Fortune -- Ford CEO Mark Fields is trying to navigate his company through an era of upheaval in the auto industry. Cars are no longer merely steel on wheels. They’re mobile computers that can respond to voice commands, serve as a hub for digital entertainment and drive themselves.

Fortune spoke with Fields recently at Ford’s Silicon Valley lab, an office that opened earlier this year as a beachhead for innovation. He’s hoping that having workers on the ground in the heart of the tech industry’s capital will help the company identify and adopt new technology more quickly. Ford F 0.56% is facing a stiff challenge to keep up from the usual auto making suspects plus newcomers like Google and Tesla. Even Uber, the ride hailing app, is a threat if people stop buying cars and use its service instead to be driven where they need to go.

The following is a Q&A with Fields that has been edited for length and clarity:

Q: How important are self-driving cars to Ford?

They’re important. But it’s more important to think about self-driving cars more holistically. We call this Ford Smart Mobility. It’s not only about autonomous vehicles, it’s about the connected car, it’s about mobility and ride sharing. It’s around the enabling technologies for the retail experience. All these things are connected. You can’t have an autonomous vehicle unless you have a connected car, and visa versa. You can’t have ride sharing without having the connection. They’re all intertwined.

Q: Is it important to be first? Ford isn’t really seen as being in the lead on self-driving cars.

It’s not the No. 1 thing that drives us. I think the No. 1 thing that drives us, and it gets back to our DNA as a company going back to our founder, Henry Ford, is around innovating to make things accessible to everyone — not just the rich. Even now, semi-autonomous features are the building blocks for full autonomy. When you look the breadth of semi-autonomous features that we have in our vehicles, we’re in a leading position there. With everything from our Fiesta all the way up to our Lincolns — customers can get a lot of these features. So as we go forward, we’re going to make sure that we continue to build on that legacy and push ourselves to make sure it’s accessible and affordable – not necessarily being the first.

Read the rest of the story here: http://fortune.com/2015/05/26/ford-ceo-wants-to-make-a-self-driving-car-for-the-masses/

Ford shifts its autonomous car program into a higher gear, announcing it will become the first automaker to test its self-driving cars at a new Michigan compound.

While the Detroit manufacturer has been working on both connected- and autonomous-car technologies for a decade, the new testing program at Mcity – a 32-acre faux metropolis in Ann Arbor, Mich. – reflects Ford’s recent move to upgrade its self-driving efforts from pure research to advanced engineering.

“We’ve been testing (autonomous) cars in the real world, but using a place like Mcity will allow us to refine our algorithms and better calibrate car sensors by repeating specific situations in a reliable way,” says Raj Nair, Ford’s vice president of global product development.

Mcity opened this past summer and is a joint project of the University of Michigan and the state’s Department of Transportation. Ford is one of a few large automakers contributing $1 million over three years to Mcity, which features storefronts, traffic lights, pedestrian zones and other real-world infrastructure to better train autonomous cars on how they need to react in a range of scenarios.

With the reality of streets humming with self-driving cars now more a matter of when than if, automakers and technology companies are looking for ways to accelerate their respective efforts.