DETROIT — Ford Motor Co. on Wednesday posted a third-quarter loss of $827 million that it largely blamed on newly revealed plans to shut down Argo AI, a self-driving vehicle development company the automaker had invested in heavily.
CEO Jim Farley says the company now believes mass deployment of fully self-driving vehicles is “a long way off.”
Ford’s adjusted earnings before interest and taxes fell 40 percent from the same period a year earlier to $1.8 billion. That’s slightly higher than the $1.4 billion to $1.7 billion range it projected last month along with a warning that inflation had significantly increased supplier costs.
The automaker’s adjusted profit margin fell by almost half to 4.6 percent, while revenue rose 10 percent to $39.4 billion.
Ford said its third-quarter results were marred by Argo AI’s inability to attract new investors, resulting in a $2.7 billion non-cash, pretax impairment on its previous investments in the company. As Argo winds down, Ford now plans to halt spending on Level 4 advanced driver assist systems to focus on lower-level advanced systems that can be deployed sooner.
Ford originally had planned to begin commercialing Level 4 vehicles in 2021.
“But things have changed, and there’s a huge opportunity right now for Ford to give time — the most valuable commodity in modern life — back to millions of customers while they’re in their vehicles,” Farley said in a statement. “We’re optimistic about a future for L4 ADAS, but profitable, fully autonomous vehicles at scale are a long way off and we won’t necessarily have to create that technology ourselves.”
Ford said it plans to hire engineers from Argo to expand and accelerate development of technology categorized as Level 2+ and Level 3 because they rely on more driver interaction.
