Ford Is Ready To Take On Uber And Lyft

In the race to define the “future of transportation,” car manufacturers are increasingly facing off against new rivals birthed not by the automotive industry, but by the technology industry.

Ford is looking to develop innovative and advanced vehicles that can be available to everyone. They are experimenting not just with new models of vehicle and technology inside them but with how people interact with them more widely. The company’s CEO Mark Field has told BuzzFeed that it’s been developing its own ridesharing service.

“Each experiment is different and luckily Mark is giving us the ability to experiment and fail fast,” Erica Klampfl, Ford’s global future mobility manager, said. “But in all of these we do have gateways where we have learnings around our products, around our technologies, around the business aspects, and around the better world. Out of these things we’re identifying partnerships, how we want to play in the space.”

According to sources, Ford is working on a ride-hailing service of its own and that it’s nearing commercial viability. Called the Dynamic Shuttle experiment, it’s an app-based service for which Ford would provide a fleet of vehicles that pick up and drop off passengers along a route that is dynamically determined based on the demand from users. “First off we have the vehicles,” Fields said. “Secondly the app itself is pretty advanced and we’re actually iterating as we go. And thirdly, there’s inherent demand for it.”

For Ford, the benefits of a program like Dynamic Shuttle are many. For one thing, it ties the company’s traditional car manufacturing business to the rise of new modes of transportation like car-sharing.

If Ford is successful and it does roll out Dynamic Shuttle as a product, it could prove a very interesting competitor for existing players.

Source: The Next Web