Name: Here’s What Ford’s Startup Incubator Has Been Doing
Uploaded: 2016-01-12
Duration: 4 min 7 s

[ MUSIC ] I think you're in your second round of techstars, correct? Correct. So, in the first round, what ideas, really interesting ideas, have actually become products of Ford? And, maybe you can talk a little bit about what's happening in the second round, which I think is just started, correct? Yeah. We're just taking applications. In the first round, we had ten companies and those ten companies, a number of the companies focus on mobility solutions around either connectivity or the whole consumer experience or some analytics. Those companies in general have raised a total about $ 3 million Of seed money. We haven't been at the point yet where they have products yet or services that we would adopt. But I'm hopeful that as the companies mature and those ideas mature, there could be. And that's the part of having this accelerator, this incubator. To accelerate these kind of ideas. So, the first class is done, but it's still going through it's maturation. And the second, what we announced today is that the second group of companies. We're targeting 12 companies. We're taking applications through, I think they're due March I think it starts around March 22nd, and then it will conclude. We'll pick the company sometime during the summer, and then it will conclude in September. So, there's a number of mobility projects around the world. You're experimenting with car sharing and And just in ways of finding parking and ride hailing, so as this moves forward, which one of these experiments looks like it has the best chance of becoming a piece, a revenue, a business, a revenue producer for, which is the goal, right? [ LAUGH ] Well, there's a couple things. Over the 25 experiments we launched this time last year By the time we got to the summer and we completed a number of them and we decided to focus on two areas, flexible use in ownership and multimodal urban mobility solutions. Which, that's basically creating an integrated platform of different types of transportation to allow people to get to and from cities. but on the flexible use and ownership we have two pilots right now. The one that looks the most promising is our go! drive car sharing pilot which is in London. Which is a pay as you go, one way, car sharing with guaranteed parking. Spaces in London, and as you know, London, finding guaranteed parking is a little bit like a needle in a haystack. And what we've learned from that is people really like the flexibility to reserve a car literally up to 15 minutes before they need it. They love the idea of parking. They want pricing that's straightforward and easy to understand and doesn't change. Depending upon the day or the time of day. And so we've learned a lot of things there. We're expanding that. The other pilot that we've run is peer to peer car sharing through here in the US and in the UK. And it's really around For credit customers being able to share or lend their vehicles to others. And the money that they make on that they can use to help pay their monthly payment, etc. And what we've learned on that is really interesting. We've learned that people, they're more apt to borrow somebody else's car than share their own. The ones that are, their vehicles are at least two years old. So we're learning a lot of things around those but those two look pretty promising. The other thing we're doing is a pilot of dynamic shuttle. And we started the experiment in the U. K. and now we've turned that into a pilot into our campus in Dearborn. Where our transit bus fans go around and can pick up folks and deliver them to certain areas. And that looks pretty promising as well. [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]