Pitch black: Ford’s autonomous cars don’t care whether it’s day or night

(credit: Ford)

As we reported on Sunday, some car makers are unhappy with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's push for coherent nationwide self-driving car regulations. This is partially because optical sensors can't always cope with adverse weather. But lest we forget, the intent—both of regulators and the OEMs that driving this technology—is to save many of the 33,000 lives lost on US roads each year. One of those companies, Ford, has just released the results of recent night testing that it says proves the effectiveness of the company's approach to autonomous driving.

The semi-autonomous cars we've been driving recently from Audi, Tesla, and Volvo all depend mainly on optical sensors to detect their environment. And the critics are correct—these sensors can't always read the lines on the road and can be susceptible to poor weather. Like Google, Ford uses lidar as the car's primary sensor. And after testing in the desert at night, Ford says that the tech far surpasses anything a human could do.

Wayne Williams—who we talked to at CES in January—was one of Ford's researchers who went for a nighttime ride in the autonomous Fusions. “Inside the car, I could feel it moving, but when I looked out the window, I only saw darkness. As I rode in the back seat, I was following the car’s progression in real time using computer monitoring. Sure enough, it stayed precisely on track along those winding roads,” he said.