 Hi, Jeff Rick here. We're on the ground in the heart of Silicon Valley at a brand new Ford facility. It's the Ford Innovation and Research Facility, right? Just opened up. They had a grand opening event today. We're happy to be out here. And I'm joined here by Raj Nair, the CTO, who's one of the featured speakers. So welcome. Yeah. Thanks for joining us today. It's a great day for us. Our pleasure. So it's it's pretty interesting for us looking it up before we came on one of the oldest U.S. car brands. If not the oldest, we'll have to check the research assistance to look that up. But certainly one of the oldest in here you are, ironically, not too far away from Tesla, one of the newest American car companies all about innovation. So talk about what it means for a company to lead Detroit, not lead Detroit, but come out here to the valley, put roots down right in the heart of Silicon Valley. What that really means for the company? Well, sure. I mean, we were founded in 1903 in Dearborn, Michigan, and I just outside of Detroit. So that is our home town. Right. But we've actually been out here in Silicon Valley for a while. We've been out here since 2012 with a smaller presence. But one of the things we've learned as we spent time out here is a tremendous opportunity of Detroit and Silicon Valley to work together. So that's what our announcement is about today, that we're really expanding our presence, this new facility you see here with some state of the art technology, but also increasing our staffing to a team of 125 strong to leverage the universities, leverage the tech companies, whether they be big ones or the small ones, and really put the connections together that are really required for the automotive industry to go forward. Yeah. And it's great, you know, you separate technology and innovation, right? There are two really separate things. Obviously, Henry Ford's super innovative with with assembly lines and really bringing new things to work, getting the car out to the average guy. But then it's technology as well. So talk about about, you know, the continual innovation. And now it's differently. You're in Silicon Valley, you know, it's a lot of partnerships. You're working with the universities. We've got the Google self driving car that you'll see rolling around here in the neighborhood. Talk about how the the environment has changed in terms of partnering and cooperating with other technology companies. Yeah, I mean, the car is most people don't realize one of those technically advanced devices that they own. Right. And so a lot of technology already in the vehicle. But there's areas that we're going to have this center work on that Silicon Valley is uniquely talented and qualified to help us with. So you mentioned autonomous vehicles, certainly an area where a leader in semi autonomous functions and vehicles right now, you know, focus on the dealer can parallel park for you already. Seeing some of the people out here and follow out so they could, they could use that function. But moving to full autonomy and the technology is required for that a lot of expertise out here. Connectivity. So we're a leader in connectivity right now, 10 million vehicles equipped with our sync connectivity solution. So you can use your smartphone in your vehicle. But that's going to move beyond the vehicle becoming a device on the internet of things. And the connectivity and technology required for that a lot of great talent out here for that. A lot of mobility solutions. So one of the things about Palo Alto, very congested for traffic, right. So solutions for that, whether they be internet based or hardware based, a lot of activity going on. And even, you know, broader solutions of what is personal mobility mean, maybe users, ride models, different ownership models, ride sharing, all of that happening out here. Data analytics. So one of the things that people don't realize is how much data their vehicle generates, right? Our fusion energy hybrid generates about 25 gigabytes of data that can be stored an hour. 25 gigs an hour an hour. So gives kind of a breakdown of what are some of those, you know, big buckets of data that it's tracking. Sure, it's tracking its vehicle speed. It's actually tracking vehicle speed from all four of its wheels. It's tracking throttle position, brake position. It's tracking, you know, what controls are you using right now? And so all that data is stored on board all that data is really owned by the customer. So we want to make sure that customers opt in if they want us to use that data that the vehicles connected to the internet, that data can now be streamed up. We can collect all of that data on an individual vehicle. If we see some diagnostic codes that are indicating service is going to be required, we can send a message that customer. If we see broad trends among a fleet of vehicles, we can make some quality corrections. Perhaps even more importantly, we can understand our customers using their vehicles, what features are important. And then tailor new vehicles, design new vehicles to meet those needs. It's interesting, we interviewed a guy from continental AG who really said most people don't understand that a car is basically a rolling computer, you know, there's so much computational horsepower that's in a car that's being used all the time and other things like how it blends the the fuel in the air and the fuel injection system and you know, just a ton of systems. Yeah. And it's also interesting, we talked a little bit about for came on air that you know, when you guys ship a car or somebody taken up from the dealership, you know, it's kind of gone, you make all these assumptions, you build these things, you build all these characteristics and the way it's going to operate. And then it's gone. So it would I imagine the opportunity to have a closed loop feedback system, absolutely, absolutely understand how do people drive their cars, not only the individual, but as you said, the aggregate, then you know, you map that against location types of cars, types of driver age of driver, it's got to be just a humongous new opportunity. Yeah, it's a great opportunity for us. You're right. Right now we send out surveys, do research clinics, get parts back from warranty to get all that real time and have it accessible by every one of our engineers on whatever part they're they're designing for the next vehicle. It's a tremendous opportunity not just for product development, but for the total company. Great. So we'll let you give you a little plug. What do you hire? And I'm sure everybody from Detroit wants to come out, especially this time of year. I know you're you're probably going to bring a few people out. Yeah, but also you're looking for people what types of things are they going to be working on if they get a job here at the Ford Innovation Center? We're looking for a broad basis skill set. So software engineers, hardware engineers, what we would call human machine interface experts that's first in experience design, but also non engineering, you know, business development analysts, even marketing aspects that are unique here in Silicon Valley. So it's a broad set within the 125 strong team that we're gonna have. And we'll have some people coming from our headquarters in Dearborn, as well as our other centers in Germany elsewhere in the world to provide the automotive background and tie in back into the headquarters. But such a strong talent pool in Silicon Valley, we want to take advantage of. Awesome. Well, Raj, thanks for taking a few minutes. Really busy, Raj and the CTO were at the Ford Innovation and Research Center just opened in Palo Alto in the heart of Silicon Valley. I'm Jeff Rick, you're watching theCUBE.