MWC 2016: Ford accelerates towards driverless and connected cars

Chief executive Mark Fields says Ford is tripling its investment in autonomous technology

Ford is planning to boost its investments in driverless car technology and to increase the use of "connected car" systems in its vehicles.

Talking at MWC 2016 in Barcelona this week, Mark Fields, president and chief executive at Ford, said the company is investing heavily in the technology that will drive the convergence of cars, connectivity and digital services.

"Transport, we feel, is on the cusp of revolution. It's inspiring a revolution at Ford. It's about making people's lives better about the way the world moves," he said. "During the next five years we're tripling our engineering investment in driver-assisted and semi-autonomous vehicle technology and accelerating availability to our customers."

Fields added that Ford is working on a number of initiatives, including the build-out of its GoDrive pay-by-the-minute car hire and sharing service, currently being trialled in London with a variant called GoPark.

"GoPark is a predictive parking system that can actually direct customers to a place where they're most likely to find a parking space," he said. "With their permission, we are equipping the vehicles with plug-in devices to collect data as they come and go [between] parking spaces in a defined area.

"And by observing patterns and combining that data with city data on traffic and parking conditions, we will be able to actually predict available parking spots based on the time of day and location."

Ford will trial the service in the London Borough of Islington, while GoDrive is available across 25 London locations.

Ford is equally committed to autonomous and connected car systems for its latest models, not just vehicles planned for the future.

"We've been focused on autonomous vehicles for more than a decade and this year we will have the largest test fleet of all automakers," said Fields. "At the same time, we're also committed to serving millions of customers today with automated technology to help them become better drivers."

Fields highlighted Ford's Traffic Jam, which automatically helps a driver with steering, braking and acceleration in heavily congested traffic on motorways, and Active Park Assist, which is intended to help drivers pull into a parking spot at the touch of a button.

He also announced that the company's FordPass "customer experience platform" will make its debut in Europe this year, along with Sync 3, an "infotainment" system that supports Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, and receives over-the-air-updates via services hosted in Microsoft's Azure cloud platform.

FordPass acts as a hub for a range of connected car services, such as remote locking, car sharing, vehicle location, guides and a services marketplace.

Ford is also partnering with BP to enable payments for fuel to be carried out with FordPass in return for reward points. "FordPass reimagines the entire customer experience and aims to do for the automotive industry what iTunes did for the music industry," said Fields, noting that the system won't just be available to Ford drivers.

Ford appears to be becoming a car and technology company, particularly as it recently joined forces with IBM to accelerate how big data is used with cars.