Ford wants to be your 'mobility' company

Ford, the pioneering car company that put many people behind the steering wheel for the first time is now researching how to remove it from our grasp.

The blue oval says it is in the process of expanding from traditional car company to 'mobility' company and that means making the autonomous 'self-driving' vehicle widely available to the motoring public.

And it also means investigating a whole raft of 'mobility' solutions that go beyond simply designing and selling cars, including car sharing, cars on demand, car swapping and e-bikes, the latter shown off in concept form at the Smart Mobility Congress in Barcelona, Spain, in early March.

"We think of ourselves as a product company, a mobility company a tech company," Ford's global research and advanced engineering boss Ken Washington told Australian media during a recent trip to Australia.

"We might sell you a car in the future, we might offer an autonomous vehicle in the future you might want to use and/or own ... All of it needs to fit together so there is an end-to-end experience that is very positive as you interact with Ford and your Ford products and services.

"We don't see anyone doing that today. I know that's ambitious but we think we can do it."

Washington said there were some circumstances coming where the traditional concept of owning and driving a car you felt emotionally attached to "might just be too difficult".

"What we are really focussed on is developing the technology on top of our existing capabilities to do semi-autonomous driving and driver assist technologies to move that level of autonomy to a full level of autonomy with the right algorithms and the right sensors at the right price point so when we have the ability to fully take the driver out of the loop, it can be done in a democratised way."

Unlike some other car companies which have nominated 2020 as an introduction date, Ford has yet to commit to a date when it intends to have an autonomous vehicle on-sale.

While Washington was clear that Ford would always offer cars that could be driven manually, he cited four "mega trends" that were driving the company's autonomous development and its other mobility investigations.

They include increasing urbanisation and the emergence of mega-cities with 10 million or more inhabitants – there are nearly 30 and there could be 40-plus in 10 to 15 years: "That means the infrastructure for transport is going to be more and more crowded and it's going to be more and more difficult to get around," Washington said. "This notion of global gridlock that has been theorised in the past is going to be become more and more reality."

Another factor is the growth of the middle class from two billion people today to more than four billion in 10 to 15 years, which means more people with the disposable income to purchase a car: "You put that together with the first trend and you have got a situation where it is going to become increasingly important to enable mobility through both a traditional lens of building great cars that are fun to drive, but also enabling people to be mobile in different ways."

Increasing concerns about the environment, and especially air quality is another mega trend. Washington said Ford had to respond to increasingly strict regulations but also had a responsibility to do the right thing by future generations.

Washington said the changing attitudes of customers was the fourth mega trend forcing a reaction from Ford: "Millennials [people born from the early 1980s onwards and embracing the demographic formerly labelled Gen-Y] especially are thinking about mobility and automotive platforms differently than my generation did. My son when he tuned 16 didn't care about getting his car licence, he wanted to upgrade his cell phone.

"They think about transport in an on-demand way and are less tied to the vehicle emotionally."

Ford's response to this is being formulated via a series of experiments conducted under the 'Ford Smart Mobility' umbrella. Mobility solutions including autonomy and digital connectivity are keys to this.

Tapping into "big data" and "analytics" aided these developments, Washington said.

He explained one experiment Ford was conducting – in association with Georgia Tech – was the autonomous repositioning of vehicles without any onboard human involvement. Another is smart parking, which uses the sensors in cars to identify open space that are uploaded to the cloud in real-time and supplied to service subscribers.

 "If we can wire all those things together in smart ways and engage smart partners it will change the way we provide experience to our customers," he said. "Think about the future around connected cars, cars that can have much more autonomy than they have today. We have a tsunami of data available to us and we can process that data to create new experience for our customers.

"There are so many options for how you might enable people to be mobile, especially in an urban environment."