Just over one year ago, the Ford BlueCruise hands-free highway driving system was announced. At that time, Ford BlueCruise was slated to launch on the 2021 Ford F-150 and 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E later that year, but it was pushed back to 2022 several months later as the automaker worked to “simplify the technology.” However, as Ford CEO Jim Farley recently explained to The Verge, The Blue Oval has had a rough go while rolling out its newest feature.
“We had some difficulties with BlueCruise when Doug [Field] got here,” Farley said. “We had designed the over-the-air update for BlueCruise in three different tranches, and that just was not going to work. So we’ve simplified it down. We’re getting a lot of BlueCruise downloads now.”
Ford hired Field – the former Apple VP of special products and Tesla’s former senior vice president of engineering – last September as its new chief advanced technology and embedded systems officer. Field was also the head of Apple’s future electric vehicle project, which has been in the works for several years now.
Though it got off to a rough start, Ford’s BlueCruise feature has earned its fair share of praise in recent months from entities including AAAÂ and Consumer Reports, the latter of which also found it to be better at driver monitoring than most other systems from competitors. Â This is important as with virtually every automaker working on some sort of semi-autonomous driver-assist system at the moment and Ford aiming to have 32 million over-the-air update capable vehicles on the road by 2028, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) will also soon assign safety ratings to these systems, too.
We’ll have more on BlueCruise soon, so be sure and subscribe to Ford Authority for ongoing Ford news coverage.
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