 From Dearborn Michigan, it's theCUBE on the ground at Ford Headquarters. Now, here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hey, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are live in Dearborn Michigan at the Further with Ford event. It's a two-day press event for Ford to bring out a bunch of people from all over the world. I met somebody from Italy in the elevator last night to look at what they're doing with autonomous vehicles and really mobility, a much broader topic than just autonomous vehicles. So we're excited to be here. We took a little ride in the autonomous vehicle before. Check it out, hashtag Ford Trends to keep an eye on what's going on. And we're excited to be joined by our next guest, Jim Bukowski, the director of electrical and electronic systems advanced engineering Ford. Jim, welcome. Thank you, welcome to you. Absolutely, so little background on you. We talked a little bit before we got started. You've been with Ford a long time. Yes. And really talk about the transformation that's happening here and really kind of the excitement, the rejuvenation around not only the autonomous vehicle, which is pretty cool, but really this broader kind of mobility strategy that Ford is executing. Absolutely. In fact, I've been with Ford for 37 years. 37 years ago, there wasn't a whole lot of electronics on the vehicle and it's grown ever since from driven by emissions and then all the opportunities and more lately connectivity and now autonomous. And as we go forward and look into the future and look at how mobility is gonna affect people in the future and what they're gonna need in the future. It's changing the company as well too. So not only a car company, but a mobility company. Yeah, interesting announcements. A couple of weeks ago, we were at the Palo Alto facility and Mark announced the, I called it the moonshot. He didn't call it the moonshot, but basically having a autonomous car level four ready in five years for ride sharing services. And then last week, you guys followed it up with an announcement about bikes in the city and sharing vans. So really taking a broad kind of when the time you leave your door to the time you get to where you're trying to go kind of this multimodal that can include a car too. Very different strategy than people might think of them for. Absolutely, that's really all about what's changing and focusing on mobility as a company and the products and services that are required to a service a customer's mobility needs. And what you see here today in terms of our autonomous vehicle is showing how we're going to first start off launching a service within our engineering complex here for employees in 2018 that'll be able on demand service take employees from one location to another. So there's a way to get started with an autonomous level four vehicle, which will then expand into other services and in high volume projected 2021. So the level four is pretty interesting. Obviously a lot of pub about the guy that crashed his Tesla playing video games when he should have been driving. And I was struck by Gus in our ride in the autonomous vehicle today. He was basically on the ready. And I've always kind of wondered if it's not a level four which is fully autonomous, what is a driver supposed to do? Cause you can't check out. You have to kind of be monitoring things. Is it more tiring than driving? So you guys have decided to kind of skip the interim step and go right to level four. Yeah, the level three is still pretty complicated. And we're still really trying to understand it because it has to do with re-engaging the driver when you need them. And you can't predict when you're going to need them. It could be very spontaneous. So it's a real challenging situation to have them ready to be engaged and if you need to bring them back in. So rather than focus strictly on level three at this point, we're really focusing on level four which says in a geofenced in a specific area under certain kinds of conditions, the driver isn't needed at all. The vehicle can, if it need be, take the passengers to a safe location and so on. Although it's still a very challenging opportunity or challenging task, you don't have to worry about re-engagement of the driver which you have to do on a level three. Level two, really, the driver shouldn't be disengaged at all. It should always be engaged. And so level three is where the driver can disengage but at a moment's notice you have to re-engage him and that's where the challenge is. Yeah, which is because computers can react faster than people and now you're adding this extra time that they have to re-engage versus if they decide their foot may hit. Well, and we're still trying to understand human beings and how do we sense their ability to re-engage? How fast they can re-engage from various states, from sleeping, from watching a movie, from whatever they might be doing. And it might be different for different individuals depending upon their physical performance at that time whether they're tired or whether they're anxious or what. So let's shift gears, you're an engineer, you get like solving problems. So over a couple of the technical hurdles that you guys had to overcome in this development that we're kind of fun to solve that maybe we're unanticipated because I know engineers like solving harder problems. It's really an interesting time for computers and computer science and what we refer to as machine learning. Teaching machines to learn so that you don't have to program every single detail and every single situation. You can submit information to these algorithms, machine learning algorithms and the machine itself can extract the important information so that when it sees a new environment it can then predict and make decisions on what it should do. So the computational powers there, the algorithms have matured and developed neural networks, deep learning and so on. Those are some of the key pieces. Now sensors are really important as well too and radar has advanced quite a bit and many cars today, even in level two have radar on them as well as ultrasonics and some video cameras but now LiDAR is really important to help locate the vehicle in its environment. So having high resolution maps, mapping out an area that the vehicle will drive in and then using the LiDAR to then match the exact location the vehicle is in is key. So it's been really an exciting time and continues to be an exciting time for engineers. Right, well one of the challenges that we talk about a lot is the cloud, right? Cloud's changing everything but soft underbelly of the cloud is when you can't get connectivity and clearly there's a lot of advancements as we move from 4G to 5G. You guys have opted really to make this thing as an autonomous unit within itself in the way that it knows where it is, the way it communicates with the road. So you're not really relying on a 5G network to make sure that it's on the right Google map that it knows where it's going. Absolutely, you know, we have to make sure that in the condition where either connectivity is not ubiquitous or somehow drops out for a second or there's some latency, the vehicle can act on its own. Just like you would if you were disconnected from the external environment, right? You have to make decisions in real time on your own with the information that you have available to you. So first and foremost is to make sure that the vehicle can deal with all its situations on its own. And then we augment it with the information we receive from outside the vehicle. So if there's new construction ahead, if there's new information that might affect the decisions the vehicle can make, then we add that to it. But first and foremost, it has to act on its own. Right, okay, so then looking forward, you got five years before Mark's gonna come out and say, hey guys, where's the car? What are some of the next challenges that you're working on as you kind of look down the road that you wanna either do better at or still trying to figure out the nuance? Well, the whole autonomous vehicle vision and where we wanna go has many aspects to it, not just the technical piece, the social piece, the regulatory piece, governmental piece are all very important as well too that have to be resolved. So it's not just the technical problem, it's how we're gonna deal with those as well too. And those are all things that we have to work in partnership with government and municipalities and other technical organizations all to help solve all of those things to make autonomous work. But really the vision is back to mobility is to be able to use autonomous vehicle and this kind of technology to improve people's experiences with mobility. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. 100 year olds companies, you guys, GE really reinventing themselves and it's gotta be exciting times get you up every morning even though you've been coming here for decades. That's right, it is, it is, it's very exciting. All right, Jim, well thanks for taking a few minutes from your busy day. Appreciate it. Thanks. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We're in Dearborn, Michigan at the Further With Ford event. Thanks for watching.