Hands on from the back seat of Ford’s self-driving car: It really works

Riding along in the back seat of Ford’s self-driving car is an uneventful experience. The car steers itself along straight and curved roads, heeds stops signs and traffic lights, yields to oncoming traffic when turning left, and waits for pedestrians to cross the road. It waits longer for the road to clear than virtually any driver you know, which may be part of its ability to drive autonomously in 2016: Ford’s self-driving car is like being driven by your overly cautious grandfather, but with better reflexes.

Even this brief demonstration suggests Ford and other automakers are not blowing smoke when they say they’ll have truly self-driving cars within five years. One open area for improvement by 2021 may be the ability to deal with the outlier exceptions, such as a child chasing a ball into the street. In my brief test drive, a car coming out of a side street and turning more or less into our path made Ford’s test driver choose to take over control briefly.

I rode in a Ford Fusion heavily modified, to say the least. Multiple Velodyne lidar devices (above) sat on a roof bar. Long-range radars faced front and rear, while short-range radars faced left and right (image below). The car also had a long-range monochrome camera facing forward and a shorter-range stereo color camera to track traffic signals and also provide short-range distance information to supplement the radar. The car retains the driver controls, and it’s crewed by a test driver behind the wheel, ready to take over; a second engineer rides shotgun and verifies all systems are working.

The loop we drove was 1.8 miles on and around Ford’s suburban Dearborn campus. It took about 10 minutes. It has been mapped in advance by 3D cameras to provide an accurate guide to the roads, structures by the roadside, stop signs, crosswalks, concrete medians, side streets, and driveways. Without this, confident self driving wouldn’t be possible. The roads are so well-mapped that lane and road-edge markings aren’t really necessary. This is the exact opposite of what’s required for lane departure warning and lane centering assist to work on today’s cars that are modestly self-driving — they can pace the car in front via adaptive cruise control, stay centered in the lane, and via blind spot detection warn of cars nearby when you’re about to change lanes.