{"id":341036,"date":"2017-05-16T04:54:16","date_gmt":"2017-05-15T20:54:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/?p=1490522"},"modified":"2017-05-16T04:54:16","modified_gmt":"2017-05-15T20:54:16","slug":"ford-cto-raj-nair-on-the-future-ford-will-look-very-different-in-10-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/ford-cto-raj-nair-on-the-future-ford-will-look-very-different-in-10-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Ford CTO Raj Nair on the future: Ford will look very different in 10 years"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/p>\n

Raj Nair (Ford) at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, our own Darrell Etherington sat down with Ford Motor Company CTO (and Ford employee since 1987!) Raj Nair to chat about the future and how a company like Ford shifts with an evolving industry \u2014 particularly as the car industry adopts the idea of cars that drive themselves.<\/p>\n

While the overall panel was about autonomous vehicles, they started off with a quick mention of the GT \u2014 Ford\u2019s ridiculous (both in its ridiculous performance and in the ridiculously low number of them being made), $450,000 supercar. We spent an afternoon checking out the GT<\/a> a few weeks back.<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah.. that car is a little bit my baby,\u201d said Nair. \u201cBut it\u2019s kind of the opposite of a driverless vehicle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nair elaborated on this a bit later when Darrell asked if we\u2019d see a 100th anniversary GT (as this new GT is a 50th anniversary celebration of the original) \u2014 effectively, whether or not Ford would still be making human-driven vehicles in 50 years:<\/p>\n

\n

Technology is progressing fast. We\u2019re 114 years old, and there are still aspects of the start of the automotive industry and what it meant for personal mobility. Horses don\u2019t serve the role that they used to, but there\u2019s still a lot of horse races that are a big deal, and people still enjoy riding horses. I hope it doesn\u2019t go that<\/em> far, but it\u2019s certainly a possibility. I think there will always be an aspect of controlling a piece of machinery, of two or three thousand pounds of machinery being controlled by very minute movements of your hand\u2026 Taking yourself to the limit, taking the machine to the limit; there\u2019s something in our brain wired to enjoy that, so hopefully that\u2019s always a part of it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

While there will probably always be those who\u2019ll want to drive themselves (if eventually only for sport), the industry trend toward figuring out autonomous vehicles seems clear. But this introduces a whole new challenge for the industry: if a vehicle can drive itself\u2026 you don\u2019t necessarily need to own<\/em> one, as you can just summon a car when you need it. Nair suggests they\u2019re well aware of this, but it\u2019s something on the horizon:<\/p>\n

\n

The pace at which the technology is advancing is faster than it\u2019s ever been. It\u2019s becoming more readily apparent to the broader public and the industry, and new entrants out in Silicon valley, and there\u2019s a lot more players coming into it. I think on the usership side \u2014 the popularity of ride hailing, the ride sharing model, is increasing \u2014 yet, the aspect of personal ownership is still really, really high. We\u2019re at a record industry of sales right now. I think we\u2019ll see a distribution change over time, but that part of it\u2019ll be gradual. Yet this industry operates on pretty long cycles, so we need to be planning for that right now.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But with just about every automotive maker cracking away at this challenge, how might Ford be the one to get it done? At least in part, by not insisting that they do it all themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not intent on doing it ourselves,\u201d says Raj, mentioning their acquisitions (like SAIPS, the machine learning company Ford purchased in 2016<\/a>), licensing and investments \u2014 like Argo AI, a team Ford committed to investing $1 billion dollars into<\/a> over five years. \u201cProbably the most sought-after talent in the autonomous space are the roboticists, the software experts and the machine learning experts\u2026 We have a very strong team internally, but to be honest, they were being very heavily recruited.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ford has already been experimenting with shared vehicles with Chariot, the ride-sharing service it acquired last year<\/a>. If shared vehicles\/routes becomes a sizeable part of Ford\u2019s business, who owns that shared (and, presumably, eventually autonomous) fleet? Ford? Private entities? Municipalities? (As Darrell noted onstage, TechCrunch had previously heard that Ford was talking with municipalities about owning ridesharing fleets as they might own public transit.)<\/p>\n

\n

We\u2019re experimenting with a couple different forms of that. Part of that is the Chariot experiment which we\u2019re doing, where we\u2019re owning fleets of transits, running shuttles and working with municipalities on some aspects of dynamic shuttles and dynamic routing, but also fixed routes at a smaller scale. And other city-as-customer pilots\u2026 I think we\u2019re open to ownership of that fleet. We\u2019re open to different models, and different discussions as to where ownership of that fleet would reside\u2026 We\u2019re interested in managing those vehicles as a service, we\u2019re interested in manufacturing those vehicles and we\u2019d also be interested in the profit opportunity for transportation services.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So if Ford deeply embraces technology at deeper and deeper levels moving forward, will it keep its \u201cFord Motor\u201d name or change it to something like \u201cFord Technology\u201d?<\/p>\n

\n

I think we\u2019re going to be called Ford Motor Company for a while. The company is attached to it \u2014 the family is attached to it\u2026 but I think Ford Motor Company will look very different 10 years from now. It\u2019ll be known not just as an automotive company, but an automotive and<\/em> mobility company.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"\" Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, our own Darrell Etherington sat down with Ford Motor Company CTO (and Ford employee since 1987!) Raj Nair to chat about the future and how a company like Ford shifts with an evolving industry — particularly as the car industry adopts the idea of cars that drive themselves. Read More<\/a><\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"\/ <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5817,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[59,66,26],"class_list":["post-341036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-media","tag-techcrunch","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5817"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341036\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}