Fords of the Future

What happens when a carmaker known for some of the best everyday driver’s cars around announces it wants to take away the driver altogether? Renuka Kirpalani went to Michigan to find out.

- Renuka Kirpalani

Automotive conferences don’t usually have a professor of psychology and behavioural economics to deliver the opening speech. But the sixth annual ‘Further with Ford’ conference had just that, which also indicates how different the future at Ford Motor Co really is. With liberal doses of humour and psychology, Dan Ariely of Duke University provoked the audience into thinking how they could do things in the present to make the future better. In a way, he was linking it with Ford’s plans to build autonomous cars for commercial operations such as ride sharing. “We are moving from owning cars to sharing them. Ford is looking at mobility through a new lens,” Ford chief executive Mark Fields said at the meet.

With an investment upwards of $4.5 billion, leasing the fourth floor of Michigan University’s new robotics lab, doubling the headcount at its own Palo Alto, California research labs, and buying into Chariot – a crowd sourced shuttle service, Ford is geared to produce fully autonomous cars in volumes by 2021. The Tesla Model 3, it seems, was a big wake-up call.