Ford Motor is spending $1 billion to take over a budding robotics startup to acquire more expertise needed to reach its ambitious goal of having a fully driverless vehicle on the road by 2021.
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The big bet announced Friday comes just a few months after the Pittsburgh startup, Argo AI, was created by two alumni of Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics program, Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander.
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The alliance between Argo and Ford is the latest to combine the spunk and dexterity of a technologically savvy startup with the financial muscle and manufacturing knowhow of a major automaker in the race to develop autonomous vehicles. Last year rival General Motors paid $581 million to buy Cruise Automation, a 40-person software company that is testing vehicles in San Francisco.
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The Argo deal marks the next step in Ford’s journey toward building a vehicle without a steering wheel or brake pedal by 2021 — a vision that CEO Mark Fields laid out last summer.
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The big-ticket deal for the newly-minted company clearly was aimed at getting Salesky and Rande. Salesky formerly worked on self-driving cars at a high-profile project within Google — now known as Waymo — and Rander did the same kind of engineering at ride-hailing service Uber before the two men teamed to launch Argo late last year.
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When talent like that comes up, you don’t ignore that ability, said Raj Nair, who doubles as Ford’s chief technical officer and product development head.
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The two will develop the core technology of Ford’s autonomous vehicle — the virtual driver system, which Nair described as the car’s brains, eyes, ears and senses.
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The decision to turn to Argo for help is a tacit acknowledgement that Ford needed more talent to deliver on Fields’ 2021 promise, said one expert familiar with Salesky and Rande.
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This is likely a realization that Ford is…