Does Ford want to
compete with Uber and Lyft? With the Dynamic Shuttle service, Ford this week
placed a small bet on part of its future being applications and software — not
just the century-old industrial process of turning steel, glass and rubber into
cars and trucks. Dynamic Shuttle is a smartphone app front end and scheduling
service back end that lets people call for a van and share a ride with six to
eight people going to more or less the same place. It lives in between city
buses that follow fixed routes and costlier taxis and car-hailing services such
as Uber or Lyft.
Ford recognizes that
building cars and trucks is a hardware business, and hardware sometimes becomes
commoditized when there’s still good money to be made off software. “We don’t
just want to be in a [commoditized] handset business,” said Ken Washington,
Ford VP for research and advanced engineering. Meaning: Look what happened to
Nokia, the world’s largest maker of cellphones within the past decade when its
software (Symbian) couldn’t compete with Apple iOS and Android.
Right now, if you want
to get a ride from Ford, you need to be a Ford employee working on the
Dearborn, MI, campus. That’s where Ford
is running a pilot program using four Ford Transit vans (you expected
Mercedes-Benz Sprinters?). A potential rider would access the shuttle interface
from a smartphone or PC Web portal and, as on Lyft or Uber, select where they
want to go.
Ford’s software and the
algorithm behind Dynamic Shuttle’s technical abilities quickly decides which
vehicle in the fleet best serves the new rider with the least inconvenience to
riders already aboard. The rider gets an offer showing the proposed pick-up
time and ride duration. Were this a commercial venture, the fare would be shown
as well. The rider then accepts or turns down the offer. If the rider accepts,
the new-rider information is dispatched to a tablet on the dash of the van with
route instructions showing the best route for the driver to take.
Ford sees Dynamic
Shuttle as a way to cover the so-called “last mile,” meaning getting someone
from his or her home to a mass transit hub where there’s never any parking, or
it’s in the next town and restricted to residents, or the rider doesn’t have a
car, at least not today. It could also offer mobility to seniors, or
schoolchildren, who aren’t driving, and with more flexibility and destination
possibility than the four-times-a-day shuttle to the shopping mall. The cost
would be more than a bus with shorter end-to-end travel times, less costly than
Uber or Lyft, and not quite as quick.
According to Erica
Klampfl, the global mobility solutions manager for Ford’s research and advanced
engineering group, “The Dynamic Shuttle solution could fill the gap between a
taxi service and public busing in cities around the globe. It also could offer
a valuable service in emerging economies, where growth is outstripping
development of the public transport infrastructure.”
Ford did extensive
research in the United States and abroad, including in Atlanta, New York,
Edinburgh, and London. Ford says it also considered “growing national
economies” in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in Brazil, and Chennai and Mumbai in
India.
Not surprisingly,
different passengers from different cultures place different priorities on what
the Dynamic Shuttle should be. In the US and in England, Klampfl said
passengers want a quality ride: Wi-Fi, USB charging jacks, no climbing over
other passengers for a seat. So the shuttles here have six to eight seats, left
side and right side with an aisle in the middle. The back row is three-across.
The would-be front passenger seat is a cargo bin for backpacks and briefcases.
In comparison, in
India, Klampfl said, “Passengers want to be guaranteed a seat.” So a Dynamic
Shuttle would seat up to 18 with the tradeoff of space and ease of entry and
egress.
How Dynamic Shuttle
would evolve
Ford is convinced
there’s a market for Dynamic Shuttle. Ford wants to be more like Apple than
Nokia, which wound up selling its handset business to Microsoft and is a shell
of its former self.
“We want to do it,”
says Ford’s Washington. “We could do it [ourselves]. We could license the the
software. We could do a joint venture licenses.”
Dynamic Shuttle is a
ways from becoming a commercial venture. The first steps are to scale up from
the current four Ford Transits serving the Dearborn campus to more Transits in
Dearborn and other Ford locations with more users loading the back-end software.
From there, Ford would try commercial pilot programs in the US and abroad.
Dynamic Shuttle is part
of a broader initiative that Ford calls Smart Mobility. It also involves car
sharing, where a Ford owner can rent out his or her car by the hour or day when
it’s not being used, as well as short term car rentals in crowded cities where
the customer is guaranteed parking at the end or stopover point of the trip.
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