Ford Opens New Silicon Valley Research Center

The Ford Motor Company has made yet another leap in the way the motor vehicle industry works. With the ever-changing industry and the way technology is constantly on a move, it’s no surprise that Ford would feel the need to step up its game and try new methods that could help make its cars even better than before. Ford's most recent move is aimed to help understand, learn and teach about the technologies and experiments that Ford is working with in mobility, autonomous vehicles, its customers' experience/connectivity and the overall data of the company. The new Silicon Valley Research Center is aimed to drive all of these.

Ford is opening the Research and Innovation Center in Palo Alto Silicon Valley to help drive innovation with connectivity, autonomous vehicles and mobility within the company. It wants to accelerate the development of technology and the experiments the company does with its vehicles to make sure that they live up to the standards that people all over the country expect when they take a drive in a Ford car. With this move, Ford is growing its global research team and trying to grow and accelerate as efficiently as possible.

The CEO of the Ford Motor Company, Mark Shields, had this to say about Ford's most recent decision, “At Ford, we view ourselves as both a mobility and an auto company, as we drive innovation in every part of our business. This new research center shows Ford’s commitment to be part of the Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem – anticipating customers’ wants and needs, especially on connectivity, mobility and autonomous vehicles. We are working to make these new technologies accessible to everyone, not just luxury customers.”

“As we think about coming to Silicon Valley, we want to be viewed as part of the ecosystem here,” said Fields. “Silicon Valley is a marketplace of ideas and it’s important to be here and be a part of that. The research center is another proof point of that.”

With the brand new Research and Innovation Center Palo Alto joining the ranks, this adds to the global network of centers just like this one that Ford has globally, along with its location that’s in Dearborn, Michigan where the company got its footing. The center in Michigan focuses heavily on the electronics and machinery side of the deal – like big data and analytics, human-machine interface and much more. The center in Aachen, Germany focuses on the next-generation powertrain and the research revolving around that.

The center is run by a former Apple Engineer, Dragos Maciuca. Ford plans to get a bit cozier to technology and all it can do, and hopefully Maciuca can help them with that. Before transferring over to the Ford Company, he was working on the latest iPhone models – not vehicles. He has a background in consumer electronics, aerospace, semiconductor manufacturing and automotive, which we believe makes him a perfect fit for the job. Having a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, his background in advising, developing, collaborating and commercializing products will be a big advantage to the Ford team.

Since 2015 got started a few short days ago, Ford has already had a handful of experiments in motion about what direction it wants to turn to in means of technology – introducing Ford Smart Mobility at the very beginning of 2015 at the International CES.

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