Ford is no stranger to Silicon Valley, where it has an office since 2012, but with the opening of a new R&D center dedicated to autonomous vehicles, mobility and connectivity, the car maker is placing it near (<3 miles) the Stanford University with which it will collaborate closely. The new Ford research center will host 125 engineers and is located next to the Nest building, a high-profile consumer device company now owned by Google. The Tesla office is also not very far away…
The Silicon Valley choice reflects not only the growing importance of tech integration in cars, but more precisely the front role that software will play in everything, especially when it comes to computer vision, voice control or Ford’s own self-driving, or simply self-parking which people can already enjoy. This is not just a hardware game, on the contrary.
Silicon Valley has many of the world’s top engineers in fields such as “deep learning”, which are key to autonomous driving since computer vision is increasingly becoming a viable option to replace a host of expensive sensors such as lasers, with cheaper alternatives such as cameras.
Dragos Maciuca, a former Apple executive, will be in charge of the research for Ford. He was working on “Mobile Technologies” at Apple.
According to Ford’s CEO Mark Fields, Ford intends to make this kind of technologies available to “everyone”. This remarks was possibly aimed at Tesla, which is well appreciated by its wealthy customers for the high-tech aspects of its cards, including regular firmware updates.
Ford has been among the first car makers to add high-tech features in its cars with products like voice-control Sync, Life360 which prevents texting distractions,
And this is only the beginning. Ford is aggressively hiring more engineers, and according to its own website, there are more than a dozen engineering positions to fill just in Palo Alto.
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