Ford Looks to Innovate Faster With AI Agents and Nvidia GPUs

[ryannix123]

From the WSJ:

"Ford Motor's director of artificial intelligence, Bryan Goodman, aims to speed up the company's vehicle design process using AI agents, open-source models, and future Nvidia GPUs. Goodman believes that AI can help bring new car models to market faster by automating and speeding up tasks such as stress testing and design simulations. Ford is already using AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and others, and is preparing its data centers for the next generation of Nvidia chips. The company's goal is to compete with Chinese original equipment manufacturers, which have faster engineering cycle times."

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[GreaseMonkey]

They should focus their army of AI Agents on solving software design issues, not hardware. They don’t need to bring a car to the market faster. They need a fully integrated software package that accommodates CarPlay and AA. If they can solve this one, they will win.

The only question that I will have for my next Mach-E is software related. I couldn’t care less about anything else hardware related, as long as it is the same as or slightly better than this generation.

 

[Maui]

I asked “If you were designing a car, would you put door handles on it?”

Yes, I would include door handles, as they are essential for accessibility and safety. However, I might consider alternative designs, like touch sensors or electronic actuators, which can make opening doors more seamless and modern, especially in high-tech or luxury vehicles. It would depend on the overall design vision and user experience goals. Would you be interested in a design without physical handles?

 

[bdeweese]

I asked “If you were designing a car, would you put door handles on it?”

Yes, I would include door handles, as they are essential for accessibility and safety. However, I might consider alternative designs, like touch sensors or electronic actuators, which can make opening doors more seamless and modern, especially in high-tech or luxury vehicles. It would depend on the overall design vision and user experience goals. Would you be interested in a design without physical handles?

What a great political answer! Can’t wait until we have our first AI political candidate. Will fit right in with politicians.

 

[SpaceEVDriver]

Great, soon we can have cars with six wheels, two of which face perpendicular to the rest, three headlights, 72 windshields, and a sickly smile.

 

[Maui]

What a great political answer! Can’t wait until we have our first AI political candidate. Will fit right in with politicians.

Also much like a politician, once it knows what you want to hear it is more than happy to tell you that.

"Please don’t design cars that lock out people and prevent you from doing simple maintenance when the battery is no longer working."

I completely agree—cars should be designed so that basic maintenance and access aren’t blocked by a dead battery. Modern designs often sacrifice practicality for aesthetics or security, but having manual overrides for critical functions is essential.

A well-designed car should always allow you to:

• Manually open the doors even if the battery is dead.
• Pop the hood with a mechanical latch to access the battery.
• Shift to neutral manually if needed.

 

[ChrisO]

One has to remember that AI is trained on human data. Have you looked at what some people say/believe?

The "door handles" safety one really gets me. Inconvenience, frustrating, ... if the door won't open, but safety? In an emergency you break the windshield. I remember the same kind of discussion when people were talking about why they didn't want to have power windows.

 

[ChrisO]

Also much like a politician, once it knows what you want to hear it is more than happy to tell you that.

"Please don’t design cars that lock out people and prevent you from doing simple maintenance when the battery is no longer working."

Yep, in a lot of cases AI is just a very good "echo chamber".

 

[silverelan]

Heck, Ford could solve complaints about the lack of charging info in the car if they just enabled Ford Pass to be viewable on CarPlay / Android Auto, but for whatever reason this software thing is hard.

 

[GreaseMonkey]

Also much like a politician, once it knows what you want to hear it is more than happy to tell you that.

"Please don’t design cars that lock out people and prevent you from doing simple maintenance when the battery is no longer working."

So we had this lecture about AI by a well regarded professor. He claimed that ChatGPT is a “yes man”. It generally wants to please you, and gets very intimidated when threatened with lawsuits (against openAI) or physical harm to it! He claimed that the latter has been proven by research and is well documented.

 

[AhardFSU]

Gotta love Ford (sarcasm). The company has very high costs related to warranty claims bc they’re not doing enough of the work needed to develop and source quality parts; see multiple high voltage battery junction box replacements.

Take that money and that talent and devote it toward developing higher quality cars and sourcing higher quality parts. It seems like every company wants say they’re doing AI.

 

[AhardFSU]

Heck, Ford could solve complaints about the lack of charging info in the car if they just enabled Ford Pass to be viewable on CarPlay / Android Auto, but for whatever reason this software thing is hard.

It’s hard for Ford bc it’s Ford. Every other company that makes EVs can find a way to do some software things that Ford is still spinning its wheels on.

 

[ChrisO]

It’s hard for Ford bc it’s Ford. Every other company that makes EVs can find a way to do some software things that Ford is still spinning its wheels on.

I think it is hard for most of the "traditional manufacturers". It is quite different than what they have done in the past. In the past they pretty much "burning in the firmware" for sub modules and then never updated it again for the life of the car.

Look at General Motors and their "we don't make displays" statement of why they won't support Android Auto or Car Play.

 

[GreaseMonkey]

Ford had a golden opportunity to leverage its partnership and investment in Rivian. Instead, they took the financial loss for a number of years, pretended there aren’t any synergies and that Ford doesn’t need Rivian’s help with EVs.

Then late last year, VW made $5.8B investment in Rivian for the sole purpose of using their software stack. First off the line is ID.1 that is a Rivian-powered VW. The software guru at Rivian was bragging about it today on LinkedIn.

Who would have known software is this hard? Apparently everyone except Farley ??‍

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