Gadgetory

there you go okay here we are folks all right welcome to the cnet stage here at CES 2012 I'm Brian Cooley and of course we are in the midst of really just kicking off CES 2012 if you're catching us live right now you know my particular specialty and passion within this wide world of technology that we cover many avenues of it but I get into the cars love the car tech and joining me now is one of the guys who will absolutely vibe with me on that one please welcome Paul Mascarenas Ford's chief technology officer thanks bro good to have you here now when you were here a year ago at the last CES you were freshly minted as the CTO at Fort I was I'm one year into the jump now right it's a ambassador of decagon is heavy diverse arree good to have you here now the phrase you coined last year is one that resonated in a lot of people's minds i've been using it and or butchering it ever since I kind of have stole it from you you said what about the car I said the car is the ultimate mobile device and it's so true and you like that we're looking absolutely is CES who is that in the future be called maybe the car electronics show because we've got such a huge presence of automakers here Ford of course one of them Alan Mulally giving the keynote again this year catch me up on what you guys have announced I think even more announcements this year on the tech front at CES than any of your previous couple of years that you've been here yeah where do we start so it's great so far as you say Alan Alan Mulally's actually flying in later today he's fourth career the detroit north american international auto show going on in what kind of juggling calendars of the moment right on top of this show which normally doesn't happen someone has an alum will be flying in italy participating in a vehicle reveal this afternoon our fusion energy which is a plug-in hybrid okay the plug-in hybrid fusion yeah continuing the reveal that we had it detroit yesterday and then tomorrow who because I mean you pulled it halfway back at Detroit and the rest of the curtain comes on today no no we're going to show it to the tech community today folks you really get yeah that's right right right and then tomorrow he'll be participating in the keynote panel CEO keynote panel with Gary Shapiro encode but what we're talking about here are really three or four key areas the first is we're showing for the first time in North America our evos concept car which if you haven't seen is absolutely beautiful car it's a concept in terms of design showing our future design language for our global products and actually when you look at the fusion production car and the evos concept you're going to see a lot of a lot of similar looks and it's amazing how much came across from that prototype concept vehicle to the production vehicle so that gives you an idea of where we're taking out design globally but the fast thing about the Evo's is that it's got almost a almost a pulse with the driver as you envisioned it very much interpretive of what the drivers doing the condition they're in even some some health status interpretation right yeah absolutely so so it's about the design the powertrain plug-in hybrid so again that energy technology exactly the same technology that will be shown on the fusion production car okay and talking about this afternoon but in terms of the technology is really about this experience that we talked about last year applying technology in the vehicle in a relevant way to create an ownership experience for our customers to you latah nurse it because ownership means you know one thing traditionally in cars it means you know getting the keys and paying off the note but you're redefining that term right yeah I mean there's the rational ownership experience which is about the quality would consistently deliver high-quality vehicles affordable value for our customers dependable over their lifetime that's the very rational side of it great fuel economy and so on but making this emotional connection ok that's the honors center and it's this what I described is a seamless experience between the home the office and the vehicle so whether you're listening to music you might be listening to internet radio in the house as you move into the vehicle our vision is that by connecting the vehicle you can continue to enjoy that same seamless experience whether it's apps that you're using absolute you would normally be running on a mobile device your smartphone tablet or whatever now throughout blink you can access those in the vehicle yeah and again guys were pretty early on that move adoro open beak one or two others I think around you're asking a couple additional answers you one just this week mpr rocks MIT I Heart Radio what is Roxy oh you don't know that one Roxy which is really interesting when it's actually context based information so knowing the destination of the vehicle knowing where you are when you're driving so if you're passing a shopping mall you might get access to shopping information are you looking for a restaurant that type of thing so its proximity days and this is exactly where we're moving now is providing more of this contextual information to the driver so it's not just bombarding you with information uni it's actually providing you with the information that you might need when you need it based on the location of the vehicle that's an interesting way to attack distraction I think which I'm sure you agree is starting to bubble up as a topic i had a regulatory layer yep what did you think of the NTSB recommendation we'ens go away from cars absolutely and you know we talked about distraction even remove hair last year yeah and if you remember along with the ultimate mobile device I talked about keeping your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road and the sync technology that we're putting in with the voice commands and so on being part of this solution to people wanting to use their mobile devices but in a vehicle and us wanting to enable our drivers to continue to concentrate on this primary task of of driving there's a dressy real wide okay and is right you know I think our viewers and we absolutely support the ban on handheld texting you know we're putting the technology and because we think it's bad for people to be using hand-held devices while they're driving right our view is that you can legislate but that's not going to solve the problem because people are still going to want to use their devices in the vehicle so we'll continue to develop our in vehicle technologies to allow the safest experience that we can and we we believe the safest experience is this seamless connectivity make it really simple make it really intuitive to connect and then provide an HMI human-machine interface and interacting with the device that is as much as possible enable through voice the key part I think is the first part you said with all our folks get the voice part keep your eyes and hands with it should be hopefully not subdivide your mind too much but the part about continuity where the car can pick up where I left off there's less sort of overhead of me saying okay let me rethink what I'm doing when I'm in the car because the car is still somewhat of a digital island except you do different behaviors in the car with media and communication but if that was not the case if it followed you more from your other places in your life there's less distraction to say okay where am I let me get oriented because most of us do that while we're already up and running you're absolutely right you're hitting on the point i mention it's all about this familiarity this intuitiveness yeah and as much as we can make it seamless you know you can really then continue to focus on driving now on the other side I don't want to get too lost in the driver distraction issue because so we're putting the technology and but on the other side we're also putting in a lot of vehicle technologies vehicle centric technologies that actually help the driver for example with the focus launched last year with the fusion launch right now you know we're launching technologies active cruise control for a collision warning mitigation by breaking lane departure warning the fusion vehicle has a lane keeping assist feature your youth noise gets down to a loss like planned and you know I took last time as well about the democratization of technology in here so in offered not offering these technologies to you know low volume niche customers we're making them very affordable very relevant and available to millions of customers around the world continuing to focus on the pillars that we've defined of high quality vehicles that are safe through the technologies that we put on board deliver the best or amongst the best fuel economy yea high efficiency gasoline engines EcoBoost plug-in hybrids and so on and also smart features and technologies and just continuing to focus on those elements one side of the technology seems to be answering for the weaknesses and the other whether it's distraction or whether its inefficiency we know that the human driver left to their own devices drives typically inefficiently right lots of high high change driving modes a lot of breaking a lot of acceleration bad stuff both of those dynamics right self or somewhat autonomous driving systems will start to moderate out bad driver behavior soon right we were not too far from that not too far from that and we're also putting in some driver assist features so for example in our current hybrids we have the fusion hybrid for example yeah the little system where you can grow leave throw the leaves right you can look at your driving style we have in the focus all right we got to be busy get people with video game they want to enact again what we want out of them right the butterfly future and so on so again putting things in that it's a little bit of fun it's not distracting but it's encouraging this efficient driving style there is a thought out there that the autonomous car is closer than we think there's a lot of this bubbling up no one's ready to put a stake in the ground and when they're going to deliver an autonomous car what is what's in the way of autonomous car self-driving cars are we going to get there with one sort of a big jump or are they going to be a very gradual continuum as we move some kind of self-driving in the market what do you say it's a good it's a great question my my view is it's somewhere in the future I haven't got a crystal ball myself so how does 10 years grass are in general crazily maybe nothing crazy for full autonomous continuing to see a progression of semi autonomous vehicles that are moving towards own yeah when we talk about these technologies I don't think people always relate to what's in our vehicles today so for example things like active cruise control that are just managing speed the big piece of autonomy is sitting there or we have the auto park assist feature which allows you to parallel park your vehicle on the fusion we have a pullout feature that chill out helps the driver to pull out I haven't tried that was way so that's interesting still these release again and these are autonomous features the self-parking I gotta hit a self parking in an affordable car as you've rolled it out is it's the best I've driven I've given a lot of self parking technologies in cars that are up to six figures that can't quite get the nose in and this man twenty-thousand-dollar Ford can do it over and over and over so I give you kudos on that but as we look at these what I call perimeter technology lane departure forward collision prevention active part all the things that work around the sensors around the outside of the car are we at the point where we can start to just roll out more software that turns those physical devices into what we need for autonomy or is there some additional tangible tech we need to get to autonomous car know what we run very focused on is we've got the hardware in the vehicle so we've got radar sensing we've got camera sensing we've got electric power steering that gives you control over the keyboard these these are what we call the fundamental building blocks the smart thing the innovative thing then and this is how we make it affordable is not to build in more hardware but it's to develop the software algorithms and the control sister so for example your toe parkassist no no no extra harbor in the vehicle that's just rolled right it's the ultrasonic sensors yet the palace terry electric power steering and a really a smile algorithm so that's what i think differentiates are in our smart innovative company this does to put a car company on the television cycled a CD company right technology company and that's what we've been emphasizing yeah now if you talk about full autonomous vehicles lots more hardware and a lot of a way to make it affordable ok i'm talking about some very very expensive ok a lot of that Karthik our communication thing is really green right now we can take our communication i think we can talk about in a different context because that's using Wi-Fi yeah short range Wi-Fi DSRC dedication short-range communications very affordable very practical a lot of big pilots around you know not just the country we've got a big program up in Michigan in Ann Arbor but in Germany Japan so I think that offers real opportunity in the near term there's speaking of your locations let's talk about your newest lab mm-hmm you've come to Silicon Valley we have we announced last week that we were opening a lab in Silicon Valley we didn't talk about the exact location but somewhere in those you know i'll be coming out a lot yeah welcome you though express or something together but no well that's really about so it's a natural extension of the work that we've been doing for the last four or five years to really connect not only with our more mature tech partners people like Google and Apple Microsoft a little bit further up the coast but the University of Stanford but I think most importantly for us having a presence in this really innovative community here and it is amazing for me it really is one of the most remarkable innovative communities in the world and it's everything from you know entrepreneurial innovative individuals yeah startups working out of their garages the kind of tech shop type approach all the way through to the tech giant's like Apple so we've been working in the valley area for a long time what is this fellow's the right time to establish a hub for us well especially if to be closer to those partners and sources and inspirations and places where you can hire the best people or some of the best people ever those universities is this is also part of the faster turn of product and design right you got to be faster which means you got to be closer to where some of the resources on road assume right so again we you know we continue to drive down the development cycle for the vehicle program yeah but you still measure that in years all right it's two or three years right what we're trying to mesh here is this consumer electronics cycle that you're measuring in months you know six to nine months a lot of folks don't realize that no different yes really and part of the solution for us it's like meshing the small gear with the big gear at this very small fast turning with the large one you've got to have an open architecture so you can introduce the latest technology and keep it up to date an example I'd give would be my fault touch we took hear about my fault such a year ago we're just launching our first major upgrade on my home touch faster simpler more functionality but we're doing it purely software-based you're staring at USB Drive reactor the metal cases right ending the us please had an interesting day knows that experience like last question I've got for you although experience like for you guys to go through what was really wasn't intended that way and then it of being a little bit of a beta cycle right i mean software companies technology companies here are kind of used to finding out from the field needs some work here and there was that difficult culturally for Ford to deal with to get that kind of feedback from the market very different for us really the vision of where we be as a tech company the ability to launch industry leading technologies yeah in a high-quality whey robust weight but at the same time be able to very very quickly respond to a customer feedback both in terms of the things I really like and then the areas of opportunity for improvement and then get those out quickly to do it efficiently and to do it in a way that is obviously free but not inconvenient to iCarly's and I think the software based updates is absolutely perfect example of the direction we're moving in as a company completely technology company as being here could see appreciate it thanks Paul Mascarenas CTO of Ford and looking forward to Ford's announcements through their CEO Alan Mulally coming a little bit later here at CES 2012 in a minute another life backpack shot here at the floor of CES you know that means BTW brian Tong is out there somewhere ready to make your jaw drop yet again stay tuned i'm brian cooley at CES 2012 with cnet com away boy you