Ford steps up autonomous vehicle testing in 32-acre simulated city

The 32-acre MCity is part of the University of MI and will be open to any automaker who wants to test self-driving cars there. “This is an important step in making millions of people’s lives better and improving their mobility”.

By including real roads lined with artificial shop fronts, Mcity can be used as a safe but realistic environment for testing autonomous cars beyond the boundaries of what is possible, and legal, on public roads. The new testing facility is called MCity and it is a simulated urban environment created to see how autonomous cars behave in the city where traffic rules are vastly different from the highway. Engineers can also test on tunnels, roundabouts, and on various road surfaces like brick, concrete, and dirt. That all starts here at MCity, where we can test safely and learn very fast.

Ford’s track record of technology leadership Ford revealed its Fusion Hybrid Autonomous Research Vehicle with University of MI and State Farm Insurance in 2013 in an effort to advance sensing systems so these technologies could be integrated into Ford’s next-generation vehicles.

Ford is lumping the autonomous vehicles in wit its Smart Mobility plan, which aims to reinvent transportation via various technologies. The team is working to make sensing and computing technologies feasible for production while continuing to test and refine algorithms.

“The goal of Mcity is that we get a scaling factor”, said Ryan Eustice, University of MI associate professor and principal investigator in Ford’s research collaboration.

Ford is looking to build its cachet in being considered one of the world’s preeminent automakers in terms of autonomous vehicle technology.

In addition, the facility also represents Detroit’s effort to keep pace with other autonomous vehicle efforts from the likes of Google, which has been testing its sometimes too slow self-driving auto.