The automobile industry is at a crossroads. We may not see it just yet - and perhaps not all manufacturers do either. The change is not one that will come due to demands from regulation, policy, technology or environment. But it will be led by the consumer's needs and requirements for personal mobility in the future. Bill Ford, scion of the Ford family and Chairman of the carmaker that carries his family name was asked if he would ever consider doing what Apple did a few years ago - when it changed its name from Apple Computer to just Apple. So could his company be just Ford and not Ford Motor Company in the future? His answer? "Hell no!"
Ford says 30 New vehicles are sold in the US every minute
Ford believes that the next decade is going to be defined by the automation of automobile, and impact society just as its founder Henry Ford did with his moving assembly line, more than a 100 years ago. But his great grandson Bill's conviction that Ford and others will still be 'car' manufacturers comes not from a delusional belief that people will always keep buying cars as we know them. But that there will be a demand for a product that will still be called a car - but will be defined differently. So the car may not be driven in the future, and may still take you from point A to B. A bus or a tram or metro can also do that you might think. Yes, it could. But those modes of mass public transport do not always cater to the last mile, and in many cases are therefore not the door-to-door solution many consumers require. Ford's Chief Executive Mark Fields says, "Here in the United States there are 30 new vehicles sold every single minute. But at that same time in the same minute, there are 7 million miles driven - and over 125,000 taxis and Ubers are on the road, 60,000 shared rides, 450,000 bytes of data from connected vehicles, and 350,000 apps are downloaded. And the bottom line - the world has just moved from owning vehicles to owning them and sharing them - and this is causing us to think very differently as a company."
We rode Ford's experimental autonomous car at the company's product development centre
Ford announced earlier that it's already working on a fully autonomous, mass model volumes product for ride sharing services to induct into their fleets. Ford's autonomous car will be ready by 2021 - just 5 years from now. It has already begun testing some of the technology it already has at hand - while further developing and enhancing t as it gets to the final product. For now it is using retrofitted Fusion hybrids with lidar, radar and cameras on board. And I got a chance to ride on Ford's experimental Autonomous Car on a mile long loop in one, at Ford's Product Development Centre at its headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. The car works just fine and did three things I expected it would - it obeyed all traffic rules like signs and speed limits, it detected pedestrians and slowed or stopped as needed to give them right of way and it also erred on the side of caution when it came to other vehicles that were in traffic on the route - driven by humans of course!
Ford will first offer these for ferrying services within the campus
As the first major step before its autonomous model comes out, Ford says it will offer these cars to provide ferrying services (like a shuttle) at the same campus for its many employees to get around from one side to the other - in 2018. By then it hopes to have perfected the system even more by making it even more accurate and also downsizing some of the hardware needed. It believes it can do the job better than Apple or Google can - because it's a carmaker with a rich heritage, rather than in spite of it. In fact Bill Ford says his company envisions the formerly mentioned tech giants as potential partners and not rivals in the future.
Ford believes it can make better autonomous cars than Apple or Google
Fields adds, "This is what is driving us to rethink our entire business model. Because this it's no longer just about how many vehicles we can sell, it's also about what services we can provide as well. And Ford's smart mobility is simply our plan to lead a vehicle connectivity in mobility, autonomous vehicles, the customer experience, and data & analytics."
The future of autonomous vehicles depends also on infrastructure and government regulations
A large part of what happens with autonomous vehicles will also be determined by infrastructure readiness, consumer adoptability and policy or regulation by governments around the world. But everything now does seem to point to the fact that there is a very definite autonomous future for the automobile - possibly a fully electric one as well.
