About That Google, Ford Partnership …

Aaron Cole
by Aaron Cole

Ford CEO Mark Fields just wrapped up his Consumer Electronics Show keynote speech Tuesday morning and mentioned the word “Google” exactly zero times. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

So, um, where does that leave the current planned partnership between the global automaker and Google to build self-driving cars and let them roam free at a 1,000-acre North Carolina ranch?

Not dead, maybe — just not fully baked, apparently.

“We talk with everyone, and those conversations are private,” Fields told Re/Code on Monday.

Ford announced a host of tech for its cars Tuesday, including a partnership with Amazon, SYNC 3 and something about drones. But no Google.

Fields closed his speech by saying that the automaker will have more to talk about autonomous cars in the future, so it’s possible that terms of a deal weren’t entirely ironed out by the time CES rolled around.

“Talk to us about the semi-autonomous vehicles that we already have on the road,” Fields said in his keynote. “And about the autonomous vehicles that we’re developing for the future.”

We were kind of hoping you’d bring that up, Ford.


Aaron Cole
Aaron Cole

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  • GOOGLE MAPS is the best navigation system I've ever used. I'd love to see "swarm intelligence" Google mapping able to give real time traffic data and conditions via Ford/ GM vehicles.

    • Redmondjp Redmondjp on Jan 06, 2016

      Really? Because in my part of the woods, it shows streets going through forests, cul-de-sacs that don't exist (and you'd think that they would automatically catch that when they run the camera car through the neighborhood every few years), and constantly gets addresses wrong by several blocks. And I live a couple of miles away from Microsoft HQ. My wife's coworker is directionally-challenged so she is completely dependent upon her direction-spewing device. A few years ago, she drove around our block for almost 45 minutes (just folling the device's directions) until she finally gave up and called us.

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