Ford Motor Company has announced that it plans to be mass producing a fully autonomous, driverless vehicle by 2021.

The company's president and chief executive officer, Mark Fields, said that “[t]he next decade will be defined by automation of the automobile.” He added that Ford sees autonomous vehicles “as having as big an impact on society as Ford's moving assembly line did a hundred years ago.”

Mr. Fields said that Ford will be doubling the number of engineers, researchers, and software developers at its research facility in Palo Alto, California, and that the facility will double in size.