Autonomy for the Masses

March 1, 2019

Lindsay Brooke

Henry Ford was not quite a year away from rolling out his world-changing Model T when, in 1907, the Chicago Hosiery Co. built a factory branch in Detroit’s Corktown district. Today the exterior of that same three-story brick building on Michigan Ave. appears unchanged from its sock-sewing past, aside from the Spin electric scooters on the front sidewalk. But inside, it’s abuzz with the innovative stuff that a 21st-century Henry would love.

Open floor plan. No offices. Rolling desks. A few tiny meeting rooms. White boards galore. And fairly high levels of ambient noise. Since opening in May 2018, “The Factory,” as its 220 employees call it, has been home to Ford Autonomous Vehicles LLC—the dedicated business unit that aims to launch Ford’s first self-driving, hybrid-electric production AV in 2021. Also based there is Team Edison, Ford’s EV advanced-planning group. Together, they are the vanguard of Ford’s multi-billion-dollar thrust into connected, multi-modal mobility. Ford leadership wanted both teams to work—and ideally, live—within the urban ecosystem where their products initially will be used most.

Sherif Marakby agrees. “It makes so much sense for us to be here, close to the customer,” Marakby, the CEO of Ford Autonomous Vehicles, enthused. “When this opportunity came up, it took me all of about a second to say, ‘I’ll go! I want to be in the city!’ I’ve lived in the area for 28 years but only spent a little bit of it working in Detroit.”

His organization’s role and passion is technology commercialization—”to make autonomy work for the masses,” Marakby told SAE’s Autonomous Vehicle Engineering. It involves defining who the customer is—and that’s not someone driving the car anymore. “With AVs, we tailor the vehicle experience to the passenger and to goods,” he explained. “Providing a full service with AVs involves the app, how you approach the vehicle as a rider and how the vehicle comes to you—and lets you know it’s your car.”

Such changes, along with little matters such as ensuring the vehicle obeys traffic laws and operates safely in all environments, “are a major reason that our teams are located in a different place—so we can think differently,” he said.

Marakby’s a realist about the technical challenges and financial burden that come with the changes. In a tightening global vehicle market, Ford is investing $1 billion over five years in Argo AI, whose algorithms and sensor-fusion expertise are vital assets for the Autonomous Vehicles team. (Talks with Volkswagen toward a potential joint venture on self-driving vehicles, including VW investment in Argo AI, were reportedly progressing when AVE went to press.) Acquisitions by Ford Mobility of other tech start-ups, including Autonomic (cloud computing software) and TransLoc (transit-services software) bolster the team’s toolset.

“At the end of the day, my organization has to be a viable business,” he asserted. “We have our own P&L. I set the specification, and the customer experience, and work on the ecosystem. I also direct the program team that directs the vehicle development. Everything that is needed for autonomy to eventually run a service and make money is in this organization.”

Moving fast

A native of Cairo, Egypt, Marakby studied neural networks at the University of Maryland, as part of his degrees in electrical and electronics engineering. “At the time, in 1990, neural nets were theoretical—how the brain works, how logic flows and how you can connect the parts. I remember taking classes thinking, ‘I can grasp this—I know how to design circuits!’ But I didn’t know how to apply it.” Few did then. He’d planned to move to Silicon Valley after graduation, but landed at Ford, building his engineering career in infotainment, electrified-vehicle and driver-assistance programs.

“Every time I wanted to expand and do something different, Ford gave me the opportunity to do it,” Marakby noted. Attendees of SAE’s early Hybrid & EV Symposia will remember him presenting Ford’s electrification progress. Launching an EV and four hybrids within a short timeframe in Dearborn somewhat prepared him for the rapid work pace at Uber, where Markaby detoured for about a year in 2016.

“I had to open my mind when I was there,” he said. “It’s a very casual but super-fast environment. It moves fast to get the job done. And that wasn’t hard to translate into Ford, believe it or not. It’s [Uber] a group of people, like those who work in this building, who think and work differently.”

In a wide-ranging interview at The Factory, Marakby discussed progress his team has made in its first 10 months, and challenges ahead. Some highlights:

On a hybrid AV, rather than electric in 2021: “We’re on a technology journey toward the battery-electric AV, but we’re not there yet. We modeled the upcoming AV on learnings from our thousands of miles of carrying people and goods in Miami and other cities. Hybrid propulsion offers great fuel economy, range, and the ability to carry the significant loads— electrical and otherwise—of an AV. Hybrids can work in all thermal conditions without losing range.

“In transport services, it’s all about uptime, which is very different than selling a vehicle. Even a huge battery in an EV will not be able to run 15 to 20 hours a day with a 50 percent loss due to loads without charging. You can’t take an AV offline for eight hours to charge it; that’s not practical for operators.”

On AV benchmarking: “We benchmarked the airline industry, which is built on utilization and customer experience. They know what giving time back to the consumer means, and that the experience is different between customers. It may be more time for working. For sleeping. For playing games. The customer may not want to use any of the screens in the vehicle; or only the big one; or they may want to use their own device. By not having everything designed around the driver, the interior space becomes flexible.”

On Ford adopting cellular V2X in 2022: “There is already critical mass around V2X (vehicle-to-everything connectivity) and we believe in it. We’re developing a ‘heavy compute’—all the sensor hardware on board—and V2X will lighten up that on-board compute tremendously. For non-AVs there are a lot of benefits to V2X as well. We feel that working with cities and infrastructure is a good path for us and through cellular communication is how we’ll be able to give information.”

New-age engineers: “You need a mix of skills and a willingness to change. It’s combining background and experience with new talent that tends to be right out of school or comes from a different industry. Mixing the two is really important—we’re trying to bring the agile-software and robust-automotive mindsets together. But you must be careful how you mix. You’re not asking people to blend in; you’re asking them to bring their thinking to work with other people.

“I learned that in this environment, when you bring in someone from outside the industry, make sure they have a buddy, someone from in the team that understands the industry so they can navigate their way around the company. Mix the internal and external knowledge while making the new folks successful.”

On Ford deciding to “own” the O/S: “We have a group of software engineers here who are creating the code for, lack of better terms, dispatch and routing of the AV service. The operating system. We call it ‘orchestration’ of the fleet and it’s important for AVs, particularly when they encounter construction zones, detours and closed roads. We do the app, the dispatch routing and even payments. Nobody’s done this before for AVs. Owning this capability is very important—integrating the whole ecosystem and making sure it works every time is inherent to working with AVs on the streets of any city.”

On learnings from the Miami testing: “We learned we can cover a 100-square-mile area and do a lot of work. Partnering with businesses such as Postmates and Walmart, we got the pick-ups pretty right...and the deliveries pretty wrong! But now we can map the streets showing where the deliveries are, years before we begin actual service. The map of Miami where we’re operating now is very different from where we started. It’s no longer ‘downtown only.’ Now, we have to understand each business, what they’re delivering.”

On 2019’s focus: “It’s a big year for industrializing and commercializing what we showed in Miami. A lot of activity around the ecosystem, routing the vehicle, vehicle development and engineering all the redundancies. We have execution plans throughout the year; 2019 gets ready, with safety drivers, to build the whole ecosystem, run the businesses with Walmart and other companies. Zoom in on where and how we’re going to operate. Take the step from ‘we know how to do it’ to actually doing it. The first phase of building it to scale is this year.”

On AV hype: “We know what everybody is using for hardware—and it’s just not ready. And all of this tech needs a viable business to provide the services — with call centers, apps, dispatch algorithms that make sure the vehicle obeys all traffic laws, parks itself safely, etc. AVs can’t do that yet.”

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