The Socially Connected Vehicle

Ford and Facebook engineers combined forces to bring the world's most popular social network into the car through an overnight "hackathon".

At Ford, we've been facilitating social connections for more than a century. Just as Facebook wasn't the first social network, Ford didn't produce the first car. But, what Henry Ford and his team did was take a smarter approach by creating reliable and affordable transportation that put millions of people on the road around the world, thereby connecting more people with each other.

The trend is clear that people are connecting online more than ever. Researchers and developers at Ford understand that customers are increasingly bringing that online social experience into their car via the smartphone.

In order to explore what these converging trends mean to the customer, Ford and Facebook engineers got together and held a 24-hour "Hackathon" at Facebook's Palo Alto campus looking at ways to socialize the car. The teams of hackers worked through the night to prototype some ideas that were demonstrated to the entire group at the end of the event. The best of those ideas are now being further developed in Ford's Dearborn, Michigan labs.

>>Learn more about the hackathon on Ford Social.