It is exactly a year since Mark Fields took charge as President and CEO of Ford Motor Company. He is only too aware that the world has changed dramatically with China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia - the new growth engines of the automobile industry.

With an increasing population of diverse buyers, Ford believes it needs to gear up for future mobility challenges. And this was the core of Fields’ opening keynote in San Francisco last week as part of the annual event, ‘Further with Ford 2015’.

Future ready

“We see ourselves both as an automotive company and a mobility company. We have to drive the business today but at the same time anticipate and deliver customer needs 15 years down the line,” reiterated Fields.

And what does a mobility company actually mean? As he put it, it is more than just motion in moving from point A to B but really about human progress. “It goes all the way back to our founder, Henry Ford. His affordable car was the world on wheels and made physical movement and mobility acceptable to everyone,” said Ford’s CEO. In the process, it gave people the opportunity and ability to pursue new experiences on their own. From Fields’ point of view, Henry Ford understood that mobility was really about freedom:to choose where to live, work and play.

Changing dynamics

For the past few years, Ford has been wondering if this freedom of mobility is actually being threatened particularly in light of four mega trends that could affect future transportation. The first trend, explained Fields, is urbanisation and the exploding (urban) population. Today, there are 28 mega-cities defined as populations with 10 million people and more. By 2030, this list will grow even further as more and more people move to cities.

Two, the rapid growth of the global middle class from two to four billion people is also something that Ford is acutely aware of. Asia will drive a lot of this growth and many in this middle class aspire to own a car which in turn will create more challenges. The third trend is health risks due to poor air quality and congestion while the fourth is changing customer attitudes and priorities regarding vehicles and transportation.

These changing global dynamics have not escaped the attention of Bill Ford, Executive Chairman and great-grandson of the founder. ‘Global Gridlock’ is the phrase he uses for the company’s thoughts about future mobility.

Fields went on to say that rather than just sit back, Ford was doing something about these issues and saw the changing scenario as a huge opportunity just as what Henry Ford had a 100 years ago. “We see software and connectivity technologies are driving vehicle innovation faster than ever,” he said.

Tech savvy mobility

While rival carmakers are also “very, very interested” in this space, Ford knows that there is a new generation of buyers who are using technologies to make their lives easier. This is where its focus on smart mobility will come in handy and puts in perspective why it sees itself as being both an automotive and a mobility company. The goal is to better understand the future of transportation dynamics and “change the way the world moves just as Henry Ford did a 100 years ago”.

It is in this backdrop that the carmaker is paying a lot of attention to its research and innovation centre in Palo Alto, California. Field said Ford was on track to having one of the largest automotive presences in Silicon Valley by the year-end. He also made it clear that it was focused on three priorities: a) accelerating the rate of progress on the One Ford plan; b) delivering on product excellence with a lot of passion; and c) driving innovation into every part of our business.

Palo Alto would play an important part in attaining these objectives in tandem with the think-tank at Ford’s headquarters in Detroit. Ford Smart Mobility will endeavour to deliver the next level in connectivity, mobility, autonomous vehicles, customer experience and big data.

“We have learnt a lot in the past six months, and now are ready to put insights into action. Our goal is to make people’s lives better by helping them navigate more easily through their day, address societal issues and, over time, change the way the world moves,” said Fields.

Among these initiatives is Ford Motor Credit Company’s Peer-2-Peer Car Sharing, a pilot for select customers in six US cities and London. This base of buyers will sign up to rent their financed vehicles to prescreened drivers for short-term use.

Ford also recently announced ‘GoDrive’ which offers customers affordable access to a fleet of cars for one-way journeys with easy parking throughout London. This will involve 50 cars across 20 locations and one-way trips with guaranteed parking.

With ‘Dynamic Shuttle’ Ford studied the on-demand ride-sharing service in New York and London and how vehicles should be modified to accommodate to consumers. ‘InfoCycle’ helped the company understand as to how bicycles can be best used in urban environments. The target is to have 1,000 cycles in Dearbon and Palo Alto by the end of this year.

Multimodal is the final part of Ford’s mobility strategy spurred by the reality of urbanisation. Solutions would then have to be multimodal like electric bikes which can be integrated with Ford vehicles. “We challenged our team to think creatively around mobility and a number of them came back with e-bike designs,” said Fields.

The writer was in San Francisco at the invitation of Ford

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