Several months back, I went to the PARC Forum on Ford, the automobile and mobility company as they want us to call them. Dr
Ken Washington gave an excellent talk, that was very different from what I was expecting.
I went expecting to hear about mobility, as in services through your mobile phone, but it was all about how people will commute and go to places in the next decades. And how Ford is hoping to make sure that it is still relevant in those decades.
Washington (vice-president of Research and Advanced Engineering at the Ford Motor Company)
started on what he called "threats to freedom of mobility", which were actually threats to Ford's business model:
1. global urbanization
2. global middle class growth
3. air quality and other health risks
4. changing customer's attitudes (to car ownership in particular, millenials and later gens don't care for cars)
He
talked about the research in the newer lab they have in Palo Alto (3200
Hill View), where they started around a year ago with some
experiments on gauging customers pain points and interests.
These are
apparently now transitioning to products and he described 5 of them.
1.
Go!drive: city driving on demand, where you pay by the minute, an
electric vehicle with designated and guaranteed parking places. They're
testing it in London.
2. peer-2-peer car sharing, I think the name
of the product is easyCarClub, they're launching in
Chicago/London/Washington/San Francisco, partnership with a SF start-up,
but I didn't catch their name.
3. they have been collecting data on bikes and cyclists since 2012
4. out of the experiment in 3, they're launching eBike, which integrates electric bikes and cars/trucks.
Three modalities: modeMe
ebike, modePro ebike and modeFlex ebike (which he says is not launched
yet, PARC heard it first). ModePro and modeFlex are sold with a transit
van Connect. all are electric bikes, where you plug in your cell phone
and that navigates you, so there are cell phones involved too, but
they're not central.
5. Finally they're also getting on the
business of finding parking places in big urban centers via Parking
spotter, which detects empy parking slots using sensors in your car and
tells other people about them, using the cloud. they have several
partnerships in the Valley already, but he did not mention who.
Summarizing:
Ford smart mobility focus on flexible use and ownership, multimodal
styles of transportation for urban solutions mobility; car
sharing/fractional ownership/ pay-as-you-go.
Because with 9
billion people in the planet in 2050, 70% living in the big cities, (by
2030 they're predicting 41 mega-cities with more than 10 million
people), all needing to go the same places and wanting to park, they
will need help.
Q&A
addressed expected issues: fuel price, mass transportation, different
contexts (Europe vs US vs China). I did not managed to ask my question
about the voice interaction of humans and cars, as there were too many
other people asking questions. But it was nice to see old friends like
Johan de Kleer, Scott Elrod and Teresa Lunt.
