Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, has now denied long-running rumours that the company is in talks with Tesla about licensing its fully autonomous driving technology.
Farley acknowledged that Ford and Tesla had a conversation, but he thinks Waymo has a superior idea.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, stated in 2021 that he had preliminary talks with other automakers on the licensing of self-driving technology, but that these talks ended without any agreements.
The CEO declared in 2023 that Tesla would consider granting other automakers licences for Autopilot and FSD.
A few months later, Musk asserted that “automakers don’t believe Tesla Full Self-Driving is real“, but that they will in the near future.
Musk stated in 2024 that Tesla was negotiating a Full Self-Driving licence with “one major automaker“.
Due to its limited efforts in autonomous driving and the fact that it was the first to embrace Tesla’s charge connector as the new North American standard, Ford was rumoured to be the carmaker in question.
During a presentation at the Aspen Ideas Festival last week, CEO Jim Farley acknowledged that Ford was in discussions with Tesla over self-driving technology, suggesting that the rumours may have been accurate.
He claimed to have spoken with Musk and acknowledged that while both Tesla and Waymo have made strides in the direction of self-driving technology, he believes that LIDAR—which Tesla does not utilise but Waymo does—is an essential component of this technology.
“To us, Waymo,” Farley said. He pointed out that both Waymo, owned by Google parent Alphabet, and Tesla “have made a lot of progress” on self-driving, and Farley acknowledged that he has had conversations with Elon Musk. But he stated that Ford considered LiDAR to be an important part of the picture, noting that “where the camera will be completely blinded, the LiDAR system will see exactly what’s in front of you.”
Together with Volkswagen, Ford spent almost $1 billion on the self-driving firm Argo AI. But in 2022, it stopped sponsoring the business, and Argo AI was disbanded after the two manufacturers integrated their technology.
Following this setback, Ford announced that it would collaborate with self-driving firms as the technology advanced.
While Tesla has been working to provide consumer autonomous vehicles to the market, Waymo has initially concentrated on creating its own cars for autonomous ride-hailing.
After years of struggling to make its consumer cars self-driving, Tesla recently reversed these disparate methods by initiating a pilot programme for its own autonomous ride-hailing fleet.