Spannender Artikel hier wie Ford die Digitalisierung nutzt und sich selbst zum Betriebssystem macht.
Now the company that helped put a car (or two) in every garage wants to be something else altogether: an operating system.
„With the power of AI and the rise of autonomous and connected vehicles, for the first time in a century, we have mobility technology that won’t just incrementally improve the old system but can completely disrupt it,“ CEO Jim Hackett said in a keynote address at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, trumpeting the pivot. „A total redesign of the surface transportation system with humans and community at the center.“
As Ford executives move to execute the plan, they unveiled yesterday a reorganization of the automaker’s young mobility business, with two acquisitions to help it along. It’s all in service of a new, very 21st century goal. Ford will put less effort into convincing people to plunk down their credit cards for personal cars (though that’s still important) and more into moving them from A to B, with a little Ford badge tacked onto whatever gets them there.
Acquisition A is Autonomic, a Palo Alto–based company with a cloud-based platform called … wait for it … the Transportation Mobility Cloud. Autonomic seeks to build a kind of iOS for cities, managing data and transactions between city-dwellers and agencies and companies that provide payment processing, route mapping, mass transit, and city infrastructure services. That sounds vague, because it is.
“By making all these different services available we have no idea what’s going to come so we’re super excited,” Autonomic CEO Sunny Madra told Fortune Thursday. Autonomic seeks to be the go-to platform for other car manufacturers, too, and Klevorn indicated Ford hopes to monetize its cloud service quickly. Somehow.
Acquisition B is TransLoc, a 14-year-old Durham, North Carolina–based company that makes software to help cities, corporate campuses, and universities manage their transportation systems, from traditional fixed-route service to on-demand ridehailing apps like Uber and Lyft.
