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MoDe:Flex eBike

The annual "Further with Ford" event, held last week in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, has signalled a change for the venerable manufacturer. While this is the fifth time the gathering has taken place, it's the first to be held outside of company headquarters in Dearborn, Mich.

The reason for the switch: a chance to show off the company's new research centre in Palo Alto, Calif., which opened last January. In his opening address, president and CEO Mark Fields announced that Ford was transforming into "a product company and a mobility company." He further revealed that the Ford Smart Mobility plan had shifted from the research to the implementation stage.

The plan, initiated six months ago, is designed to "deliver the next level in connectivity, mobility, autonomous vehicles, the customer experience and big data." Coming out of the research phase, Ford has decided to hone in on two key areas for further experimentation: multi-modal urban mobility solutions and car-sharing and flexible ownership schemes.

CEO Mark Fields announced the Ford is transforming into 'a product company and a mobility company.' Sam VarnHagen

At its research centre, Ford unveiled two e-bike concepts, the MoDe:Me (for individual use) and MoDe:Pro (for boutique service companies), both of which can be disassembled to fit into every Ford vehicle in the fleet. The e-bikes can be linked through an app to any smartphone and feature haptic handlebar grips that signal when to turn right or left. The grip ends also feature turn signals that make it easier for car drivers to predict where the e-bike rider is going.

The Ford car-sharing pilot, dubbed Peer-2-Peer Car Sharing, will see Ford Credit customers in London and six U.S. cities offer their vehicles for others to use on a short-term basis. There is also a public car-sharing pilot in London, called GoDrive, which sees a fleet of 50 vehicles in 20 locations that people can hire for one-way trips within the city.

In Palo Alto, a Ford engineer drove a golf cart through a parking lot using a live video feed and a remote control steering wheel. The challenge of public car-sharing programs, said Mike Tinskey, global director of vehicle electrification and infrastructure at Ford, is the manpower required to return the cars back to home base.

This capability, called remote repositioning, is still in the beta stage. But it incorporates cameras and driver-assist systems currently available on Ford vehicles – and puts the company "on the journey towards full autonomy." In San Francisco, another engineer demonstrated its remote parking technology; standing outside a Ford Focus, he pressed a button on the key fob and the car manoeuvred itself into position.

In support of the idea of self-driving vehicles, Crystal Worthem, marketing manager for Ford, cited a study of 1,000 millennials (people aged 23-34) and Generation Z (16-22 year-olds) living in the United States. Respondents claimed to be more afraid of other motorists driving dangerously (88 per cent) than they were of public speaking (75 per cent), death (74 per cent), snakes and spiders (69 per cent) and ghosts (44 per cent).

These two cohorts are giving car manufacturers fits because of their apparent lack of interest in anything automotive. Concerns about the high cost of car ownership, mass urbanization, congestion, pollution and traffic safety have millennials and members of Generation Z thinking about mobility in different ways.

Still, the number of vehicles on the road today, estimated to be one billion, is expected to double by 2050. Ford executives hope that transforming into a mobility company will give them the street cred needed to capture a bigger slice of that particular pie. "We want to change how the world moves – again," was the message, referring to the Ford Model T, the car that introduced the middle class to the freedom of the open road.

Ford is trying to position itself not as a car industry stalwart, but as a company that plans to "think, act and disrupt like a start-up company." The R&D team in Palo Alto is working on close to 30 new technologies with start-ups in the area; Fields talked about "being a part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem." Whether the company that produced the Model T will be considered cool and buzz-worthy remains to be seen.

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