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  3. (1) Not every self-driving car company is a hi-tech unicorn eager to disrupt

(1) Not every self-driving car company is a hi-tech unicorn eager to disrupt

游客2024-08-24  26
问题     (1) Not every self-driving car company is a hi-tech unicorn eager to disrupt the status quo. The latest firm to invite journalists to experience its autonomous technology is the epitome of traditional car manufacturing: Ford.
    (2) On its sprawling campus in Dearborn, Michigan, the century-old company is trying its hardest to look and act like a new startup. In March, Ford launched a subsidiary called Ford Smart Mobility (FSM) to develop in-car connectivity, ride-sharing and autonomous technologies. FSM is designed to compete like a startup, with the aim of translating Ford’s decade of work in autonomous systems into real products. At its first public autonomous vehicle demos, young engineers and entrepreneurs were enthused about reinventing our traffic-clogged cities.
    (3) "We’re rethinking our entire business model, " said Mark Fields, Ford’s CEO. "It’s no longer about how many vehicles we can sell. It’s about what services we can provide. We understand that the world has changed from a mindset of owning vehicles to one of owning and sharing them. " That has led to some quirky investments, such as Ford’s acquisition last week of a San Francisco-based crowdsharing shuttle bus startup called Chariot, and a partnership to provide the city with thousands of human-powered bikes for a ride-sharing scheme.
    (4) But while Ford’s car sales are fairly healthy today, Fields foresees a world transformed by driverless cars, Uber and climate change. "You could argue that in major cities, vehicle density will drop because of automated vehicles and congestion charges. Some cities might even outlaw personal use of vehicles. * One of Ford’s strategies to cope with this is to accelerate its efforts towards a fully autonomous car. Fields now says Ford will have a completely self-driving car, without a steering wheel, an accelerator or pedals, in production. It will initially be used only for robotic taxi services in restricted urban areas but should be available for consumers to purchase by the middle of the decade.
    (5) Ford’s newfound confidence in self-driving cars comes just as the technology’s pioneers are struggling to mature beyond this same gee-whiz enthusiasm. Google’s self-driving project, perennially (永久地) poised to be spun out into a separate company, recently lost key members, while Apple is rumored to have laid off dozens of engineers and scaled back its ambitious plans to build its own autonomous vehicle.
    (6) But other rivals still seem years ahead of Ford. Uber is beginning a driverless taxi pilot in Pittsburgh this week (albeit with a human safety driver), and startup Nutonomy is already offering robotic taxi rides in Singapore. To judge by Monday’s demos, on the other hand, Ford’s self-driving Fusions are still spooked (惊吓) by bushes growing too close to the road and paralyzed with indecision when confronted with pedestrians who may or may not be about to step off the pavement.
    (7) Its fleet of development cars, currently just 10 strong, looks thin compared with Google’s dozens of cars operating across the U.S. , or the thousands of autopilot-enabled Teslas gathering millions of miles of real-world data monthly. Ford aims to have 30 autonomous Fusions by the end of the year, and about 100 by the end of 2017.
    (8) But although Ford may appear to be lagging behind, it has been working quietly behind the scenes. Several self-driving startups, including Uber, Faraday Future and AutonomouStuff, are already using Ford Fusions (or its near equivalent, the Lincoln MKZ) to develop their own technologies. "It’s the absolute best vehicle right now for testing self-driving, " says Bobby Hambrick, CEO of AutonomouStuff, a company developing retro-fit automated driving kits. "There are no other carmakers that are so open to work through third parties like us."
    (9) Fields also points to the multinational’s competencies in building and selling vehicles. "We’ve been working on autonomous vehicles for over 10 years, " he said. "And for 100 years, we’ve built high-volume product with quality and affordability."
    (10) Fields finished his keynote address by predicting that autonomous vehicles will have as big an impact on society as Henry Ford’s moving assembly line did a century ago. He will be hoping that Ford will still be around to celebrate the centenary of the autonomous car. (本文选自 The Guardian ) [br] Ford’s strategies in line with the traffic-jammed world include all the following EXCEPT________.
选项 A、investing into some eccentric inventions
B、transferring its operational conception
C、hastening its development of autonomous vehicles
D、getting involved in some sharing projects
答案 A
解析 细节题。作者在原文第二段末尾提到，福特致力于重塑交通拥堵的城市，其后的第三段第一至四句引用其首席执行官的原话，指出福特的经营理念由关注销售转为注重服务，该段第五句则提到了福特参与的一些分享型公共交通项目，A“投资一些稀奇古怪的发明”是对第三段第五句的曲解，原文的意思是福特做了一些看起来与其业务关联不大，看似古怪的投资，故A为本题答案。B和D是福特应对交通拥堵的策略；而在第四段第四句中作者明确提到，应对交通需求变化的一个策略是加速研发全自动汽车，故C也符合文义。
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