This week Ford established Latitude AI, a wholly owned subsidiary to develop what it calls a “hand-free, eyes off driver assist system” for its next-generation vehicles. Latitude AI will be a team of 550 people hired from Argo AI – a now defunct company that was majority owned by Ford and the Volkswagen Group at 42% each, alongside Lyft and other smaller investors. The team will be working with data from Ford’s BlueCruise system, which has accumulated more than 50 million miles of driving data to work from. Ford’s executive director of advanced driver assistance technologies (ADAS) – Sammy Omari – will serve as the CEO of Latitude. Ford is quite late to the game in establishing its own dedicated…