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Ford Starts Testing Autonomous Vehicles In U-M's Simulated City

ANN ARBOR (WWJ/AP) - Ford Motor Co. is testing autonomous vehicles at a new simulated city at the University of Michigan.

The Dearborn-based company says it's the first automaker to test such vehicles at the 32-acre Mcity, which officially opened in July on the university's Ann Arbor campus.

Ford has been testing autonomous vehicles for more than 10 years and said Friday it is now expanding testing on the roads and realistic neighborhoods of the simulated city.

"Testing Ford's autonomous vehicle fleet at Mcity provides another challenging, yet safe, urban environment to repeatedly check and hone these new technologies," Raj Nair, Ford group vice president, said in a statement. "This is an important step in making millions of people's lives better and improving their mobility."

The $10 million testing ground is run by the Mobility Transformation Center, a partnership between the university, state and federal governments and auto and technology companies. It's the world's first full-scale simulated real-world urban environment designed to test connected and automated vehicles in an effort to accelerate development time.

The site has many familiar features of urban driving, including intersections, a railroad crossing, roundabouts, brick and gravel roads and parking spaces.

"The goal of Mcity is that we get a scaling factor," Ryan Eustice, University of Michigan associate professor, said in a statement. "Every mile driven there can represent 10, 100 or 1,000 miles of on-road driving in terms of our ability to pack in the occurrences of difficult events."

Along with testing at Mcity and on public roads, Ford's autonomous fleet has been put through the paces at the company's vehicle development facilities in Dearborn and Romeo, Michigan.

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Mcity (Credit: University of Michigan)

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