Ford bets $1B on startup founded by Waymo, Uber vets

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Ford Motor is spending $1 billion to take over a budding robotics startup to acquire more expertise needed to reach its ambitious goal of having a fully driverless vehicle on the road by 2021.

The big bet announced Friday comes just a few months after the Pittsburgh startup, Argo AI, was created by two alumni of Carnegie Mellon University's robotics program, Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander.

The alliance between Argo and Ford is the latest to combine the spunk and dexterity of a technologically savvy startup with the financial muscle and manufacturing knowhow of a major automaker in the race to develop autonomous vehicles. Last year rival General Motors paid $581 million to buy Cruise Automation, a 40-person software company testing vehicles in San Francisco.

The Argo deal marks the next step in Ford's journey toward building a vehicle without a steering wheel or brake pedal by 2021 - a vision CEO Mark Fields laid out last summer.

The big-ticket deal for the newly-minted company clearly was aimed at getting Salesky and Rande. Salesky formerly worked on self-driving cars at a high-profile project within Google - now known as Waymo - and Rander did the same kind of engineering at ride-hailing service Uber before the two men teamed to launch Argo late last year.

"When talent like that comes up, you don't ignore that ability," said Raj Nair, who doubles as Ford's chief technical officer and product development head.

The two will develop the core technology of Ford's autonomous vehicle - the "virtual driver" system, which Nair described as the car's "brains, eyes, ears and senses."