Ford Considering Deleting Feature Nobody Uses To Save Millions Of Dollars

Ford Considering Deleting Feature Nobody Uses To Save Millions Of Dollars

The Active Park Assist feature was introduced in 2009, and despite its brilliance, it’s now a waste of money.

Ford is considering getting rid of part of the Active Park Assist driver-assist suite it introduced over a decade ago – to save money amid inflation and increase profitability.

In a conference call this week, Ford COO Kumar Galhotra said that only a few people use the parallel parking assist feature and that they can remove it to save money.

“So one example is an auto-park feature that lets the customer parallel park automatically. Very, very few people are using it, so we can remove that feature. It’s about $60 per vehicle,” Galhotra said.

Galhotra added that removing the feature could save Ford $10 million a year.

The parallel parking assistance feature is part of Ford’s Active Park Assist suite of driver-assistance tech. Introduced in 2009, it was among the first commercially available systems of its kind (Toyota being the first a few years prior), with the aim to alleviate the “stress” from the so-called “challenging” parking procedure.

Since then, several Ford vehicles received the feature, even the entry-level ones. Today, almost every brand-new vehicle with driver-assist features offers active parallel parking assistance.

However, the feature isn’t exactly something that customers use extensively, as Galhotra remarked. The company discovered this by using connected vehicle data from its customers.

The Active Park Assist, now in version 2.0, is still being offered to Ford vehicles today as part of Ford’s Co-Pilot360 – an SAE Level 2 autonomous driving technology. The F-150 Lightning and the newly launched facelifted Explorer, among other Ford vehicles, currently include the feature, but perhaps not for much longer.

As technology progresses and develops, automakers are introducing more features to add value to their cars. Some cars can even park by themselves without a driver (albeit in an enclosed environment), but how much tech do we really need, and how often does the average driver use it? Perhaps in an autonomous world, automatic parallel parking has value, but as things stand, it’s quicker and simpler for most people to just park the car themselves.