DEARBORN, Mich. — Raj Nair, the development chief leading Ford Motor’s effort to build self-driving cars, concedes that he does not know what caused the fatal May accident in which the driver of a Tesla Model S sedan, operating in Autopilot mode, crashed into a tractor-trailer crossing a roadway in Florida.
But Mr. Nair has given considerable thought to the circumstances — a truck turning left into traffic and a partially automated vehicle traveling at highway speed, leaving little room for miscalculation. He has pictured the car’s camera looking ahead and struggling to make out a white truck against an overcast sky, its forward-looking radar beam possibly shooting under the truck’s trailer.
The conclusion he has drawn: The current state of even semiautonomous driving technology isn’t quite ready to take on such a complex traffic situation. That is why Ford, which on Monday demonstrated its own approach to self-driving vehicles, said it was convinced by its decade of research to take a go-slow approach.
“We’ve not been able to do that with cameras and radar,” Mr. Nair said of Autopilot. “Not to the safety level we would be comfortable for introducing that into production.”
And so the automaker plans to introduce self-driving cars in a controlled urban environment within five years, capable of functioning as robotic taxis at slow, stop-and-go speeds in settings with traffic-light predictability.
The company provided the first public demonstration of the fleet of self-driving cars it is building at its sprawling engineering campus here, about 10 miles west of Detroit. Ford allowed reporters, analysts and other guests to take a ride in some of the 10 white Fusion sedans it has outfitted so far with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of radar; lidar, a kind of radar based on laser beams; cameras; computer chips and other gear.
The demonstration came a day after Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk,outlined upgrades to Autopilot that he said he believed would probably have prevented the fatal crash of the Model S. These included a more precise use of radar to identify obstacles, and a move to make radar the primary means of scanning the road. The cameras in Tesla cars had previously served that role.