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Exclusive: How Do You Sell Driverless Cars, If Drivers Are Your Best Customers? Ford CEO Jim Hackett Explains the Autonomous Vehicles Business

Exclusive: How Do You Sell Driverless Cars, If Drivers Are Your Best Customers? Ford CEO Jim Hackett Explains the Autonomous Vehicles Business

Ford CEO Jim Hackett, in an exclusive interview with Newsweek, talked about the future of the autonomous vehicle business. Building cars that can drive themselves through busy downtown streets safely and efficiently is above all a staggering achievement in artificial intelligence, which is why tech companies were first off the mark to develop them. Traditional car manufacturers are now spending billions to catch up, hoping that their well-known brands will give them an edge. Ford, which plans to roll out a fleet of autonomous vehicles in 2021, ranked No. 1 in Newsweek ’s survey of automobile brands. We caught up with CEO Jim Hackett in Miami in November to talk about Ford and the future of transportation.

You’re now calling Ford a “mobility company.” What does that mean? Henry Ford brought us mobility. But for the first time in history, you’ve got the confluence of technology that will let the vehicle drive itself, the ability for the vehicles to communicate with each other and all talk to the cloud. The cities will also communicate with the cloud, which then connects with the vehicles in ways that actually help choreograph traffic.

Is the advent of driverless cars as big a change as the Model T? It is. Some people estimate that the whole system of vehicles, transportation and coordination will cost $10 trillion. That’s half the GDP of the U.S. today. So it’s a really big opportunity. Ford CEO James Hackett-Ford_230 What is your vision of transportation 10, 20 or 50 years from now? We think the streets now come back to people. We’ve done models where, because of the way you can choreograph the transportation system, people in life actually spill back into the areas where they’ve been taken away. That is what will make cities more livable, because […]

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