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Enabling Smart Cities
The future of city transport is intelligent movement. To make room for an ever-expanding population, we are searching today for the solutions and platforms that will make tomorrow viable.
We are aggressively expanding core cellular-based connectivity across the Ford lineup with 100 percent of new vehicles in the U.S. and China connected by 2019 and over 90 percent of new global vehicles connected by 2020.
Smart Solutions for Cities
In 2017, we opened our Mobility Innovation Office in London. The Here East office will target the near-term development of mobility technologies with a focus on the specific requirements of European cities. We will continue to work on projects with the city to help improve air quality, ease congestion and broaden mobility for Londoners.
The Here East campus is already home to Loughborough University, one of our longstanding research partners, and the Advanced Propulsion Centre, which has supported our powertrain research, including recent developments for this year’s plug-in hybrid Transit.
Helping Drivers to Outsmart Traffic
In May 2018, we announced that the popular navigation and traffic app Waze will be available to Ford owners globally. With more than 100 million active users, Waze is the world’s largest community-based navigation app. The collaboration means that Apple iPhone owners will be able to project Waze to the big screen in their car. Ford already offers mobile navigation app Sygic on the AppLink platform, and the SYNC 3 Navigation System with FordPass Live Traffic.
“Waze works as a personal heads-up from 100 million of your friends on the road – and now that will include the many Ford drivers who will be able to safely access our app while on the move through the car display.”
Connected Travel
Today, we spend an average of 38 hours a year in traffic; 30 years ago, it was 16. Growing urbanization brings increasing congestion – without solutions.
Ford’s Transportation Mobility Cloud is an open software platform that, among other things, could one day allow vehicles, streets and cities to talk to each other and plan the most efficient routes for people. This cloud technology could direct people to use a combination of an autonomously driven Ford-built taxi and bicycles to get to their destination. In the future, Ford customers may not even be car drivers at all.
“We believe transportation done right – as part of a systems approach – can bring life back to our cities.”
