Ford Motor Co. plans to open a research lab in Silicon soon to further growing the company's commitment to bring affordable technology affordable into vehicles. Ford is the latest automaker to open a research center in Silicon Valley. Volkswagen AG, Daimler AG and BMW all have Silicon Valley research centers.
"Ford has an incredible heritage of driving innovation in the transportation and manufacturing sectors during the past 107 years," said Paul Mascarenas, Ford chief technical officer and vice president of Research and Innovation. "Now it's time to prepare for the next 100 years, ushering in a new era of collaboration and finding new partners to help us transform what it means to be an automaker."
Ford Research and Innovation, the company's advanced engineering arm, will open the new Silicon Valley lab in the first quarter, helping ensure Ford keeps pace with consumer trends and aggressively prepares for the future by developing solutions to harness the power of connectivity, cloud computing and clean technology.
"An open attitude to new ideas is critical to solving the transportation, environmental and societal challenges we expect in the future," said Mascarenas. "With increasing pressures from urbanization and the need to reduce energy use, we're going to see energy storage, wireless connectivity, sensing systems and even autonomous vehicles as key parts of the solution."
The new Ford lab will be located in the San Francisco Bay area of California and will serve as a hub for independent technology projects and identification of new research investments and partners located along the west coast. Ultimately, the lab will create an "innovation network" connecting Ford's Advanced Design Studio in Irvine, Calif., and Ford employees working with connectivity platform partner Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, Wash.
"Silicon Valley represents a deep and dynamic technology neighborhood and is far from Dearborn," said K. Venkatesh Prasad, senior technical leader for open innovation with Ford Research and Innovation. "With so many opportunities and so much potential, our new lab will allow us to scout new technologies and partners in their own environment and continue our expansion beyond the traditional automaker mindset to drive innovation for a better mobility experience."
Prasad - a Silicon Valley veteran himself - will travel from Dearborn to the Bay area regularly to shape the lab. The new research lab's employees will be recruited both locally and rotated-in from the global network of Ford employees and will spend their time developing and discovering new technologies, trends, partners and collaborative research projects, said Prasad.
The number of Ford employees at its new lab will be comparable to what you expect of a startup, with an emphasis on quality over quantity, said Prasad.
Prasad added that the establishment of Ford's all-new Silicon Valley lab will not duplicate or replace work being done at the company's Research and Innovation Center in Dearborn, its European facility in Aachen, Germany, or the recently established technology office in Nanjing, China. By Joseph Szczesny