Bill Ford is tired of hearing the future of cars belongs to Silicon Valley. Yet for years, theApple and Google crowd have been telling him that only Big Tech can make driverless vehicles. The Ford Motor Co. executive chairman and great-grandson of auto pioneer Henry Ford said that probably they were “too dumb to get it”. He’s not kidding. Tech giants Apple Inc. and Google, once intent on disrupting, if not destroying, Detroit, have concluded for now that they don’t want to build cars. Sure, they still bank on supplying the autonomous software that will drive robot rides, but the concession that they’re not up to the complex task of mass production tilts the balance of power to traditional automakers.
Vehicle manufacturing is a massive undertaking. There is the metal bending and assembly, a highly evolved process in itself. Car companies also integrate millions of lines of code that control everything from the radio to the radar sensors that will soon allow hands-free driving. Detroit also has deep experience managing the long chain of suppliers that provide roughly 30,000 parts. James Kuffner, former head of Google Robotics and now chief technology officer at the Toyota Research Institute said that all that complexity is something a lot of IT companies getting into the business realized the hard way. He considers that making a car is not an easy task.
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