Sometime in the near future, when you run into traffic and are unlikely to make it to a meeting on time, your car will control the damage. All you will need to do is tell the car, before you start, the route you want to take and the time in which you have to make it to the destination. The software in your car will sense the slow speed of the car, because you are in heavy traffic, calculate the extra time you are likely to take, activate your mobile handset (probably through Bluetooth) and send out a message to the person waiting at the other end that you will be late by a specific time. Once you’ve reached, it will send out another message, this time to your spouse, that you are at your destination — safe, though late.
Or imagine you are cruising on the highway along the Western Ghats. The scenery is amazing but you know that the weather is unpredictable. Suddenly, a message on your radio will alert you that a cloudburst has happened a kilometre ahead. You can pull over and wait for it to pass. This alert will not come from the weatherman. There will be a sensor attached to the wiper of the cars ahead of you; when all ten begin to work on maximum speed, a remote server will catch the signal and conclude that a cloudburst has happened. If you have bought the application, the information will straightaway be relayed to you.
As a member of the Technical Advisory Board of Ford Motor Company, it is Ventakesh Prasad’s job to see that applications like these one day become the part of a car’s ecosystem. As the market place gets more competitive, it is applications like the two mentioned above that will make a car maker stand out. And Prasad is the man who has to make it happen for Ford. In his vision, there will soon be an army of application developers around the world, including in India, who will develop applications for Ford cars; customers will buy them off the shelf and install them in their cars. The business models of mobile phones and cars have come together — you could call it convergence.
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Prasad got into Ford in 1996 because he was candid enough to admit in the interviews that he didn’t know anything about cars. After studying at the National Institute of Technology at Trichy (1980 batch), Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Prasad had done his PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Rutgers University and worked for Nasa and Ricoh till the call came from Ford. The bosses there probably wanted some fresh and unbiased ideas. His ignorance of cars was put down as an advantage. “There was a little silence and then the interviewer asked how did I know it was the right answer,” says Prasad.
According to Prasad, it enabled him to come up with visions to democratise technology and transform automobiles from mere mechanical systems to computing platforms in the course of the past decade. “It really helped me to not know that there are things which couldn’t be done. It allowed me to create a white space and doing experiments with interesting players outside of the industry,” says he.
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Industry estimates indicate that 25-30 per cent of material costs in manufacturing a vehicle today go towards integrating electronics and software systems in cars. However, in value terms, over 90 per cent of the features on offer are IT driven. Connectivity in vehicles has become crucial. Till recently, the tyres were an island in the car because they were not connected into the car’s software. But even that has changed now because there’s a small sensor in the tyres that tells the driver the pressure while driving. This interactive thought is at the core of Ford’s attempt to morph from a vehicle manufacturer to a technology provider. Prasad says Ford Executive Chairman Bill Ford’s concern is no longer to make more cars, “but what if we only make more cars.”
At the heart of Prasad and his mission to foster global cross-functional innovation and leverage the vehicle as a software platform where features and services could be beamed in from the outside without incremental built-in hardware is the Open XC programme. Launched in San Francisco last year, the project aims open-source applications for vehicles from developers the world over. Prasad explains, “Large firms would not see any value in doing an application for a market sized at less than a million. So what happens is that the value proposition for those at the tail-end of any kind of distribution gets neglected. What we are trying to enable here with this is if you are a market size of one and I as a developer see the need, I can create the applications with the toolkit that is available.”
The key here, Prasad says, is to ensure that the applications do not become outdated. “The architecture is based on built-in, brought-in and beamed-in elements. The built-in parts are meant for 5-10-year cycles, brought in elements have a two-year period and beamed in elements have 3-6 months cycle,” he adds. “So Internet music, Google applications for directions are fast moving through the power of the cloud and the phone. On the car itself we don’t want to add any application unless absolutely necessary. We want to minimise the risk of seeing something that is outdated.” With scale, Prasad is hopeful the cost of buying applications too will come down. Voice-recognition and navigation software were to be found only in high-end cars till not so long ago; today even entry-level cars come fitted with it. Ford’s Figo, the mass-market car for India, is thus enabled with voice-recognition technology which allows users to place a phone call on the move. Additionally, the induction of radar technologies helps the driver to maintain a safe distance with cars in front.
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It is perhaps this inquisitiveness which has now driven Prasad to work with a medical research firm in the US to develop an application which would monitor glucose levels of passengers in vehicles. The project, still in the works, would determine the glucose levels of the passenger in the passengers’ seat, mute the music or phone volumes and issue an hypoglycaemia alert if required. “Who would have thought a car company would have anything to do with a medical research firm. But now all these services are in the realm of possibility.”
But this is not where Ford’s ‘what next?’ man is stopping at. Prasad talks of shared mobility usage for which gears have already started to move on the Internet. The owner of the car can “repurpose” (sell) the seats while travelling alone. The cloud would credit appropriate change for service as per usage. As urban cities grow bigger and bigger, Prasad says, the lines between private and public modes of transportation would begin to blur. For the car-owner, it’s putting the asset, which begins to depreciate from the moment you first turn on the ignition key, to good use — he can rent his car when not in use to bring down the net cost of ownership. “We at Ford are committed to the shared usage models. We will leave no opportunity unturned for enhancing personal mobility experience. However, to get the Ford experience you need not own a Ford car. You can have the experience for 1-2 hours.” That’s a practical man.