Analysis-Ford, VW pop the automated-vehicle bubble with Argo AI exit

DETROIT (Reuters) - The road map to fully self-driving vehicles is being rewritten once again, this time by Ford Motor Co and Volkswagen AG. When the two automakers joined forces in July 2019 to share control of self-driving startup Argo AI, it shook up the landscape among other key players. Wednesday's announcement that Pittsburgh-based Argo is being shuttered and some of its employees moving to Ford and VW underscores the growing realization that automated vehicles may be even further away from mass deployment than industry executives predicted back in 2019. "It's become very clear that profitable, fully autonomous vehicles at scale are still a long way off," Ford CFO John Lawler said on Wednesday. As Ford, General Motors Co and other companies began to realize they would need to step up investment over a longer period of time, "it was never clear what the financial returns were going to be" on automated vehicles, Evangelos Simoudis, an investor, author and corporate adviser, told Reuters on Wednesday.