[DeTomaso] NPC: ti's a good time to be in....
audionut at hushmail.com
audionut at hushmail.com
Wed Apr 1 15:20:44 EDT 2015
Great info, thanks Larry. These trends appear very positive to me.
Just Uber'd around Hollywood last weekend. Using phones, my friends
set us all up with these local kids (anybody under 30 is a "kid" to me
now) who showed up instantly in Priuses to take us anywhere for next
to nothing. It was so nice to not have to worry about driving or
parking when kicking around the city. Being out on the road with
robots seems like it would make the roads safer and more efficient.
Slow cars in the faster lanes would be fewer. Since I'm also a
motorcycle rider, I feel that sensor technology looking out for me
will doubtless be superior than your everyday random human, who may or
may not decide to check their blind spot. People who would rather
not drive are most likely crappy drivers anyway. I'm all for robots
putting them in the passenger seats.
Sent using Hushmail
On April 1, 2015 at 9:01 AM, "Larry - Ohio Time" wrote:Ken
Washington, Ford's new VP of research and advanced engineering
Global trends appear to be moving towards a future where in many
markets,
car ownership may look like an expensive, impractical and inconvenient
way
to get around. So what's the next model of personal transport, and
where do
the big automakers fit in? Ford's new global VP of Research and
Advanced
Engineering, Ken Washington, sat down in Melbourne for a "crystal
ball"
discussion about autonomous cars, on-demand vehicles, car sharing,
smart
parking, multi-mode transport, and how a car company might learn to
cater to
a new generation of customers that are far more interested in
upgrading
their phones than getting their driver's licenses.
Over the last 100 years, auto manufacturers have created a fairly
stable
relationship with their customers. People buy cars more or less as
soon as
they can afford them, and enjoy a freedom of mobility that was
unavailable
to them beforehand. Cars transform our lives and they're a symbol of
independence. So many sexual awakenings have happened in, or because
of,
cars that many owners have developed intense emotional connections
with
them.
But now, the wind is blowing in a different direction. Where kids of
Generation X dreamed of the day they'd get their first car,
Millennials are
attaching the same feelings to their smartphones. They're connected
with
their friends and love interests 24/7 - the car is no longer the
gateway to
social interaction.
"When my son turned 16, he didn't care about getting his driver's
license,"
says Washington. "What he cared about was upgrading his cellphone.
That was
just unfathomable to me, but to him it was very natural and I think he
wasn't alone. The new generation is really thinking about how to use
transportation in an on-demand way, they are less tied emotionally to
the
physical vehicle, and I think it's going to become very important for
us to
be responsive to the future generations who are thinking about
mobility
through that different lens."
That's just one of the challenging trends Ford and other auto
manufacturers
are facing, and Washington identifies three other "megatrends" that
are
influencing thinking at Ford.
"First, there's urbanization. Today there's almost 30 cities with more
than
10 million people. In the next 10 to 15 years there's some studies
that tell
us that's going to grow to more than 40. So this is a trend that's
going to
be significant and it means that the infrastructure for transport is
going
to be more and more crowded, it's going to be more and more difficult
to get
around. This notion of global gridlock, which was theorized in the
past, is
going to become more of a reality.
"The second is more people are entering what we would define as the
middle
class, where you have enough disposable income to buy a car. From 2
billion
today, over the next 10 to 15 years we see than number doubling to 4
billion
people. You put that together with the first trend.
"Third trend that we're seeing is increasing concerns about the
environment,
with air quality being near the top of that list. So it's going to
become
increasingly important for us to deal with the realities of, not only
regulation driven requirements on the automotive sector, but the right
thing
to do for the world, to make air quality good for our future
generations."
So - choked city roads, increasing pressures to go easier on the
environment, and a new generation coming through that is far less
likely to
aspire to car ownership in the same way their parents did - what's the
path
forward for automakers?
Ford doesn't know what the future looks like, but it has some theories
and
it's starting to test them in the real world. So here's a few things
Washington was prepared to speak about.
On self driving cars
While he was unwilling to put a time-frame on when Ford expects to go
fully
driverless, Washington said, "autonomous vehicles are going to become
a
reality in the future, we're pretty convinced of that. That puts more
and
more requirement on the technology for autonomy to be very good and
robust.
That's why we're taking our time to get that right. So imagine if you
get
that right and you can take the driver out of the loop. Well that
might
totally redefine what the interior of the vehicle might look like. Say
you
have a city taxi service, if it's semi- or fully autonomous, you might
design that taxi vehicle to be very different looking to the cars that
we
drive today. A lot of that will depend on the outcome of some of these
experiments that we're doing now."
On the legalities of driverless cars he said, "there are enough
technical
challenges that that's where we're putting our energy right now. The
automotive industry has to come together as a community to work with
the
policymakers and to address some of the legal issues. So technically,
we
believe it's absolutely going to be possible for the ability to do
full
autonomy in certain geofenced areas where the climate is good, you're
not
obfuscated by snow and rain... that's going to be hard enough. The
good news
is, we've got many of the building blocks available today. The new
Mondeo
has many very capable semi-autonomous features on it. Lane keeping,
blind
spot monitoring, parking assist, these are the building blocks for the
future fully autonomous vehicle."
On '"car on demand" subscription services
"That's exactly one of our experiments. And it's one that we're
actually
having some good success with. We launched that experiment in the city
of
London. With the density of the population there, it's very
challenging to
own, park, drive and navigate. So we've launched one of our
experiments
there we're calling Gold Drive. It's a vehicle on demand, we have both
a
Focus BEV and a Focus Gas, a fleet of vehicles, and you can subscribe
to the
vehicles using your smartphone. You access the vehicle, unlock it, get
in
the car, start it, drive it for however many hours you wanna use it
for,
drop it off... One of the early learnings we're getting from that
experiment
is that people love the idea of using a car and then being able to
deliver
it in a place where they have a guaranteed parking spot. Those are the
kinds
of learnings that are telling us that if we do something like a car on
demand or a car sharing service, make sure you have a place to park it
- and
also make it easy for people to access it!
"Another experiment we're doing is remote positioning of vehicles.
Imagine a
future where you've got cars on demand that you order, that you wanna
have
available the next morning. Well, one of the challenges is having the
vehicle in the right place at the right time. Imagine a future where
you
could actually re-locate that vehicle autonomously but remotely, by
remote
control. So we're doing an experiment [using go-karts] to enable the
remote
repositioning of vehicles using on-board cameras and sensors so you
can
relocate a vehicle from one place to another, safely, but with no
on-vehicle
human involvement. We're working with Georgia Tech."
On smart parking
Many of Ford's new cars already have the ability to identify an open
parking
spot as they drive past it. The next step, according to Washington,
might be
to communicate with other cars on the road when a spot is available.
"It's not science fiction, because the sensors on the vehicle are
actually
capable enough to tell when you've driven by a parking spot. The
vision
recognition capabilities of these on-vehicle sensors are actually good
enough to tell you if that's a valid parking spot or not. If you
overlay
that with very detailed maps of certain cities, you could actually
imagine
how you could inform an information system that this is not only a
free
parking spot, but a valid one. We're doing an experiment, I think it's
in
Atlanta in the US, where we're using the onboard sensors of the
vehicles to
do exactly that. It's a prototype and it's an experiment. We'll run
that
experiment for this year, and based on what we learn we'll determine
whether
it's something we wanna roll out as a service.
"We've been thinking about this a lot - the potential for bringing
value to
our customers is enormous if we can do analytics around the data
that's
available that comes from the vehicle, and process that in smart ways
that
give value back to the customer. If a customer wants to have access to
that
parking information, they might need to give us access to the sensors
on
their vehicle to be a participant. That's one of the premises we're
testing,
there are many other models we might use."
On tech giants Apple and Google getting into the automotive space
"It's actually pretty exciting to us that there's so much interest
from the
tech sector in automobiles and the automotive sector. We think it's a
case
of rising all boats, so we're pretty excited about that. It's
validated the
need for us to be in Silicon Valley, and it's a pretty special place.
You've
got a very high density of tech companies and venture capital
investment
firms and universities and national laboratories doing very cutting
edge
research and technology development. By being a part of that community
you
have access to a very vibrant community of innovative thinkers and
technology innovators.
"It's very validating to us that technology behemoths like Apple and
Google
are paying
attention to the automotive industry. With that said, it's also a bit
of a
wake-up call. We don't have forever to figure out how to take our game
to
the next level in terms of driving innovation in our business, getting
value
out of doing connected car and doing something real with autonomous
vehicle
technology.
"The good news for us is that we've been in Silicon Valley for a
number of
years. We started our operation there three years ago. This year we
opened a
much larger facility and announced our commitment to populate that
facility
with more than 120 people by the end of this year. We're very excited
about
that. We've got a very creative team there and they're part of a
global PD
(product development) team.
"It's already giving some benefits to us by enabling to accelerate
some of
our partnerships with the universities there, and with tech companies
that
we're doing research with. One of our projects is with Nest
, where we've developed a capability for the vehicle to
communicate to the Nest API so that when you approach your home, it'll
send
a signal to your home to turn the temperature up, or to cool it down -
sort
of a smart car/smart home concept. That wouldn't be possible if we
hadn't
been there in Silicon Valley and forged that relationship with Nest.
"I'd say we're paying attention to the tech companies' interest in the
automotive sector, but I think threatened is too strong a word."
On Ford's data and analytics capabilities
We put it to Washington that Ford's existing fleet of vehicles could
make
for a big advantage over Google's small fleet of autonomous test
vehicles
and that every sensor on every Ford on the road could be relaying back
a
massive amount of data to help jump-start Ford's own autonomous car
plans.
"A big part of the big data experiment is to assess the validity of
doing
something like that. So far the signals are coming back that it's
possible,
it's very feasible. We are getting more serious about data and
analytics.
We're just now in the process of assembling our global data and
analytics
team under the leadership of a new senior leader that we hired earlier
this
year. We hired our first chief data and analytics officer, and he's
assembling this team and their primary responsibility is going to be
to
develop the architecture for us to harvest and get value out of this
massive
sensor set of vehicles that are collecting data - and to do it in the
right
way, with the right privacy principles and the right cybersecurity
protocols
and the right framework for keeping the data organized and sorted so
you can
do analytics on it that can then inform how you can actually make the
service and the experience better. That's certainly squarely in our
plans."
On whether the days of the car enthusiast are coming to an end
"I think you're going to have both models. There are going to be
people who
continue to have a great relationship with their vehicle. I'll never
stop
having that kind of feeling toward my vehicle. I love to drive and I
think
I'm not alone. I think that holds for future generations as well. But
in
some circumstances it may be too difficult to be mobile in a megacity
in an
efficient way, and we want to be able to enable our customers to have
good
options when it's too difficult - and when it may not be the best
thing for
the environment for everybody to try to fit a vehicle on the road all
the
time where the infrastructure just doesn't support it
Larry - Cleveland
-------------- next part --------------
Great info, thanks Larry. These trends appear very positive to me.
Just Uber'd around Hollywood last weekend. Using phones, my friends
set us all up with these local kids (anybody under 30 is a "kid" to me
now) who showed up instantly in Priuses to take us anywhere for next to
nothing.
It was so nice to not have to worry about driving or parking when
kicking around the city.
Being out on the road with robots seems like it would make the roads
safer and more efficient. Slow cars in the faster lanes would be
fewer. Since I'm also a motorcycle rider, I feel that sensor
technology looking out for me will doubtless be superior than your
everyday random human, who may or may not decide to check their blind
spot.
People who would rather not drive are most likely crappy drivers
anyway. I'm all for robots putting them in the passenger seats.
Sent using Hushmail
On April 1, 2015 at 9:01 AM, "Larry - Ohio Time"
<Larry at ohiotimecorp.com> wrote:
Ken Washington, Ford's new VP of research and advanced engineering
Global trends appear to be moving towards a future where in many
markets,
car ownership may look like an expensive, impractical and
inconvenient way
to get around. So what's the next model of personal transport, and
where do
the big automakers fit in? Ford's new global VP of Research and
Advanced
Engineering, Ken Washington, sat down in Melbourne for a "crystal
ball"
discussion about autonomous cars, on-demand vehicles, car sharing,
smart
parking, multi-mode transport, and how a car company might learn to
cater to
a new generation of customers that are far more interested in
upgrading
their phones than getting their driver's licenses.
Over the last 100 years, auto manufacturers have created a fairly
stable
relationship with their customers. People buy cars more or less as
soon as
they can afford them, and enjoy a freedom of mobility that was
unavailable
to them beforehand. Cars transform our lives and they're a symbol of
independence. So many sexual awakenings have happened in, or because
of,
cars that many owners have developed intense emotional connections
with
them.
But now, the wind is blowing in a different direction. Where kids of
Generation X dreamed of the day they'd get their first car,
Millennials are
attaching the same feelings to their smartphones. They're connected
with
their friends and love interests 24/7 - the car is no longer the
gateway to
social interaction.
"When my son turned 16, he didn't care about getting his driver's
license,"
says Washington. "What he cared about was upgrading his cellphone.
That was
just unfathomable to me, but to him it was very natural and I think
he
wasn't alone. The new generation is really thinking about how to use
transportation in an on-demand way, they are less tied emotionally
to the
physical vehicle, and I think it's going to become very important
for us to
be responsive to the future generations who are thinking about
mobility
through that different lens."
That's just one of the challenging trends Ford and other auto
manufacturers
are facing, and Washington identifies three other "megatrends" that
are
influencing thinking at Ford.
"First, there's urbanization. Today there's almost 30 cities with
more than
10 million people. In the next 10 to 15 years there's some studies
that tell
us that's going to grow to more than 40. So this is a trend that's
going to
be significant and it means that the infrastructure for transport is
going
to be more and more crowded, it's going to be more and more
difficult to get
around. This notion of global gridlock, which was theorized in the
past, is
going to become more of a reality.
"The second is more people are entering what we would define as the
middle
class, where you have enough disposable income to buy a car. From 2
billion
today, over the next 10 to 15 years we see than number doubling to 4
billion
people. You put that together with the first trend.
"Third trend that we're seeing is increasing concerns about the
environment,
with air quality being near the top of that list. So it's going to
become
increasingly important for us to deal with the realities of, not
only
regulation driven requirements on the automotive sector, but the
right thing
to do for the world, to make air quality good for our future
generations."
So - choked city roads, increasing pressures to go easier on the
environment, and a new generation coming through that is far less
likely to
aspire to car ownership in the same way their parents did - what's
the path
forward for automakers?
Ford doesn't know what the future looks like, but it has some
theories and
it's starting to test them in the real world. So here's a few things
Washington was prepared to speak about.
On self driving cars
While he was unwilling to put a time-frame on when Ford expects to
go fully
driverless, Washington said, "autonomous vehicles are going to
become a
reality in the future, we're pretty convinced of that. That puts
more and
more requirement on the technology for autonomy to be very good and
robust.
That's why we're taking our time to get that right. So imagine if
you get
that right and you can take the driver out of the loop. Well that
might
totally redefine what the interior of the vehicle might look like.
Say you
have a city taxi service, if it's semi- or fully autonomous, you
might
design that taxi vehicle to be very different looking to the cars
that we
drive today. A lot of that will depend on the outcome of some of
these
experiments that we're doing now."
On the legalities of driverless cars he said, "there are enough
technical
challenges that that's where we're putting our energy right now. The
automotive industry has to come together as a community to work with
the
policymakers and to address some of the legal issues. So
technically, we
believe it's absolutely going to be possible for the ability to do
full
autonomy in certain geofenced areas where the climate is good,
you're not
obfuscated by snow and rain... that's going to be hard enough. The
good news
is, we've got many of the building blocks available today. The new
Mondeo
has many very capable semi-autonomous features on it. Lane keeping,
blind
spot monitoring, parking assist, these are the building blocks for
the
future fully autonomous vehicle."
On '"car on demand" subscription services
"That's exactly one of our experiments. And it's one that we're
actually
having some good success with. We launched that experiment in the
city of
London. With the density of the population there, it's very
challenging to
own, park, drive and navigate. So we've launched one of our
experiments
there we're calling Gold Drive. It's a vehicle on demand, we have
both a
Focus BEV and a Focus Gas, a fleet of vehicles, and you can
subscribe to the
vehicles using your smartphone. You access the vehicle, unlock it,
get in
the car, start it, drive it for however many hours you wanna use it
for,
drop it off... One of the early learnings we're getting from that
experiment
is that people love the idea of using a car and then being able to
deliver
it in a place where they have a guaranteed parking spot. Those are
the kinds
of learnings that are telling us that if we do something like a car
on
demand or a car sharing service, make sure you have a place to park
it - and
also make it easy for people to access it!
"Another experiment we're doing is remote positioning of vehicles.
Imagine a
future where you've got cars on demand that you order, that you
wanna have
available the next morning. Well, one of the challenges is having
the
vehicle in the right place at the right time. Imagine a future where
you
could actually re-locate that vehicle autonomously but remotely, by
remote
control. So we're doing an experiment [using go-karts] to enable the
remote
repositioning of vehicles using on-board cameras and sensors so you
can
relocate a vehicle from one place to another, safely, but with no
on-vehicle
human involvement. We're working with Georgia Tech."
On smart parking
Many of Ford's new cars already have the ability to identify an open
parking
spot as they drive past it. The next step, according to Washington,
might be
to communicate with other cars on the road when a spot is available.
"It's not science fiction, because the sensors on the vehicle are
actually
capable enough to tell when you've driven by a parking spot. The
vision
recognition capabilities of these on-vehicle sensors are actually
good
enough to tell you if that's a valid parking spot or not. If you
overlay
that with very detailed maps of certain cities, you could actually
imagine
how you could inform an information system that this is not only a
free
parking spot, but a valid one. We're doing an experiment, I think
it's in
Atlanta in the US, where we're using the onboard sensors of the
vehicles to
do exactly that. It's a prototype and it's an experiment. We'll run
that
experiment for this year, and based on what we learn we'll determine
whether
it's something we wanna roll out as a service.
"We've been thinking about this a lot - the potential for bringing
value to
our customers is enormous if we can do analytics around the data
that's
available that comes from the vehicle, and process that in smart
ways that
give value back to the customer. If a customer wants to have access
to that
parking information, they might need to give us access to the
sensors on
their vehicle to be a participant. That's one of the premises we're
testing,
there are many other models we might use."
On tech giants Apple and Google getting into the automotive space
"It's actually pretty exciting to us that there's so much interest
from the
tech sector in automobiles and the automotive sector. We think it's
a case
of rising all boats, so we're pretty excited about that. It's
validated the
need for us to be in Silicon Valley, and it's a pretty special
place. You've
got a very high density of tech companies and venture capital
investment
firms and universities and national laboratories doing very cutting
edge
research and technology development. By being a part of that
community you
have access to a very vibrant community of innovative thinkers and
technology innovators.
"It's very validating to us that technology behemoths like Apple and
Google
<[1]http://www.gizmag.com/google-self-driving-car-prototype/35339/>;
are paying
attention to the automotive industry. With that said, it's also a
bit of a
wake-up call. We don't have forever to figure out how to take our
game to
the next level in terms of driving innovation in our business,
getting value
out of doing connected car and doing something real with autonomous
vehicle
technology.
"The good news for us is that we've been in Silicon Valley for a
number of
years. We started our operation there three years ago. This year we
opened a
much larger facility and announced our commitment to populate that
facility
with more than 120 people by the end of this year. We're very
excited about
that. We've got a very creative team there and they're part of a
global PD
(product development) team.
"It's already giving some benefits to us by enabling to accelerate
some of
our partnerships with the universities there, and with tech
companies that
we're doing research with. One of our projects is with Nest
<[2]http://www.gizmag.com/nest-developer-program-works-with-nest-hom
e-automatio
n/32676/> , where we've developed a capability for the vehicle to
communicate to the Nest API so that when you approach your home,
it'll send
a signal to your home to turn the temperature up, or to cool it down
- sort
of a smart car/smart home concept. That wouldn't be possible if we
hadn't
been there in Silicon Valley and forged that relationship with Nest.
"I'd say we're paying attention to the tech companies' interest in
the
automotive sector, but I think threatened is too strong a word."
On Ford's data and analytics capabilities
We put it to Washington that Ford's existing fleet of vehicles could
make
for a big advantage over Google's small fleet of autonomous test
vehicles
and that every sensor on every Ford on the road could be relaying
back a
massive amount of data to help jump-start Ford's own autonomous car
plans.
"A big part of the big data experiment is to assess the validity of
doing
something like that. So far the signals are coming back that it's
possible,
it's very feasible. We are getting more serious about data and
analytics.
We're just now in the process of assembling our global data and
analytics
team under the leadership of a new senior leader that we hired
earlier this
year. We hired our first chief data and analytics officer, and he's
assembling this team and their primary responsibility is going to be
to
develop the architecture for us to harvest and get value out of this
massive
sensor set of vehicles that are collecting data - and to do it in
the right
way, with the right privacy principles and the right cybersecurity
protocols
and the right framework for keeping the data organized and sorted so
you can
do analytics on it that can then inform how you can actually make
the
service and the experience better. That's certainly squarely in our
plans."
On whether the days of the car enthusiast are coming to an end
"I think you're going to have both models. There are going to be
people who
continue to have a great relationship with their vehicle. I'll never
stop
having that kind of feeling toward my vehicle. I love to drive and I
think
I'm not alone. I think that holds for future generations as well.
But in
some circumstances it may be too difficult to be mobile in a
megacity in an
efficient way, and we want to be able to enable our customers to
have good
options when it's too difficult - and when it may not be the best
thing for
the environment for everybody to try to fit a vehicle on the road
all the
time where the infrastructure just doesn't support it
Larry - Cleveland
References
1. http://www.gizmag.com/google-self-driving-car-prototype/35339/>
2. http://www.gizmag.com/nest-developer-program-works-with-nest-home-automatio
More information about the DeTomaso
mailing list