Ford-VW driverless car venture folds in face of tech challenges

Argo AI, a self-driving vehicle group jointly backed by Ford and Volkswagen, is abruptly shutting down operations after six years of development.

Establishing fully driverless technology that is profitable and scalable would cost billions of dollars and take at least half a decade, John Lawler, chief financial officer at Ford, said as the company reported results on Wednesday.

“We’ve looked at this every way you can,” he said. “And we just see the profitability . . . a long way out.”

The shutdown follows years of consolidation as Uber, Lyft and others have thrown in the towel upon realising that the dream of robotaxis is more distant than the industry had envisioned five years ago, when big sums of money flowed to small start-ups, and major automakers feared that their business model was at risk.

Tens of billions of dollars have been spent on driverless technology since Google launched its self-driving project in 2009, but no meaningful revenue has emerged and the vast majority of projects are in some stage of pilot mode overseen by engineers.

Doug Field, who left Apple Car to become Ford’s technology head, said that fully driverless autonomy — known as Level 4 — was “the hardest technical problem of our time”.

“It’s harder than putting a man on the moon, to create an L4 robotaxi that can operate in a dense urban environment,” he said.

Jim Farley, Ford chief executive, tweeted that the company would be refocusing its efforts from Level 4 to its BlueCruise project, a so-called Level 3 technology that assists drivers but does not displace them.

“[The] BlueCruise L3 system will be essential to the future of accessible, driverless vehicles in everyday life,” he said.

The dissolution of Argo leaves 2,000 employees in limbo. Ford and Volkswagen will hire some, particularly those with expertise in machine-learning and sensor technology, Ford executives said.

Ford reported a $2.7bn charge related to winding down Argo, which it said had been unable to find new investors. The Detroit automaker earned $1.8bn in net profit for the third quarter on $36bn in revenue, but said that operating income of $11.5bn for the year would be at the low end of the company’s guidance, partly because Ford’s UK operations expose it to the falling price of sterling.

Argo was founded in 2016 and led by Bryan Salesky, who like many got his start on the technology at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Urban Challenge, an early, high-profile test of automated driving technology.

Ford invested $1bn in the group in 2017 and Volkswagen joined two years later with a $2.6bn investment aimed at making Argo a leader of driverless tech on two continents. The start-up was valued at more than $7bn at the time.

Meanwhile, industry leaders Cruise, owned by GM, and Alphabet’s Waymo were last valued at $30bn and continue to expand efforts in multiple cities.

In a GM earnings call on Tuesday, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said the driverless tech industry was “seeing increased separation between the company’s operating commercial driverless services and those that are still stuck in the trough of disillusionment”.

Vogt added that there was a “virtuous cycle” fuelling the growth of the driverless leaders, who were taking the best talent, making it more difficult for the others to keep up.

“And it happens not just with talent, but also with suppliers, partnerships and investors,” he said. “And you’ve seen this play out at Cruise with us pulling in timing and expanding scale, which is an anomaly in an industry that is dominated by delayed milestones and missed targets.”