 It's theCUBE. Here is your host, Jeff Crick. Hi, Jeff Crick here with theCUBE. We are on the ground in the heart of Silicon Valley at the brand-newly-opened Ford Innovation and Research Center right in the middle of everything, just a few blocks away from HP, another great technology company. And I'm joined here by my next guest, Ken Washington, the VP of Research and Advanced Engineering. Thanks for stopping by. Oh, it's great to be here with you. So, a lot of excitement, ton of press. Everybody's here. You guys had some opening remarks, and the one that kind of jumped out at me was kind of thinking about different types of mobility. So, you know, we're here, people are riding Ubers, they're riding alternative cars, Zipcars. You know, not a lot of the young people living downtown San Francisco are necessarily racing out and buying that first car. You guys are thinking about that. Tell us a little bit about your perspective of that trend from Ford and a car manufacturing company. Well, first of all, we've certainly noticed the trend. And so, we wanted to be part of that. But we didn't quite know what would work for an auto OEM like Ford. And so, we started some experiments. And we call them that intentionally because some of these experiments are going to lead to business outcomes that will work for us, and some might not. And so, over a year ago, we established what we called a blueprint for mobility that laid out a number of experiments that we announced a little over a week ago at the Consumer Electronics Show. And in those experiments, we're exploring alternative usership models, alternative ways to actually get around a city using public transportation or private transportation, and new ownership models for how you would actually either purchase a car and or own a car. And then last but not least is new ways of interacting with your social network as you seek to be mobile. It's all about choice. Enabling choice regarding, if I wanna move from point A to point B, what options do I have? And I might not have the option of owning a vehicle and then parking it where I need to go. So, our experiments are looking into offering options for how you would make that choice in a way that would fit your lifestyle. Yeah, it's interesting because it's really, it's transportation as a service sometimes, not necessarily just I wanna get a car, which is kind of like cloud, but at the end of the day, there's gotta be a data center back behind the cloud. So even if you wanna get transportation, at the end of the day, there's gotta be some wheels, right, that are taking you places. Right, and we're starting by putting the customer in the center and asking the customers what would work for you. And so one of the things we heard when we asked, well, what would work for you is, give me the option of sharing a vehicle with another person who wants to own a vehicle. One of the things we learned by talking to customers is that in this new world where people live in mega cities and when you see the middle class growing at a really significant rate, more people are in a position where they wanna own a car, but sometimes they're not in a position to actually own a car. And so they wanted to have the option of owning a car in a partnership with two or three other people. So we're doing a shared ownership experiment. That's just one example of the kind of choices we're offering in our mobility experiments. Talk about two like alternative, well, let me back up a step. So one of the things about being in Silicon Valley is there's a lot of other tech companies here that you can partner, right? You're right across the street from Tesla, the newest US automaker. You guys are one of the oldest US automakers. Google's down the street with cars driving all around Mountain View that you see all the time. But you talk about another interesting partnership that you guys are doing with a gaming company. Again, kind of thinking outside the box, using kind of the technology that's available to change the game a little bit. I wonder if you can dive into that a little bit for us. Sure, sure. One of the great things about being in Silicon Valley and one of the reasons we chose to create a presence here is the way you innovate is we're learning how to innovate in a Silicon Valley way. And part of innovating that way is trying things out that can grow up and turn into new opportunities. And so we looked at, we're trying to find a way to accelerate our learning and algorithms for autonomous vehicles. And we turned to the gaming industry and because what if you could do learning and autonomous driving experiments in a virtual world. And to explore that idea that we could have on one hand built a virtual environment that would be suited for automated driving but that would take much more time than just leveraging an existing gaming engine that has the ability to make very realistic scenes. And so we just tried it out. We got an open source gaming engine and just tried it. And it turns out it worked. And when it worked, then we went and actually purchased a more full featured gaming engine. And that more full featured engine gave us the ability to actually advance our algorithms. We're still in the fairly early phases but we're pretty excited about that. Not only because of that particular example but about the way that we're innovating in a Silicon Valley way. Yeah, it's a very different way. And arguably easier way because in software you can A-B test and roll things out and make iterative changes. If you make a multi-billion dollar investment to roll out a new car model with factories and parts and stuff, those are big gamble. So out here it seems to be smaller chunks a lot more faster. And I'm glad that you guys are adopting that. That's great. Last thing I wanna talk about is internet of things, connected devices and not just the simple things that I can plug my Bluetooth in but really what types of new opportunities does the fact that everything's gonna be connected on the cloud with big data capabilities, inexpensive storage, inexpensive compute, gonna impact the way you guys deliver your products, go to market, interact with your customers? It's gonna really change what's possible. And we're excited about it because the internet of things, I mean the vehicle is one of the most advanced things that can be on the internet and we recognize that. And we're also seeing the evolution of smart technology in homes. And so we had one idea of what if you could put those together. And you mentioned you're working with Nest which is actually a little surprise. Yeah, we're doing some research to explore what would it be like if we could enable a vehicle to talk to your smart devices in your home. And it turns out that's quite possible. And so we're doing some research in that area. That's an example of what the internet of things will enable as you create these capabilities in the vehicle by connecting the vehicle onto the internet and then analyzing the data in smart ways so that you're changing the experience of the driver. Not just in the vehicle, but you're changing their lifestyle, if you will. You're enabling them to have the kind of lifestyle that they truly want. So we're looking at it from lots of angles. Right, and of course all the data you guys are getting in terms of how these products are actually used, it's gotta be so nice to actually be connected to those things at some point in time where you know how people drive. You know what habits are. You know the difference of San Francisco driver than an LA driver, than a New York driver, than a Detroit driver, or somebody out in the middle of the plane states. That's gotta be tremendously valuable information. The possibilities are very significant. That it's really important to recognize that the data is not ours. It's the customer's data. And so it starts with an acknowledgement of that. And so if the customer gives us the permission through an opt-in process, then we will have access to that. And our commitment is to use that access in a valuable way. Pair it up with the other information we have access to add it with the ability to analyze that in a thoughtful way to give a value back to that customer. That's what we're calling our big data analytics element of our Ford Smart Mobility Plan. We think it's gonna unlock lots of new experiences and we're excited about that. You just have to get flow from progressive to offer out the little GPS, UPS thing. She's pushing those things all the time. Well Ken, thanks for stopping by. It's really exciting. A lot of opportunities here for Ford to continue to move, continue to innovate. I know the focus was a big step forward for you guys on a big success. So thanks for stopping by. It's my pleasure. Thank you. All right, so I'm Jeff Rick here. We're on the ground at the Ford Innovation and Research Center downtown Palo Alto.