Ford Abandons the Self-Driving Road to Nowhere

There was a sudden announcement that the company was closing its doors. A spokeswoman for the company said that some of its employees would be offered jobs to work on automated technology with either Ford or Volkswagen. Most of it was owned by the auto giants. They decided to end things.

The end of Argo is a sign that the effort to get cars to drive themselves is in trouble. As investors prepare for a potential recession and others prepare for a revolution in the form of electric cars, the prevailing wisdom on self-drive vehicles has splintered.

Some companies have stuck with the program. At the cost of billions, they have begun to roll out a limited version of the service. They have adopted a pragmatic attitude and are plugging away at the problem even though they are behind the times.

Ford and Volkswagen are moving. They prefer to back technologies they can sell to car buyers today instead of spending a lot of money on self-driving cars.

It wasn't a lightweight in a self-driving vehicle. The player was well-known and respected. Ford invested $1 billion in the company in order to catch up with the Joneses. The president of the company, Peter Rander, was an alumni of the abandoned self-driving project of the company, as was the CEO, Bryan Salesky.

The company was testing in at least eight cities in the US and Germany, including its home base of Pittsburgh. It gained a reputation in the industry for its safer approach to the project of testing robot on public roads. It had the support of Ford and Volkswagen, as well as funding from the rival ride-sharing service, Lyft.

Why did it go wrong? In a call with investors this week, Ford executives made it clear that they don't think self-driving is a good idea. There are big problems for the self-driving industry. The CEO of Ford said that the company would have a long road to get to a self- driving car. He estimated that $100 billion has been poured into the industry and no one has defined a profitable business model.

The math of the movie didn't add up for the accountants at Ford. John Lawler, Ford's chief financial officer, said that it would take five years or more for something to start generating a meaningful business. The company lost $827 million this quarter due to an accounting charge.