Smart Mobility | Dragos Maciuca

So yeah, thanks for having me. I'm Dragos Mociuca. I'm the Director of the Ford Research and Innovation Center in Palo Alto. So I'll give you a little bit of background on our office and how we're innovating and how we work with startups. Basically, we're part of Ford's Innovation Center. So Ford has had an innovation center in Dearborn where the headquarters are for clearly a long time. We've had another one in Aachen in Germany, again for many years. But as the automotive industry has been moving from being a mechanical engineering type industry, then shifting slowly towards an electrical engineering type industry, now as we are becoming more and more software driven, clearly there's a need to have a presence in Silicon Valley to take advantage of what goes on here. So therefore we opened this office in Silicon Valley. Ford actually had a small office for a couple of years before this, but it was really small. We opened this one about a year and a half ago, and I'll show you more about that, because we needed to expand a lot more. Basically what we're trying to do in this office is 5 main pillars. So connectivity, basically connecting the car to the cloud as in IoT. So the car becomes nothing more than another T, another thing in the Internet of Things. Mobility, it's more about how do we take advantage of moving people around. Just making cars only, it's not enough. The model of ownership is changing, so owning a car in a rural area like a pickup truck somewhere in Iowa, that's still going to be the future. In urban areas, especially in megacities, that's not possible anymore. You just can't pump enough cars. They have nowhere to go. So it's all about new business models, about car sharing, about multimodal transportation, about how do you really move people from point A to point B. Part of that strategy is also autonomous vehicles. We announced just recently that by 2020 we'll have autonomous vehicles dedicated for urban areas specifically designed for car sharing. So we're designing vehicles that are specifically made for this purpose. The customer experience becomes something that's a lot more important, and frankly, all of us, the entire industry, has been guilty for a long time of putting features in the car. So cars designed by engineers for engineers instead of trying to think how a human really uses a car and what is that experience all about. So we're trying to change that paradigm and start with the human, how the human uses it, how the users think about it, and then develop the technology around that. And lastly, it's about data analytics. So once you have cars that are connected, that have sensors, they become probes in the environment. So then we start to understand more about our own drivers, about our cars, but also making life easier for the users of the cars and for the infrastructure they're part of. So by collecting data from our own vehicles, for example, we can help cities identify where parking spots are available so that people don't drive around trying to, you know, wasting time and energy trying to find a parking spot. Or we can learn more about our own vehicles. But what really glues all these pillars together is basically what we get from Silicon Valley. So it's about developing software. It's about compute platforms. And it's about sensors, particularly sensors for autonomous vehicles and sensors for the passengers that are inside the vehicles. And by the way, Can I ask in the beginning, you can stop me anytime you want, so you don't have to wait until the end if you have any questions. An interesting thing that's happening in Silicon Valley is that, so I, as you know, I spent my entire career here, but I've also been a car nut. So I started my career with BMW, basically that office. And BMW was only the second car company to establish an office in the Valley. Mercedes, to give them credit, were the first, and they did that about 20 years ago. At that time, and even as recently as 5 years ago, cars in Silicon Valley were still an oddity. It was still strange. People still didn't understand why car manufacturers are here, what they're trying to get from Silicon Valley. That thing started, that mentality started changing about maybe 4 or 5 years ago, where you could already see some VCs, some niche VCs trying to understand that there is a future in cars. Before that, most of them saw the cars as being from the Rust Belt, from being just about mechanical engineering, just about metal. Basically, they were not something that gets developed over 7 to 10 years. They had no interest in that. About 4 or 5 years ago, There was this small change where a few of them saw this shift to software and they started looking for companies, they started investing. And then in the last probably year or so, already just that recently, you see this huge change that has happened where people really, and veterans of Silicon Valley really understand the connection between Silicon Valley and the automotive industry. And it's because we're moving a lot to software, because we're becoming more in the need of this technology that's being developed here, that they're starting to understand this because we're starting to speak their language. So we're definitely not the first. We're certainly not alone. But we are part of this ecosystem of OEMs and tier 1 suppliers that need to be in Silicon Valley because of this fundamental change to software. Another thing I would say that I felt it on basically on my own skin is the change from mechanical engineering to electrical engineering was relatively slow, relatively easy to understand. It was easy to understand that you take an engine that's controlled purely mechanical with a carburetor and you change it to let's say a fuel injector that's controlled by a chip. That was easy to understand because it was still this one-to-one relationship between— the electronics and mechanical engineering. Now the shift to software is much more fundamental and much, much faster because you're talking about completely different speeds at which things change. And the software is not only dedicated to a particular car because you could have the software for that particular engine, but it's also all the infotainment, everything that goes on in the car, everything that goes on in the cloud that's associated with a car. So you end up with very different timelines, different mentalities of how you develop software versus how you develop the car and its components. The other thing that's really fundamentally different than in the past and than other industries is that at one extreme you have things that are safety critical. Think of the engine, the transmission. Those things need to work really well from the beginning. They can't kill people. They need to start on a cold day. They need to start on a hot day. The way I think of them based on my background, it's almost like satellites where you need to launch them, and when you launch them, they better work. But they don't have that user interface. It's just everything is embedded software. It's very much firmware and the— Hardware. control for that device. At the other extreme, you have Facebook that they do updates twice a day. And the worst thing that can happen to them if something goes wrong is you don't see pictures of your cat. And they may lose $1 million, which is nothing to them. The problem— and they have nothing that's safety critical. The problem with us, or the challenge for us, is that in the same device, which is the car, we need to have both of them working at the same time. So we need the safety critical, which is the engine, transmission, brakes, emissions, and then at the same time we have the infotainment system, which needs to be easily upgradable, which can then connect with the rest of the vehicle. So it's a very different beast than developing for one extreme or the other and trying to make both of them work at the same time in the same device. And again, those are some of the challenges we're trying to address. By having this office here.