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FORD TARGETS FULLY AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE FOR RIDE SHARING IN 2021;
INVESTS IN NEW TECH COMPANIES, DOUBLES SILICON VALLEY TEAM
Ford announces its intent to have a high-volume,
fully autonomous SAE level 4-capable vehicle in
commercial operation in 2021 in a ride-hailing or
ride-sharing service.
To get there, the company is investing in or
collaborating with four startups to enhance its
autonomous vehicle development, doubling its
Silicon Valley team and more than doubling its
Palo Alto campus.
“The next decade will be defined by automation
of the automobile, and we see autonomous vehicles as having as
significant an impact on society as Ford’s moving assembly line
did 100 years ago,” said Mark Fields, Ford president and CEO.
Autonomous vehicles in 2021 are part of Ford Smart Mobility, the
company’s plan to be a leader in autonomous vehicles, as well as
in connectivity, mobility, the customer experience, and data and
analytics.
Building on more than a decade of autonomous vehicle research
and development, Ford’s first fully autonomous vehicle will be
a Society of Automotive Engineers-rated level 4-capable vehicle
Hu says. Putting these new
batteries in electric vehicles as
well could represent “a huge societal
impact,” Hu says.
Lithium metal, for one, reacts poorly
with the battery’s electrolyte - a
liquid that conducts ions between
the cathode (positive electrode) and
the anode (negative electrode) -
and forms compounds that increase
resistance in the battery and reduce
cycle life. This reaction also creates mossy lithium metal bumps,
called dendrites, on the anode, which lead to short circuits,
generating high heat that ignites the flammable electrolyte, and
making the batteries generally nonrechargable.
Measures taken to make the batteries safer come at the cost
of the battery’s energy performance, such as switching out
the liquid electrolyte with a poorly conductive solid polymer
electrolyte that must be heated at high temperatures to work,
or with an inorganic electrolyte that is difficult to scale up.
While working as a postdoc in the group of MIT professor
Donald Sadoway, a well-known battery researcher who has
developed several molten salt and liquid metal batteries, Hu
without a steering wheel or gas and brake pedals.
It is being specifically designed for commercial
mobility services, such as ride sharing and ride
hailing, and will be available in high volumes.
“Ford has been developing and testing
autonomous vehicles for more than 10 years,”
said Raj Nair, Ford executive vice president,
Global Product Development, and chief technical
officer.
This year, Ford will triple its autonomous vehicle
test fleet to be the largest test fleet of any automaker – bringing
the number to about 30 self-driving Fusion Hybrid sedans on the
roads in California, Arizona and Michigan, with plans to triple it
again next year.
Ford was the first automaker to begin testing its vehicles at Mcity,
University of Michigan’s simulated urban environment, the first
automaker to publicly demonstrate autonomous vehicle operation
in the snow and the first automaker to test its autonomous
research vehicles at night, in complete darkness, as part of LiDAR
sensor development.
helped make several key design and
material advancements in lithium
metal batteries, which became
the foundation of SolidEnergy’s
technology.
One innovation was using an ultrathin
lithium metal foil for the anode, which
is about one-fifth the thickness of a
traditional lithium metal anode, and
several times thinner and lighter than
traditional graphite, carbon, or silicon
anodes. That shrunk the battery size by half.
But there was still a major setback: The battery only worked at
80 degrees Celsius or higher.
So Hu developed a solid and liquid hybrid electrolyte solution.
He coated the lithium metal foil with a thin solid electrolyte
that doesn’t need to be heated to function. He also created
a novel quasi-ionic liquid electrolyte that isn’t flammable, and
has additional chemical modifications to the separator and cell
design to stop it from negatively reacting with the lithium metal.
The end result was a battery with energy-capacity perks of
lithium metal batteries, but with the safety and longevity features
of lithium ion batteries that can operate at room temperature.
New-Tech Magazine Europe l 17