News Summary

• Omari joined from Motional, the $4 billion Aptiv-Hyundai joint venture.“Going from a quarterly release to a weekly release is obviously a lot of tooling, and also a lot of mindset changes,” Omari said.
• By focusing on those moments, Ford engineers have massively expanded the operating window of its most sophisticated advanced driver assistance system (ADAS), allowing more drivers to spend more time with hands off the wheel.“We’ve basically improved that 3x,” Omari says of the latest release.
• It will also position the vehicle more accurately in narrow lanes.No, these are not radical changes to the way BlueCruise operates, nor will they revolutionize the lives of the people who pay up to $800 per year for access to the service.
• “Now we have an internal release every week,” he said.Omari is Ford’s executive director of advanced driver assist technologies, and CEO of Ford’s new autonomy subsidiary, Latitude AI.
• Perhaps in a nod to Doug Field, Ford’s chief advanced product development and technology officer, hired from Apple in 2022, Omari says that Ford is also looking to Cupertino for inspiration.“This is about ADAS, but it’s also about a lot more than ADAS.
• Drivers who own BlueCruise-equipped cars, anyway.Today, the company is announcing BlueCruise 1.3, dropping just a few months after the 1.2 release, which added niceties like automatic lane changes.For 1.3, BlueCruise will stay more engaged through tighter corners than before.