Mobility Solutions

For decades, we focused on how to sell more cars and trucks. Today, we are considering the consequences if all we do is sell more cars and trucks.

It’s simple math: as the Earth’s population grows, so does its need for mobility, which is a critical enabler of economic growth and human potential. Consider the following:

  • There are now more than 6.9 billion people in the world. By 2050, there will be 9 billion, 75 percent of whom will live in urban areas.
  • By 2015, it is projected that at least 35 mega-cities will have a population of more than 10 million.
  • The number of automobiles globally is expected to grow from about 800 million today to between 2 and 4 billion by 2050.
  • During 2010 alone, the car market in China expanded by 30 percent, while the market in India grew by more than 35 percent.

We are poised to capture our share of these growing markets. But we also recognize that there are limits to growth, because putting 9 billion people onto the world’s already congested roads is neither practical nor desirable. With growth comes severe mobility challenges, ranging from CO2 and other emissions to congestion. At Ford, we’re addressing these challenges by:

  • Reducing the environmental impacts of the vehicles we offer by improving their fuel efficiency, making them from more sustainable materials and taking many other measures detailed in this report
  • Developing advanced technologies such as electrified and biofueled vehicles
  • Exploring how we can help to reduce the global crisis of gridlock by enabling vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications that will allow cars to re-route to avoid traffic jams, based on information sent by other vehicles

But we also recognize that to develop innovative mobility solutions, we need to look beyond the vehicle itself to new models of mobility, which take a more integrated approach toward developing transportation solutions. Our vehicles must fit into a broader ecosystem that ties together multiple modes of transportation, enabled by innovative information technologies.