9-19-2016, C3 Report -- While attending the Further with Ford conference at the company’s headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, earlier this week, the automaker’s old-fashioned script logo at the entrance to the building caught my eye. Probably because I’d watched several episodes of HBO’s Silicon Valley on the plane ride to Detroit; its opening title sequence features tech company logos vying for attention. At Ford, its old-school insignia seemed out of step with its ambitions to remake itself as a mobility company rivaling the likes of Uber, Google, and others.
Technology has certainly created Kodak moments for many long-established and iconic companies, and some predict the same thing will occur in the auto industry. While Ford isn’t the only car company making this transition into mobility, it has been one of the most aggressive. It plans, for example, to build and deploy fully self-driving vehicles for an autonomous ride-sharing service in five years; check out a hands on with Ford’s latest self-driving car from our sister site ExtremeTech. Last week, it also acquired van-pool service Chariot and announced plans to expand bike-sharing in the Bay Area.
The Further with Ford event featured a parade of company executives in a carefully choreographed series of discussions and presentations. But at the same time, I found the company’s kingpins, and particularly executive chairman and company scion Bill Ford, unusually candid about the opportunities and challenges the automaker faces in moving from selling vehicles to marketing mobility.
In an opening session, CEO Mark Fields suggested that vehicle miles traveled will be more important than number of vehicle sold. Product chief Raj Nair noted that Ford is intentionally disrupting its century-old business model of vehicle sales since the change is inevitable.
But few things provoke a stronger reaction from auto industry veterans than the idea that car companies are dinosaurs that will be eventually usurped by Silicon Valley. In an onstage interview, Bill Ford, the great-grandson of the company’s founder, acknowledged that “it’s not just Google and Apple, but it’s start-ups of people spinning out of Google and Apple” with which Ford will have to compete.
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