From the Financial Times' FT Weekend Magazine:
This year, Ford, announced it was opening a research and innovation centre in Silicon Valley. But it’s not just computer geeks that the great American carmaker is hiring these days. It has recently taken on a plethora of social scientists as well, in its research labs in Michigan and around the world.
These psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists are trying to understand how we interact with our cars in a cultural sense. It is a striking development and one worth pondering in a personal sense if, like me, you spend much of your life rushing about in a car.
In the early days of the company, Ford executives did not seem to be overly concerned about “culture”. The founder, Henry Ford, was cavalier about his customers, famously declaring: “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.” But while the company has become far better at offering a customised service since Ford’s day, its cars generally seemed to have been designed by clever engineers who tended to assume that everyone liked the same things that they did: mostly flashy gadgets.
These days, Ford executives have realised that it is not good enough to create cars simply according to what seems cool to its (mostly male) engineers in Michigan. They need to take a much wider and more imaginative view of consumer tastes.
That is partly because of globalisation — and, in particular, the fact that Ford (like all carmakers) is more reliant on the Chinese market for sales. Unsurprisingly, Chinese consumers often have radically different ideas of what makes a great car, especially if they are female.
A second reason why Ford is becoming more interested in culture is that the nature of cars is being transformed in a surprising way. Back when Henry Ford started making his Model T, the task of building cars was a job for technical engineers. Today, it also involves computer experts since cars now contain a dizzying amount of software.
That has prompted tech companies to jump in. Last month, I listened to some engineers at Viv Labs, a Silicon Valley start-up created by the founders of Apple’s intelligent personal assistant Siri. They explained how we would soon be using cars embedded with artificial intelligence. Companies such as Google are creating self-driving cars and even Apple is rumoured to be creating a car of its own — a move that would probably create even more waves than last week’s launch of the Apple Watch....MORE
