 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the North American International Auto Show. 10,000 press people here today, taking it all in, a ton of cars, beautiful cars, a lot of alternative types of mobility. And that's really the interesting story here is that it's not just about cars anymore, it's about mobility, it's about last mile, it's about how do we deal with congested cities and congested urban areas. And it's interesting to me that all the auto companies in Ford in particular are really taking an aggressive move to fix that problem, not just come out with new shiny cars, of which there's plenty of those too. So we're excited to have Jessica Robinson, she's the director of City Solutions for Ford. Welcome, Jessica. That's right, thank you for having me. So interesting keynote this morning by Mark Fields, talked about some ungodly percentage of the total population will be compacted into like 30 or 35 cities worldwide. That's a huge change. Oh, absolutely, I mean, cities are where most of the world's population are going to live in the future. And what's interesting to me, and we saw Mark's announcement with the bike service in San Francisco and the chariot service in San Francisco, is that the real aggressive move into mobility, not just the cars in this whole kind of last mile issue as well as, of course, autonomous vehicles, which is pretty exciting. Oh, no, absolutely, you're totally right. And for us, what's really exciting is these two services together in San Francisco enable a couple things. One is us to work more closely with the city and start to understand their pain points more acutely. But also it enables Ford to begin to stand up our own services as part of Ford's smart mobility. Right, just an announcement today, I think, that Uber said they're going to let city planners have some of their data coming out of their cars as to what the traffic patterns are, what the flow is. Obviously it's in all of our phones, but really this kind of cloud and big data has really opened up an opportunity to look at the streets a completely different way. Absolutely a completely different way. And what we're hearing when we talk to mayors even again in the conversations that we had today is they're really faced with this paradox of new services, new demands from citizens in the city about how to get around. And as people move to those cities, we need to increase just the total capacity there. But at the same time, our roads aren't growing. We know that if you expand roads, it doesn't necessarily improve flow. And so Ford thinks we can actually work directly with cities to address this paradox. Explain a little bit about how it works inside of Ford because clearly there's a bunch of car guys in there, car guys and gals. To really look at the transportation issue through a very different lens than just longer wheelbase, more horsepower, more miles per gallon, et cetera. In terms of the culture inside of Ford, how is that playing out? Who's kind of driving that? And how does it kind of permeate the whole organization? Yeah, that's a great question. So the good news is, even though we might not have always talked about it, Ford actually has a history of this thinking. And when you hear Bill Ford talk, he'll say that it goes all the way back to his, the founding roots of the company itself. But we're moving from the stage of experiments and mobility all over the world to now saying, how do we actually put this in a scalable way to roll up? So again, the roots have been there for a really long time. But again, by setting up a separate business unit, it really enables us to focus on that. And that's the city solutions group of which I'm a part. We again, were set up specifically to have those conversations at the city level. So what are some of the things that you're doing that have nothing to do with rubber wheels and transmissions in terms of pushing these initiatives and helping cities do better with transportation? Sure, yeah. So you mentioned a couple in San Francisco. On September, we announced the acquisition of Chariot, which is a crowdsourced shuttle service to help people get to work more efficiently. Again, with the bike share as well. And I think what's important about that is there was a study that came out recently that one of the shuttle vehicles running around the city actually can take up to 25 cars off the road during a commute. So it is rubber, it is metal, but it actually is a completely different way about thinking how that vehicle plays out in the real world. Right. And then it's just interesting here at the show, there's all these other little last bio solutions. All the, we're downstairs, there's all kind of scooters and different things. Again, to work in this kind of multimodal fashion where depending on what you're doing, time of days at work is a pleasure, is a grocery shopping, you'll pick from a whole variety and maybe a number of options to get a particular trip done. Oh, absolutely. And I think flexibility is something that we've heard time and again. And again, that goes back to why we set up this group is we could develop and launch a new vehicle or a new service and attempt to do it on our own in a silo, but we really believe strongly that it needs to integrate with the broader system, whether it's walking or a bicycle and a bike share or public transit, it can't exist in its own. So we really do see the connection as critical. The other just vibe I get here at the show and it's our first time to the show is from the outside looking in, you think autonomous vehicles and a lot of these trends are really a giant threat. Like, oh my gosh, all the car companies should really be scared. This is bananas, you know, kids aren't buying cars anymore. They don't buy music. They don't buy anything, right? If it's not on their phone, it doesn't exist. That's right, that's right. But in fact, I get the vibe that it's really been embraced as an opportunity to transform the company with different types of propulsion, different types of engines, different types of business models, different types of ownership models. So it feels like it's been an opportunity to kind of reinvigorate as opposed to really be kind of this nasty dark cloud. Yeah, no, I think that's a great point. And again, you hear Mark Fields talk a lot about being beyond auto and including mobility. And we know that that's a huge potential growth area for us at the business level. There's certainly other drivers beyond it. The work that we do reduces congestion and improves air quality. But at the end of the day for the business, there's a $5.6 trillion transportation services industry that we barely participate in today. And so when you think about the long-term future of Ford Motor Company more broadly, it's a place we absolutely have to be. Right. All right, Jessica, you'll be the last word. What's getting you up in the morning is a lot going on, but is there two or three kind of pet projects that really get you excited to come to work every day? Yeah, so what gets me up in the morning is a different kind of mobility, which is airplanes, because we've been very busy talking to a lot of mayors and chief innovation officers, CTOs at cities. And so our challenge really now is to take it forward and help grow this business. All right, well, Jessica, thanks for taking a few minutes. I know you're super busy. Thanks. Gee, Jessica, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at the North American International Auto Show. Thanks for watching.