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Ford claims it will have 100 self-driving cars on the road by the end of the year

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A Ford advertising billboard in New York City in January 2016

Ford aims to have 100 self-driving vehicles on the road by the end of the year, its president of mobility said on Thursday.

After reporting a top- and bottom-line earnings beat, Ford's Marcy Klevorn said on the company earnings call that the automaker's autonomous vehicle efforts are going well in Miami and Washington, D.C.

Klevorn said Ford makes an effort to test its autonomous vehicles in cities with a “really difficult setting to prove capability.” Compared to some of its competitors, like Tesla and GM, Ford said it prefers testing in places with seasonal weather changes and intense urban challenges.

Klevorn said Ford is focusing more on “complex miles” than point-A-to-point-B miles in an area where everyone is retired and the roads don't change a lot. The company will begin testing in a third city later this year.

The company announced in March that it would build a new factory in Michigan to expedite its autonomous vehicle efforts. Rival self-driving car companies, like Tesla and Waymo, are also expanding road tests.

UPDATE 4-Ford more confident of stronger 2019 despite ‘volatile environment’

DETROIT (Reuters) – Ford Motor Co on Thursday posted a better-than-expected first quarter largely due to strong pickup truck sales in its core U.S. market and said it was more confident in its forecast 2019 would bring better results than last year. FILE PHOTO: The Ford logo is seen at the North American International Auto… Continue reading UPDATE 4-Ford more confident of stronger 2019 despite ‘volatile environment’

Pending homologation, Qiantu K50 electric sports car will be assembled in Washington state

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Qiantu K50 by Mullen, 2019 New York auto show
The glamorous, supercar-shaped, Chinese-built Qiantu K50 that was shown last week at the New York auto show garnered much attention and likely changed some attendees’ conceptions of what kinds of vehicles might be imported from China.

Importing the K50 directly from China isn’t what U.S. company Mullen Technologies exactly plans, though. The company announced Wednesday that it signed a letter of intent to assemble the Qiantu K50 near Spokane, Washington.

The facility could be up to 1.3 million square feet and include assembly and manufacturing, as well as research and development.

DON’T MISS: Qiantu K50: Quirky, curvaceous electric two-seater coming to the U.S. next year?

According to a report by Spokane Public Radio, citing the West Plains Airport Area Development Authority, Mullen expects that the operation will employ 55 initially, with up to 860 jobs by 2026. Mullen will lease the facility from the development authority, which will issue bonds to build the plant.

Qiantu K50 by Mullen, 2019 New York auto show

The K50 is carbon fiber bodied, and initial plans include the shipment of the car’s complete panels from China to Washington where it will be mated to the body and chassis, which are also shipped from China. Washington is also the home of SGL Carbon, which supplies carbon panels for the BMW i3; that’s in Moses Lake, about 100 miles away from Mullen’s facility.

CHECK OUT: Karma presents its electric-car vision to China and vies for partners

The facility will include “an air handling system to optimize the battery call life,” the company says in a press release—a detail that we assume refers to how packs are assembled, although we’ve reached out to the company for clarification as initially the company will be receiving complete packs from China.

Mullen also confirmed Thursday something it hadn’t last week at the New York show: the North American version will have a revamped battery pack powering the K50.

“With the innovation Mullen Energy has underway the lithium batteries powering the sports car would be 30 percent lighter and would significantly increase the overall range of the vehicle,” the company said in a press release.

READ MORE: Chinese electric sports car Qiantu K50 might be made in U.S., with Coda connection

This innovation likely comes at least in part via failed automaker Coda. Mullen purchased the remains of Coda and holds Coda’s intellectual property rights, and last week Mullen chief technical officer Frank McMahon called that company’s former battery management system the most relevant piece they hold from Coda, moving forward.

Qiantu K50 by Mullen

There’s one big asterisk to Mullen’s plans: It still needs to homologate the Q50 for the U.S. That may require additional side-impact beams to be placed on the vehicle, lighting moved, or other changes.

Mullen likely will need to raise further funds for ongoing research and development, as well as assembly. That said, it’s looking increasingly likely that we’ll see not just the K50 on U.S. roads but also other future electric vehicles from them as well.

Tesla Autopilot, Full Self Driving, Elon Musk, ARK Invest — CleanTech Talk with Tasha Keeney

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Published on April 20th, 2019 |

by Zachary Shahan

Tesla Autopilot, Full Self Driving, Elon Musk, ARK Invest — CleanTech Talk with Tasha Keeney

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April 20th, 2019 by Zachary Shahan

For our hot new CleanTech Talk podcast interview series, I recently sat down with ARK Invest Analyst Tasha Keeney to discuss various aspects of autonomous vehicles, Tesla, Tesla, and Tesla. Tasha is focused on autonomous cars and 3D printing in her position at ARK Invest. She and ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood recently hosted Tesla CEO Elon Musk in the studio for their new podcast series, so we built off of that chat and I also brought in several key autonomy topics I’m always eager to learn more about.

The conversation was approximately 45 minutes long, so to cut it down into more manageable portions, I’ve split it into two episodes. This is the first episode, and the second will be published tomorrow. Listen to the discussion on your favorite podcast platform (options linked below) or via this embedded player:

You can subscribe and listen to CleanTech Talk is on: Anchor, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Breaker, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket, Podbean, Radio Public, SoundCloud, Spotify, and Stitcher.

To kick off, I asked Tasha about her background and how it fit into ARK Invest. She was previously a management consultant, mostly in the auto industry on the supply chain side of the story. We slid into a short chat about the autonomous vehicle industry as a whole and suppliers in the industry before making our way to Tesla and the large team of experts at the company who are focused on advancing Tesla Autopilot on a daily basis, and who meet with Elon on a weekly basis.

I then brought up my favorite CleanTechnica article on Tesla autonomous driving, one written by Mike Barnard in 2015 and republished last year when Tesla hit 1 billion miles on Autopilot. I highly recommend reading that article before or after listening to the podcast. Tasha took that summary and got more technical, explaining part of why they are bullish about Tesla’s autonomy approach.

I also touched on a Navigant Research report that puts Tesla near the bottom of the list for self-driving vehicle strategy and development. I had found those conclusions to be confusing, but also had a general hunch why they were what they were, so I was curious to hear Tasha’s take on that. She focused on the point that Tesla doesn’t use prototype vehicles, which may confuse analysts, and that there’s perhaps over-reliance on California disengagement reports (which are actually not standardized and are self-reported).

Another top topic of curiosity for me for years has been exactly how and how much Tesla uses “ghost driving” or “shadow mode” to improve Autopilot and eventual Full Self Driving. Clearly, Tesla’s approach involves learning from drivers who have Autopilot on and then disengage for some reason, but I also wonder how much Tesla’s software is learning how to drive simply from monitoring what the human drivers do without Autopilot activated. Tasha’s take on this from talking to Elon is that the Autopilot disengagements are particularly important but that the system must be learning to some degree from the shadow mode testing. (This is really a topic it would be cool to talk about with Elon or one of his Autopilot team members, as there’s still plenty of mystery here.)

Lex Fridman at MIT has been tracking Tesla Autopilot miles and last we heard had the figure just over 1 billion. Tasha has built on that work for ARK Invest to come to the conclusion that Tesla vehicles with “Autopilot hardware 2” have driven 10 billion miles, better capturing or quantifying the miles that are potentially involved in ghost/shadow learning.

Getting to the topic of full self driving, Tasha touches on Elon’s comment on the ARK Invest podcast that he and the crew think Tesla vehicles “will be feature complete — full self-driving — this year,” and could be ready for drivers to go to sleep behind the wheel a year later — but that depends mostly on regulators. Tasha said that is probably an aggressive timeline, but considering it’s coming from Elon, how could it not be? Going back to the ARK Invest interview with Elon, these were his words on that matter: “My guess as to when we would think it is safe for somebody to essentially fall asleep and wake up at their destination? Probably towards the end of next year. That is when I think it would be safe enough for that.” Again, though, it’s up to regulators when that is permitted, so Tasha and I discussed that topic of regulators/regulations for a few minutes.

We then briefly talked flying taxis and electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft — fun topics, but that will be a topic for another analyst and podcast discussion.

We ended the first part of this two-part discussion by chatting about the processing power needed in autonomous vehicles, the importance of that for over-the-air software updates, and Tesla’s overall hardware and software leadership. Highlighting this challenge for conventional, established automakers, Tasha had this to say:

“We call it here at ARK the sort of ‘old DNA’ issue — when innovation happens that you can sort of be caught flatfooted if you’re very stuck in your ways. I think that’s a huge problem for the traditional autos. And same thing with autonomy.

“If they were to do this, they have an even larger fleet than Tesla, right? They could get this data. But Tesla started years ahead of them. So, we think it’s possible they could just totally run away with this opportunity.”

As part of this whole matter, Tasha and I talked about a presentation from George Hotz (aka geohot) and a brief Q&A I had with him in which he emphasized Tesla was so far ahead on software in part because the company was so far ahead on hardware. For more on that, I recommend this CleanTechnica exclusive: Geohot: Tesla Autopilot = Apple iOS, Comma.ai = Android.

The second part of our interview with Tasha Keeney will be published tomorrow here on CleanTechnica, including on the CleanTech Talk portion of our site. In the meantime, I recommend this article and podcast for more on these topics: Elon Musk: Full Self-Driving Teslas This Year, “Unequivocal” Tesla Autopilot Improves Safety.

Interested in buying a Tesla Model 3, Model S, or Model X? Need a referral code to get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging? Use ours: http://ts.la/tomasz7234 (or not).

About the Author

Zachary Shahan Zach is tryin' to help society help itself (and other species). He spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as its director and chief editor. He's also the president of Important Media and the director/founder of EV Obsession and Solar Love. Zach is recognized globally as an electric vehicle, solar energy, and energy storage expert. He has presented about cleantech at conferences in India, the UAE, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, and Canada.

Zach has long-term investments in TSLA, FSLR, SPWR, SEDG, & ABB — after years of covering solar and EVs, he simply has a lot of faith in these particular companies and feels like they are good cleantech companies to invest in. But he offers no professional investment advice and would rather not be responsible for you losing money, so don't jump to conclusions.

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