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EuroWire – May 2012
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Transatlantic cable
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.
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.
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.