i3 - January/February 2016 - 40

How do the vehicles we're driving today
and the vehicles we'll drive in the future
reflect the trends you see?

There is an
awakening force
right now-
especially in my
company-that
understands
that there are
some needs for
bringing current
trends into cars.
-Aric Dromi, Volvo Cars

Our approach
is to enable
an interaction
between cars and
people, and one
way to do that is to
think about what to
automate and what
not to automate.
-Alexander Mankowsky,
Daimler AG

Connelly: What we're trying to understand is the
car means different things to different people. The
car can mean one thing based on somebody's age,
but can also mean another thing based on geography. Our challenge is to stay true to our brand but
also recognize that customers have different expectations for different things. Think about consumerism or status, for lack of a better term. Consumerism 1.0 is where you rely on badges to project your
status in an area. Consumerism 2.0 is where you
use experiences, not badges-the things that you
do, the adventures that you take, stories that you
tell-as the status. Consumerism 3.0 is based on
mastery. And Consumerism 4.0 is philanthropy, or
things that you do to improve the world or how you
leave your footprint.
In that spectrum we see that the different parts
of a Ford vehicle might resonate more deeply with
some customers than others. It might even be
things like the materials that go into our vehicles
like using blue jeans to do insulation for our doors,
soy and mushrooms as foam byproducts or insulation byproducts and my favorite, that we're working
on now, is where we take the skins of tomatoes to
help create new plastics.
Dromi: There is an awakening force right now-
especially in my company-that understands that
there are some needs for bringing current trends
into cars. How do we cope with these changes with
our current vehicles? How do we retrofit a vehicle?
How do we start tackling interaction services
around the vehicle? I have not come across a single
car company that is not talking about, "Hey, we
need a cloud." It's another problem that with too
many clouds out there, it's not a scalable solution.
There's a concept we are working on now. It's
called ESL, empathetic system learning. It's not
about machines anymore. It's about learning
systems. You can see for instance the way Tesla
cars are learning from each other. You can see this
type of technology out there in Google Now with
their deep learning capabilities, and even Facebook
M. Again, these things are not really scalable if
you look at the big picture. For the first time since
we solved the big manure crisis in London and
introduced the car, the automotive industry has the
ability to influence society if we will just be smart.
Mankowsky: Mobility is a collaborative interaction. Our approach is to enable an interaction
between cars and people, and one way to do that
is to think about what to automate and what not

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

to automate. It's the difference between blind
trust and informed trust. If the car is sensing its
environment, then you can say, "OK, the car is
perfect. Trust it." That's bad. So, informed trust:
The car should show inside what it's sensing
outside, so you can develop a familiarity with the
automatic function. If there is something missing, and you can feel that, you can say, "OK stop
this. Something's wrong" from the inside. And
from the outside, people see this moving robot
and maybe interact with the machine.
You see that cities got denser and denser and
public places become scarcer and scarcer. We
need a kind of shared space like Hans Monderman invented in the 1990s. We will have that in
the future, and therefore the cars or the moving
machinery, moving artifacts, should be enabled
so that people can communicate in a good way
with them.

Are you optimistic about the future?
Connelly: If you ask someone over 30 years of
age "what does mobile mean?" they're going to
talk about transportation. But ask someone under
30 years of age and they're going to talk about
cell phones. So companies like Ford can't just
think of ourselves as a manufacturer of cars. We
want to be an enabler of mobility, and that means
smart mobility and multi-modal forms of mobility-things like mass transit, bicycles and strategic
partnerships. We're at a revolutionary moment
for a company that's 100 years old, because we're
rethinking everything.
Dromi: The car is the only personal device that
you can literally immerse yourself inside of. It is
the only computer you can sit inside. You can't
sit inside your iPhone or laptop or iPad. One of
my favorite quotes by Bill Gates is that we always
overestimate the change that will happen in the
next two years but we underestimate the change
that will happen in 10 years. How I perceive myself
inside of a mobility hardware or software experience is fundamentally going to be different in 10
years, 50 years and 70 years from now. We can only
navigate that, and that's the fun part.
Mankowsky: My impression is that we are living in a very transformative time. Automation
is the driver and the car will be the messenger of
this transformation, because the car is the most
advanced technical, technological large object -
very valuable-and the people are very emotional
and connected to it. It's a very good place now to
be in the automotive industry and to participate in
creation of this future.
I T I S I N N O VAT I O N

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_space https://www.teslamotors.com/

i3 - January/February 2016

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