EoW May 2012

Transatlantic cable

† In the meantime, Bill Ford has gotten behind an interim e ort for relieving congestion on US roads and highways. In the week before Barcelona a venture capital rm that he helped start, Fontinalis Partners, said it had put $13.7 million into a Silicon Valley car-sharing company called Wheelz. Started up in the Autumn of 2011 at Stanford University, Wheelz links up California car owners willing to rent out their vehicles with drivers who do not own cars but occasionally need them.

Mobile World Congress on a subject dear to his heart: the necessity for telecommunications providers and auto makers to work together to prevent gridlock from choking the world’s cities and highways. “When we do the math, and look at the global vehicle population, there is cause for real concern,” Mr Ford told an audience of senior mobile professionals and mobile industry players from 200 countries. “There are about a billion cars on the road worldwide. With more people and greater prosperity, that number could grow up to four billion by mid-century.” As reported by Detroit Free Press business writer Brent Snavely, preventing that prospect – of a never-ending tra c jam that wastes time, energy, and resources – is seen by Mr Ford as the joint responsibility of auto makers, technology companies, and governments. (“Bill Ford: Cooperation Urged to Prevent Global Gridlock,” 28 th February). Wrote Mr Snavely: “Bill Ford sees a future when communications technology in vehicles will do more than simply sync an iPhone or play music from the Internet.” In Mr Ford’s long-term view of the future, the urban trans- portation landscape will be radically di erent from what we know today. “We will have a true network of mobility solutions, all connected and operating together,” he told the mobile industry conference. “Pedestrians, bicycles, cars, as well as commercial and public transportation, will be woven together into a single, connected network.” Automobiles, said the descendant of the inventor of the Ford Model-T, will probably look very di erent and will be able to navigate on their own. They should be connected to public databases that can recommend alternative options – trains, buses, carpools – when congestion is unavoidable.

A new ‘paradigm of durability’ is keeping older cars on American roads, longer

Another Ford, a writer on automotive topics for the New York Times , also has his views on the car of the future, but not in terms of telecom features or position in the transportation network. To Dexter Ford, the statistic that the average age of a car on the road in the United States stretched to a record 11.1 years in 2011 suggests a trend toward longer – much longer – life in service. This Mr Ford wrote: “Multiply that number of years by the annual miles driven – the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] uses 15,000 for the cost calculation on fuel economy labels – and it becomes evident that one pearl of conventional wisdom has become outdated.” That would be the wisdom of the 1960s and ’70s, when odometers typically returned to all-zeros on reaching 99,999 miles. The idea of keeping a car for more than 100,000 miles was the automotive equivalent of driving on thin ice. You could try it, Mr Ford said. But you’d better be prepared to swim. How far can a modern car be driven? Their budgets strained by a stubborn recession, many owners of cars began to push them farther; and, in the process, generated important information.

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EuroWire – May 2012