April 16, 2021: -Ford Motor followed Tesla in many ways when it came to the Mustang Mach-E, its new battery-electric vehicle. Still, CEO Jim Farley tweeted on Thursday to show that Ford is not like Tesla when testing driverless tech using customers as guinea pigs on public roads.

 Ford’s upcoming hands-free highway driving system, Farley tweeted that, “BlueCruise! We tested it in the real world, so our customers don’t have to.” In October 2020, Tesla released a beta version of its premium driver-assist system, which the company markets as “Full Self-Driving” to customers.

Only some customers who purchase the Full Self-Driving (FSD) option get access to the beta version to try the newest features added to the system before all bugs worked out.

The company unveiled that it rolled out FSD beta to 2,000 drivers before but revoked access for a few drivers who weren’t paying proper attention to the road allegedly.

In his most recent update, via Twitter, Musk said on April 9 that Tesla is “Almost ready with FSD Beta V9.0. Step change improvement is massive, especially for weird corner cases & bad weather. Pure vision, no radar.”

Tesla faces criticism for the FSD brand name in the U.S., and a German court barred Tesla from using Autopilot and Full Self-Driving in advertising because they overstate the capabilities of a Tesla vehicle.

Recently, there have also been some crashes that also involved Teslas, prompting federal investigations that will determine if the driver assistance technology may have contributed to or caused the collisions.

According to Reuters, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that it had opened 27 investigations of Tesla vehicles, out of which 23 are active. Its Blue Cruise system will be released this year-end on the 2021 Ford F-150 and 2021 Mustang Mach-E after over 500,000 miles of development testing and fine-tuning, according to Ford.

Like General Motors’ Super Cruise, Ford’s system promises fewer capabilities than Tesla’s FSD system. But Ford’s won’t require drivers to “check-in” by touching the steering wheel.

Ford and GM systems are also prohibited to several pre-mapped highways in the U.S. and Canada. Tesla doesn’t limit the use of Autopilot and FSD or FSD beta in the same way.