 on the ground, presented by theCUBE. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in a special on the ground in downtown San Francisco, not far from Super Bowl 50 city, the city's filling up, the banners are going out, but we're here to talk about smart mobility and we're excited because Dr. Ken Washington is in town so we thought we'd run up and get a few minutes. Ken, good to see you. Oh, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So we first met you about a year ago at the grand opening of the research center down in Palo Alto. So happy anniversary. Give us an update on what's going on. Well, thanks, Jeff. It's been a great year. You know, it's only been a year and we've already almost filled the whole facility. We said we're gonna hire over 100 people and we did. So we have over 100 people, but more importantly, these people are really contributing to our vision for smart mobility. They're making it happen with connectivity. They're contributing to our autonomous vehicle research program. They're working in mobility solutions. They're building advanced sensors. They're working on the real deal. It's really a great environment and they're really doing a lot of really great work. That's great. And I know a big part of the mission of you guys being in that facility in Palo Alto was to be part of the community and to really contribute. And when we were there a couple weeks back, you know, Mark talked about being part of the community. So how's that kind of panned out? And then what have been some of the ancillary effects of that presence and the rest of Ford? Well, we set about becoming a part of the community. We didn't want to be visitors. And that meant forging lasting relationships, really building rich business relevant partnerships. And we've done exactly that. We've interacted with over 200 companies in just the last year. And these are startup-like companies. Companies of all sizes, small, medium and large. And we bring lots of visitors from our Dearborn main campus. And because of that, it's really helped give our whole company a view of how Silicon Valley works. That's great. So Smart Mobility, it's what you guys are all about. So let's kind of run through, what are the pillars? Give everybody kind of the high-level overview. Then let's dig into some of the things you've been working on over the last year. Love to talk about it. So Smart Mobility is our strategy to change how the world moves, to make people's lives better. And it starts with connectivity. Because when you connect the vehicle onto the internet, becomes a note on the internet of things, it enables all kinds of ways to bring your digital life with you into the car, to make the vehicle a part of your mobility ecosystem. So connectivity, alternative modes of mobility, enabling people to get from point A to point B using multiple modes, car sharing, ride service, multimodal, even using shuttles. The third element, autonomous vehicles. We've made a lot of progress on autonomous vehicles. Love to talk more about that. We'll definitely jump into that. Data and analytics, a lot of these connectivity opportunities start and build further when you can process the data, do analytics so we can really get to know our customers, so we can delight them, and we can make the services relevant to them. And last but not least, making all of that, bringing all of that to our customers in a way that creates great experiences. So the consumer experience, we actually start with that, understanding what experiences they want and need, and then bringing those technologies to them so it changes their lives. Well I was going to say, could you talk about all the time talking about customer experience? Customer experience, really starting from there. But let's jump into the autonomous cars, right? That's a sexy thing, and we see Google cars driving around mountain view all the time. I know you've got a fleet, and you've announced you're tripling the fleet of four autonomous cars, but kind of walks through, there's kind of driver assist, which we hear about today. You can buy it in today's cars where maybe it tells you there's a deer jumping in front of you as a bunch of commercials. There's kind of driver assist, then there's kind of semi-autonomous, and then there's fully autonomous. And you've made a pretty bold prediction that we're going to have autonomous cars in four years, I believe. I heard you quoted in an interview. So what are kind of the distinctions? What are the hurdles? Where are we on that path? Well, it's probably good to start with what you can do today. Our cars today have capabilities on them that allow you to be a better and a safer driver. And it does exactly what the words indicate. It's driver assist technologies. And those are technologies at levels one and two. And these are levels defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers. Levels one and two are levels that allow you to be assisted with technology so it'll help you break if it sees that an object is in front of you. It'll alert you to things in your blind spot. It'll help keep you in your lane. Those are the first two levels. The third level allows you to actually get out of the loop and the car will navigate autonomously. However, that level does not have the kind of detail and the kind of ability to keep you out of the loop. And so it's not good enough so that you can be totally out of the loop. So on that level, you must have an ability or some mechanism to get the driver back in the loop if something really challenging happens that the vehicle can't handle. Level four is where we're aiming our fully autonomous vehicle technology. And level four in defined environments where you have high resolution maps available and when you know that the sensors can perform it their best, you can fully take the driver out of the loop all the way to their desired destination. Our research vehicles are aimed at that level and we believe that the technology will be ready within the next four years to be level four fully autonomous with drivers fully out of the loop in defined environments. Awesome. So I've never been in a self-driving car. I've got to come visit you on Dearborn and DriveWorn. I don't bring them out to Palo Alto but it seems like that middle level is that even really more relaxing thinking again about your experience. If you've got to be kind of ready and I think Google recently released some of their numbers where there were so many hundreds of incidents where somebody had to take control of the car. I'm thinking, are you sitting there like on kind of high alert waiting for the call? Do you get some type of sensor? Do you have to, basically you're driving but you're really just not operating the levers? And is that a viable middle step or do we really need to get to that level four as you described it? Well, level three, I mean, you framed it well. I mean, level three is an area of active research because we don't know how to reliably get the user back in the loop, it takes time. And our experience to date has led us to understand that if the vehicle is good enough so that you can come out of the loop, getting you back in the loop is tough. With that said, we're not giving up on that so it's an area of active research for us. However, our current focus is on level four and at level four, the driver can be totally out of loop and you don't have to come back in. That means that you have to work on a couple of key challenges and so one is your sensors have to really be good enough to detect what's going on in the environment and you really have to have high resolution maps. That's why we're working with key partners like Velodyne which announced their third generation LiDAR sensor that we're gonna bring to our next generation of autonomous vehicle research platform to allow us to continue to make progress toward that level four vision. Right. And the piece that doesn't get much talk is trucks and service vehicles. And there's a whole world where the multimodal isn't necessarily an option for the UPS driver or a local service delivery van or LTL. Where does all the autonomous technology play in the commercial fleet world? Well, I think that's an area where the key is for our technology platform to be agnostic about the vehicle platform. And our strategy is so that the technology stack that's going into our research vehicles can be moved from vehicle to vehicle to vehicle. And that includes trucks and utility vehicles. We're not starting there with our research vehicle for obvious practical reasons. But the idea would be when the technology is ready and it's been proven out on our research vehicles it can move across our full lineup. Because our vision is to make fully autonomous capabilities available to the masses. And we believe that one of the first applications is going to be in a service, like a ride service, where people can say, I need to go from point A to point B. And some service will have autonomous vehicles and it will come and take you there. So let's jump into some of the details. You talked about the five pillars and some of the recent announcements that you guys have made on some of those very specific categories. So we're really excited about the progress we're making in connectivity. So let me start with Sync Connect. So the whole idea of Sync Connect is making progress start putting our vehicles onto the internet. And so starting with the model year 2017 escape we're going to put modems in our vehicles and we'll continue to build that out across our full fleet over the next year or so. That's going to make the vehicles on the internet of things, you'll be able to do over the air updates of the actual system itself. And it'll allow you to remotely unlock your car with your cell phone. We're building an app into Fort Ass and I'll talk about that in a minute. So you can interact with your car because it's a secure device on the internet. And so we're excited about that. If you were at CES, you saw that we're working with a partner with Amazon to take advantage of Sync Connect to have it talk to your smart home and other smart devices that are in the Amazon cloud in this example. So we've shown in a prototype that you can talk to the Amazon Echo device and through the Amazon cloud interact with your car whether you're in your car or whether you're in your own. That's an example of the kind of things that you can do and unlock when you have the car on the internet when it's enabled with Sync Connect. And are you going to open your APIs for other people to build these apps? Where's the app development ecosystem, you think, on the forum? Well, that's a really great point that the more people who get involved in the app development, the better it gets for everybody. And so we're really excited about Smart Device Link, which is the open source version of our App Link. App Link allows you to put applications on our Sync 3 platform. SDL or Smart Device Link is the open source version of that. Toyota announced that they're going to be embracing that standard. And so working with a partner, they're going to bring SDL into their vehicles. We're excited about that and we'll see how it builds from there because we know that a number of other OEMs are looking at it as well. Well, that brings up a great point kind of about co-opetition, which is a very kind of Silicon Valley thing. You know, your competitors on one side of the table, you can go out the street on the other door and you cooperate. And there's a great Volvo commercial talking about the three point safety belt where they invented it. It was a great invention and they basically opened it up. And of course, open source is a big thing. So what's your strategy? How are you thinking about, you know, what's open? What do you share with other car manufacturers or app development ecosystem versus what you guys hold close to the vest? Well, you said it really well. That's kind of a Silicon Valley hallmark, which is being part of the community and sharing information and just kind of being in the buzz, if you will, for collaborating with both partners, strategic partners and with, you know, competitors. And so we do that in areas where it's common technology that works best at scale, right? Right, you know, like connectivity. How you apply that for your specific application or your specific vehicles, that becomes intellectual property and we hold that pretty close. So for example, how we're actually doing the sensor fusion in our autonomous vehicles, that's for intellectual property. So we hold that pretty close. But as far as the actual connectivity methods for how to bring applications into our sync module, SDL is a great way to put that into the open source. Right. So what about the critics that say, oh my gosh, even you can in some of the other interviews, like you can talk about, you know, keeping your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel. And now you're bringing all this connectivity, you're bringing apps, you're bringing all these things from the outside looking in look like distractions or even potential, you know, ways to hack the vehicle and Lord knows we don't want people doing that. How do you kind of answer those kind of objections? I'm sure you hear it from the less excited people. What's an appropriate concern? And which is why we never compromise security and safety. It's our top priority. And so everything we do is done through the lens of how can we bring this capability safely and securely to our customers? And quite frankly, that's one of the reasons why sometimes it may take a little longer than consumers are accustomed to and devices that are, you know, are not putting you in harm's way like a vehicle. Right, right. And so we have to take the time and the effort to ensure that we're hardening these electronics, we're making them automotive grade, and we're hardening the networks that are in our systems. We take really careful measures to ensure that we're firewalling off the safety critical systems in our vehicles on the CAN bus separate from the infotainment systems. Now, when we open up in the future, the ability to do over-the-air updates, you're going to have to poke some holes in that firewall, which means we have to do that right. You have to do it smartly and you have to have the right security processes in place. So that's always going to be front and center in everything we do. And one last thing about keeping your eyes on the road and hands on the wheel, the really neat thing about the technology wave that's happening today with machine learning and advanced computing in the cloud, that's opening up great promise and great capabilities in terms of voice recognition as well. And that's going to do nothing but make it even easier to keep your eyes on the road, hands on the wheel. As you interact with your vehicle through voice, that's only going to get better and better and better. Our voice recognition on our phones is really good because of the cloud computing that stands behind it and props it up. That's going to come to vehicles in the future. It's amazing how the voice has evolved only in the last couple of years. I was joking with somebody just about the old OCP software and you're just trying to scan a document and convert it to a word. But before I let you go, you're a very smart guy, nuclear scientist, rocket scientist, relatively new to the automotive industry. And you're out really getting this message out. And I just want to steal a quote that she said somewhere else. Understanding the culture of what it takes to do big things and really helping people make a clear vision. I'll share with us a little bit about your experience in driving this change in a really big old company that's been at it for over a hundred years, based in what some would still say is the rust belt and really trying to drive innovation in this new vision that's just beyond bending metal and shipping cars. Yeah, it's really been a great time to come to Ford because the industry, it's not new to Ford or any of our competitors for innovating. I mean that the vehicle is a very innovative technology and there's a lot of innovation in a vehicle. Just look at the complexity and the technology that goes into our vehicle's powertrains and our control modules that are in the vehicle and the transmissions that are in our vehicle. That's a lot of complexity and a lot of innovation there. So innovation is not new to us. What's new is this whole wave of the internet and sensors and autonomy and machine learning and software driven in the pace of it. And so here we have to learn how to leverage others. We have to learn how to smartly partner. We have to learn how to ride the technology wave, how to become part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem and bring those innovations quickly into our ecosystem. That's why we have our Silicon Valley lab. That's why we're learning to innovate everywhere in our business in that style and doing it smartly and doing it in a way that continues to keep our cars safe and smart. It's an exciting time to be in the industry and I love having a team around me that can really drive us forward. My role is to set the vision and keeping them seeing what's possible and asking those hard questions of each other. And they're doing that. It's fun to watch. Well, you're doing a great job. You're doing a great job and really appreciate you spending a few minutes with us and I look forward to our next update as things continue to move along. It's fun talking with you, it was my pleasure. Absolutely. Dr. Ken Washington up with Jeff Rick. We are on the ground in San Francisco. You're watching theCUBE. We'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.