Ford and Volkswagen are leaving the Argo AI automated vehicle project

According to Reuters, the roadmap for self-driving cars will be rewritten once again, and this time by Ford Motor Co. and Volkswagen AG.

In July 2019, after the two automakers joined forces to jointly run Argo AI, a startup specializing in developing unmanned vehicles, it led to a shift in the marketplace among other key players.

Argo, which was based in Pittsburgh, closed Wednesday, and some of its employees moved to Ford and VW, signaling an increasingly clear realization that mass production of self-driving cars is a long way off, despite industry predictions as far back as 2019.

John Lawler, Ford's chief financial officer, said Wednesday that it has now become abundantly clear that large-scale production of cost-effective, fully autonomous cars is still a long way off.

With the timeline for mass production of autonomous cars increasingly delayed — after global automakers and supplier companies invested about $100 billion in their production — the once-overestimated estimates of companies specializing in developing autonomous driving systems have suffered a significant decline.