As automakers all over the world continue to race towards autonomous->ke5282 driving technology,->ke1701 one company has beaten all others in testing driverless cars in snowy conditions. Not that it’s an achievement of some sort, but Ford->ke31 has done it, becoming the first automaker to do so since Google, another company that’s already testing autonomous vehicles in the snow, isn’t technically an automaker…yet.

In any event, Ford said that it’s been running sensor tests for more than a year now and these tests have led to prototypes of its driverless cars to drive by themselves in a controlled, snowy environment. So how exactly was Ford able to become the first automaker to do this? According to the company, it recalibrated an existing technology among driverless cars. The technology is called Light Detection and Ranging sensors, or LIDAR for short. These sensors are installed in a handful of sections in the body of the car to help build a detailed view of the environment around the car. They function just like radar in their ability to rapidly fire laser lights away from the car and measure how much light is reflected back. But, since these sensors don’t work well in snowy conditions, Ford reprogrammed the sensors to instead detect landmarks that are above the ground, including road signs, traffic lights, and even buildings. Once these landmarks are detected, the car is able to compare this info to a high-resolution map of the road that it already has stored in its computer, allowing the car to navigate the road by itself even during times when road visibility are at its worst.

You could say that it’s an achievement by Ford, and in some ways, it is. But, autonomous driving cars being able to navigate around snowy conditions is just another piece to this entire puzzle that Ford and a lot of other automakers are racing to finish first. It’s nice to see that the Blue Oval is putting in the work to ensure that it crosses that line first.

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Why it matters

This isn’t entirely surprising considering that a lot of companies are all on the same boat as Ford. They’re all doing their own research and development of their own autonomous driving tech, so at some point, somebody’s going to be the first at achieving a breakthrough of some sort. It just happened to be Ford.

I’m not saying this because I’m dismissing Ford’s achievement, because it really is a big step in finally bringing autonomous driving technology to life. It goes to show that the American automaker is going all-in on this tech as it should. Judging by how a lot of companies are doing the same thing, it was very important for Ford to be the first to get a driverless car to navigate around a model city built by the University of Michigan in snowy conditions. Being the first means other companies will look at your model and try to replicate it with their own tech. This gives Ford the small edge of pursuing other aspects of the technology as other companies try to keep up.

I’m excited to see what lies ahead for Ford and the future of autonomous driving as a whole. This technology has gone past the point of being a fad that will eventually die down. It’s a real thing that’s really shaping up to be the future of the industry. Whether it’s automakers like Ford, Tesla, Toyota, or tech giants like Google or Uber, everybody has pushed their chips into the center of the table. In a lot of ways, it solidifies one of the most popular sayings within the auto industry: the race for innovation never ends.