(Image Credit: iStockPhoto/Craig Dingle)

During a visit to Ford's innovation centre in Germany last month, ConnectedCar Tech took a look at some of the company's latest advancements and gained some insight about where the motoring giant is heading when it comes to fully-autonomous vehicles. 

Ford made a couple of related announcements this week, the first being the company has developed a "dynamic" Uber-like shuttle service for its employees in Michigan. Although the current iteration requires a driver, comments by Ford executives during our trip point towards a fully-autonomous shuttle service being the first step in Ford's self-driving plans. 

Pim van der Jagt, Managing Director at Ford, said: "There will be almost no difference between individual and public [transport] vehicles. At one point you will just order transportation for a certain amount of people – from place A-to-B – and a vehicle will show. It will still be a public transport, but more like an individual public transport." 

The biggest hurdle to overcome is local vehicle regulations. For example, Ford's upcoming semi-autonomous remote parking feature, demonstrated in our video below, is legal in Europe but not in the United States. "In the US, there is still one regulation which needs to be modified. At the moment it will not be allowed to have such a feature because it's required that somebody presses the pedal for shifting out gears," says Ahmed Benmimoun, Research Engineer at Ford. 

Legislation is changing fast, however, and regulatory bodies have been working closely with manufacturers of self-driving cars to ensure they face as little as hurdles as possible – whilst still ensuring the safety of pedestrians and other road users. Just this week, Ford was granted a permit in California to begin testing self-driving vehicles on public roads. 

With more than 100 researchers, engineers, and scientists on staff at its Research and Innovation Center in Palo Alto, California, Ford now has one of the largest automotive research centres in Silicon Valley. Testing at this facility is part of Ford’s 10-year autonomous vehicle development program, and a key element of 'Ford Smart Mobility' - the plan to take the company to the next level in connectivity, mobility, autonomous vehicles, the customer experience, and data and analytics. 

“Having a strong presence in Silicon Valley allows us to further accelerate our research on a wide range of technologies, and apply our insights to create real-world mobility solutions,” said Ken Washington, Ford vice president, Research and Advanced Engineering. 

In the past year, the Palo Alto facility has researched: 

• Autonomous vehicle virtual test drive: This study allows virtual interaction between an autonomous car and pedestrians, replicating real-world situations to better understand and develop responses to some of the unexpected things that can happen on the road. 
• Sensor fusion: Sensors on autonomous vehicles detect and track objects in the vehicle’s view, fusing information together to provide a 360-degree view of the car’s surroundings – including street signs, other vehicles, even pedestrians. 
• Camera-based pedestrian detection: Camera sensors serve as the eyes of a vehicle, allowing the car to “see” and sense pedestrians. 
• Data-driven health care: Throughdata collection from Ranger pickups and motorcycles outfitted with OpenXC technology, Ford is working with Riders for Health to collect GPS data and mapping coordinates to make health care, vaccines and medication delivery to people throughout rural Africa more efficient and accessible. 

Earlier this month, world leaders met to discuss climate change and made pledges to reduce their emissions and subsequent contributions to global warming. Vehicles are vital to our everyday travel, but it's no secret they're also the second biggest creator of emissions. Governments will be looking for ways to reduce vehicle emissions without having a significant impact on travel and the economy, and it's therefore in their best interest to ensure legislation doesn't prevent innovation. 

Speaking about autonomous public transport, Pim van der Jagt says: "Governments will look at this from an environmental perspective. A bus is public transport, but it's not environmentally-friendly if only three people take the bus." 

To help drive the development of connected car services, Ford announced it has partnered with agile software development experts Pivotal to help build the next-generation of in-car experiences. In particular, Ford will make use of the Pivotal Cloud Foundry^® and Pivotal Big Data Suite to expand its Ford Smart Mobility connected vehicle platform. 

“As we grow to become both an automaker and a mobility company, having leading software development expertise is critical to delivering at the speed consumers expect,” said Marcy Klevorn, Ford vice president and chief information officer. “Customers today are used to frequent software updates on their mobile devices, and expect them with all technology. This collaboration with Pivotal allows for quicker vehicle software updates and an even better user experience for Ford customers.” 

In order to ensure updates can be delivered fast, they must be available OTA. Such updates are vital for the latest security patches, as more control is taken from the driver and placed into the virtual hands of the vehicle, but can also open the occupants to security and privacy issues through interception techniques – as we reported earlier this month. 

This is a fact which Ford is well-aware of. Pim van der Jagt says on the subject: "You open-up a vehicle, and you open it to more attacks. The safest way is to physically connect to a vehicle to upgrade it, but that means you've always got to go to a dealership or somewhere else." 

"You can't update a Ford over-the-air today, but of course we're looking into it. We can say 'You don't have to come for service – you can wait another 3,000km' and it's very convenient if we can perform updates OTA. Somewhere we need to find a middle between very high security of the vehicle, and yet provide the convenience and flexibility to the customer." 

When pressed on how the security on V2V (Vehicle-to-Vehicle) technologies might work – Pim van der Jagt said it's based on unique security certificates. "You get a certificate to communicate with the other vehicle – so if the other vehicle receives your information about this car, this dimension, driving in this direction, the other car decodes it and knows you're a real car." 

"If hackers come in and start creating 'ghost' cars, doing things which aren't physically possible, we can revoke that security certificate. It would be difficult for a hacker to get that certificate, but then we can revoke that certificate very quickly. It would only be possible for hackers to operate for a short period." 

Ford is making huge advancements towards a self-driving future, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a commercially-available self-driving car on the market within the next decade. They're already showing us vehicles driving themselves in traffic... 

Do you think we'll see a self-driving car by Ford within the next decade? Let us know in the comments.