Ford Establishes Latitude AI to Develop Automated Driving Tech

Ford Motor Co. has established Latitude AI, a wholly owned subsidiary focused on developing a hands-free, eyes-off-the-road automated driving system. The formation of the company comes as Ford continues making advancements to its hands-free highway driving feature, Ford BlueCruise, which already has accumulated more than 50 million miles of hands-free driving, the company said.

Establishing Latitude supports Ford’s strategic shift last year to focus on automated driving technologies for personally owned vehicles, the company said. Ford hired about 550 employees formerly of Argo AI across machine learning and robotics, cloud platforms, mapping, sensors and compute systems, test operations, systems, and safety engineering. The Latitude team has applied much of its experience in automated driving, including software development tools and infrastructure, in the pivot to work on advanced driver assist systems (ADAS).

Sammy Omari, executive director of ADAS Technologies at Ford, will serve as the CEO of Latitude. Peter Carr has been appointed CTO, and David Gollob has been named president.

Sammy Omari, who serves as executive director of ADAS Technologies at Ford, will serve as the CEO of Latitude. Ford established the company as a wholly owned subsidiary focused on developing a hands-free, eyes-off-the-road automated driving system. Courtesy of Ford.

Latitude is headquartered in Pittsburgh with additional engineering hubs in Dearborn, Mich., and Palo Alto, Calif. The company also will operate a highway-speed test track facility in Greenville, S.C.