BlueCruise allows for hands-off driving on 130,000 miles of highways. (Fox News Digital)
At least that is all it could do when it launched a year ago.
The 2023 Mustang Mach-E comes with the latest BlueCruise 1.2 software, which has added functionality and works better overall.
Ford has been using artificial intelligence to improve the system’s capabilities through machine learning.
BlueCruise is also offered on the Ford F-150 pickup. (Ford)
"A fairly large number of customers do decide that they want to share data with us," Sammy Omari, Ford’s executive director for advanced driver assist system technologies, told Fox News Digital.
"We are very surgical about what we’re allowed to collect and not just about how we collect it, but how we handle that data internally," he said.
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AI software scrubs the data of personal information, blurs license plates in the images and crops them to just the parts it needs.
"We’re not really interested in anything, any data that could lead us to what customers used the car, like, for example, things like the vehicle identification number," Omari said.
The 2023 Ford Mustang Mach-E is the first model available with the BlueCruise 1.2 system. (Fox News Digital)
However, it is getting there. Compared to when Fox News Digital tested the original version last year, BlueCruise can now stay engaged for much longer before asking for help.
"For time between disconnects we improved almost 2x, so it’s kind of dramatic," Omari said.
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The algorithm learns in part by looking at video shot in different environmental and lighting conditions.
This gives it a broader understanding of what roads and lane markers look like across the 130,000 miles of controlled access highways in the U.S. and Canada that have been certified for it to operate on so far.
BlueCruise can change lanes when the driver hits the turn signal stalk. (Fox News Digital)
Of course, while AI does a lot of the heavy lifting developing the software, it is ultimately up to the humans on Omari's team to add the final touches and validate it. The cars cannot modify the software onboard by themselves.
"Machine learning engineers are a very rare commodity and a very expensive commodity," Omari explained.
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"For them to operate at scale, at Ford scale, we really want them to focus on small bits and pieces where they can add value that we can’t automate."
Gary Gastelu is Fox News Digital's automotive editor.