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Ford Patent to Take the Fun Out of Off-Road Driving

The autonomous driving tech is coming, and while some people (read "long commuters) are anxious to welcome it, others feel it as if it were the end of the world.
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They are called "petrolheads" and they love driving above anything else. These people want to hold the steering wheel, they want to select their own gears, they want to tell the car where to go and not the other way around. And yet the industry seems to be headed in the direction they dread the most.

But not all is lost. If allowing the vehicle's systems to take over when cruising down the freeway becomes mandatory, those who still want to feel in control will always have two things left: the racing circuit and an off-road trail.

Well, while Roborace is taking care of the former, it looks like Ford is working on the latter. A recent patent application (via Off Road) from the Blue Oval company that allows its off-road vehicles to maneuver themselves over a patch of rough terrain has just been approved, meaning hands-free driving could become a thing outside the paved roads as well.

The system relies on a suite of sensors that scan the environment and send the data to a central processing unit. The CPU then analyzes the obstacles and tries to identify them. Based on pre-recorded data, it then decides whether it's safe to navigate over it.

Ford's system would also evaluate whether it's best for the driver and other passengers to remain in the vehicle, or if the obstacle would be so bumpy they'd be better off walking by the vehicle instead. There's also talk of a "remote device," which should be something similar to the smartphone app Land Rover demonstrated a while ago.

Since off-road driving is mostly done for fun, we don't really see how useful this system would be in the real world. However, pickup truck and SUV owners who roam on trails where there's good mobile phone reception might enjoy watching a YouTube video while moving forward at the same time.
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About the author: Vlad Mitrache
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"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie)
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