Ford’s hands-free driving feature won’t be available until late...

Ford’s hands-free driving feature won’t be available until late 2021
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Coming to the Mustang Mach-E, and then to others

By Sean O'Kane@sokane1 Jun 18, 2020, 6:00am EDTShare this on Facebook (opens in new window)

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Images: Ford
Ford announced late last year that the Mustang Mach-E will be the company’s first car to allow hands-free driving in certain situations. Today, the company is opening up about how exactly that technology will work, but it’s also saying that the feature won’t be available until the second half of 2021.
It’s a complicated thing to communicate to people ... especially when you have [different features like] lane keeping, adaptive cruise, and so on” Darren Palmer, the head of Ford’s global EV division, said on a press call. Palmer says Ford tried out “all different types of graphics, colors, and information to see which of them would be understood by the most people most easily without education.”
Palmer said that drivers will be able to disengage Active Drive Assist by gently moving the steering wheel, which he said he feels is better than the higher amount of force other systems like Super Cruise or Autopilot require.

“On at least one of the popular systems you have to kind of ‘break free’ from it, and it’s very unnerving for people, because they feel like they’re wrestling with it. And so we really wanted to make sure we didn’t have that,” he said.

All driver assistance systems have their limitations, which can become a problem if the humans behind the wheel get tooconfident in them. In fact, this was one of the overarching themes in the National Transportation Safety Board’s hearing earlier this year regarding Tesla’s Autopilot.
When the Mach-E goes on sale at the end of this year, buyers who want the hands-free driving mode will have to purchase what Ford’s calling the “Active 2.0 Prep Package.” This will make sure the car has the hardware (a forward-facing camera and radar sensors) that’s necessary for the hands-free driving mode, which Ford is calling “Active Drive Assist.” But the Active Drive Assist feature will require a separate purchase of its own, and won’t be available until a software update that’s coming later next year. (The company said it is not yet ready to reveal pricing for any of this.)

regarding Tesla’s Autopilot.

Palmer and Ford engineer Chris Billman said that the camera-based driver monitoring system should help mitigate this problem. Billman also said that Ford carefully chose the language it’s using to name and describe Active Drive Assist and similar features. “We don’t overpromise or imply that the features can do more than they can. We try to make them intuitive and straightforward,” he said.