Ford CEO Mark Fields looks to a future beyond car ownership

Ford CEO Mark Fields has been moving the automaker into ventures outside of its normal core business of selling cars for a few years now. His LA Auto Show keynote touched on the company’s current undertakings and future plans. Engadget sat down to talk with Fields about the automaker’s post-car-ownership road map, its partnerships with public transportation and the company’s plan to bring autonomous taxis to the market in 2021.

Tell me about your plan to transport people without them driving their own cars. You guys are moving quickly in this space — like really quickly. I think for an automaker like Ford, that’s a huge change in such a short amount of time. Is it something you felt like you had to do or something that you wanted to do?

I think it’s a combination of both. And I think it first starts with taking a point of view on the future. For a lot of businesses, the future is just a five-year business plan and every year you just add another year to that plan. Our approach has been to take a point of view on what we think the world is going to look like in the next 10 to 15 years.

Part of developing that point of view on the world is looking at societal trends, looking at consumer preferences, looking at things like what’s happening with the growth of big cities around the world. The issue of air pollution and air quality. Then developing a strategy in that world in terms of where we want to play and how we want to win, rewind back to today and make some strategic choices.

I think about half the world’s population lives in cities. Our view, and others’, is by the next 15 years that could be literally two-thirds of the population. So that will mean more congestion. The infrastructure is not going to be able to handle that. That’s a threat to our business and one of our motivations. What we need to do now is to first adjust to that and, secondly, view that as an opportunity. Particularly along the lines of stepping back and looking at the transportation system. Then where do we want to play within that and, importantly, talking to cities to understand what problems they want to solve. And how can we bring assets and business models in that maybe weren’t natural but are a natural extension of Ford?

How is that conversation Ford is having with municipalities? Are they surprised that Ford is talking to them?

They’re very surprised that an automaker is talking this way. Part of what we tell them is we’re on this transition to be an auto and a mobility company. What we’ve learned is when you talk to a lot of mayors about what they’re facing, they face this problem of they want more capacity for mobility in the cities. I think that more and more people are coming in. At the same time, they want less congestion and they want less pollution. So they’re looking for partnerships and partners to come and help solve that for them. That’s kind of how we’re thinking about this.

At the end of the day, you have to have a customer. For us, it’s not just about going into a city and just doing business within their boundaries. We want to work with them and make this a win-win. Help them solve their mobility problems but also at the same time open up new growth opportunities for Ford.

Is there a plan to be more integrated into public transportation?

I think what we are thinking about is the transportation system. I think what’s really going to be important going forward, particularly for cities, is how do all these pieces fit together? How do they communicate to one another? You know, a great example is, how about a future where, when a Caltrain comes into the station, it’s already communicated with our Chariot shuttles to be there so that when folks come off they can go the last mile. It’s all ready to go. That integration, I think, is going to be very important to cities. That’s how we’re thinking about engaging cities.

You know, we have this advantage. We have a relationship with many, many different cities around the globe because of our core products (police and emergency vehicles). We have those relationships. How do we work with them to help solve some of these problems that they’re trying to solve?

Talk a little bit about the infrastructure and communication of smarter cities. Is this something that you guys are looking into? The car-to-car communications, the car-to-infrastructure communication — is that something that Ford is also investigating?

Yeah, we’re working on that. I do think that we have to be very realistic. Vehicle-to-infrastructure is assuming there’s an infrastructure there.

Yeah. There’s an infrastructure along, like, two strips in Las Vegas right now.

Yeah. I think we’re quite a ways from there, but clearly we’re working on vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure. Our overall approach, particularly on autonomous vehicles, is not to rely on vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure. We want the vehicle to be self-aware in its environment. Therefore, a lot more processing power is going to be required on vehicles and that’s why we’re using LIDAR systems, cameras, radars and other sensors.

Ford just seems very aggressive. You announced autonomous ridesharing is coming in 2021. And everyone else is like “Yeah, we have it, it’s coming.” You’ve drawn the line in the sand.

It’s a great rallying cry for us. It comes back to the why of our company. We’ve always tried to make people’s lives better by helping change the way the world moves. That innovation mind-set drives everybody in the company and it’s a great way of focusing everybody’s efforts

If you make that public proclamation, then everyone’s like, OK, we have to do this.

And they’re all excited about it. Plus, when you think about the talent necessary — the talent that we need to add to our company to complement the talent we have — people want to work to make their dent in the universe. They want to work on projects that matter. We’ve been very pleased with the talent we’ve been able to attract to our company based upon not only who we are but what we intend to do.

Infrastructure, cars and bicycles. It seems very odd that Ford would get into bicycles.

It’s not about “Well, Ford’s in the bicycle business.” That’s not the point. The point is these bicycles will have GPS systems on them and are feeding us data. We will be able to understand not only how traffic moves in a city but also how these bicycles are used. Then, more importantly, to your point around integration, how do we use this to help integrate into our shuttle service? That’s what we’re really looking at. People using different modes of transportation to get from point A to point B. How do we enable that? And at the same time make a good business model of it?

Five years ago, did you think that Ford would be “OK, we’re doing mobility, we’re going to start talking about last mile”?

I think five years ago we were obviously working on the core business coming out of the Great Recession, working on our traditional business. At the same time it’s this process that we have of always looking at the business environment and understanding what it means for our future. This mind shift around going from owning to owning-and-sharing has been very enlightening for us. Then, on top of it, a lot of us have lived in big cities around the world, and, you know, there’s more cars and the same amount of streets.

The slow evolution of the tech-centric LA Auto Show

The LA Auto Show billed itself as the place where established automakers and enthusiastic startups would come together to show off the latest technological achievements in the world of cars. It even rebranded as “AutoMobility” combining the traditional show and connected car event into one.

Jaguar unveiled the I-Pace and Chrysler showed off the first hybrid minivan and Mini finally got into the hybrid game. But the majority of announcements were about regular old cars and trucks. Which is fine, but there are other car shows for that. So, while there might not have been a stack of tech-heavy cars at this year’s event, we did at least get a hint of our connected auto future.

It’s worth remembering, automakers take between three to five years to bring a new car to market. Sure some like Ford and GM are moving quickly into this new semi-autonomous world while Audi, Mercedes and BMW have been whittling away at self driving for years, but it takes time to move an industry this big to announcing all its tech here in LA.

So, expect more tech next year, and even more the year after that. And if the auto industry sees the value in introducing its newest electric vehicle or semi-autonomous feature under a warm fall Southern California sky, the LA Auto Show should become the data in the automotive year that pushes cars into the future.

Hyperloop One settles lawsuit with former employees

As Hyperloop One continues its attempt at building the future of public transportation, it’s moving on without the baggage of a messy lawsuit. The company announced today that it has reached a settlement with former employees, including co-founder and former CTO Brogan BamBrogan. No terms were disclosed, however, the lawsuit contained allegations of financial mismanagement, harassment and threats, which Hyperloop One had responded to with a $250 million suit of its own, claiming the exec had tried to lead a coup within the company.

In a memo to current employees, CEO Rob Lloyd looked forward, citing the company’s opening of a fabrication facility, acquiring $50 million in financing and new partnerships. Now the company can focus on more standard issues, like delivering on its vision of self-driving vehicles that turn into high-speed train cars. Easy, right?

Hyperloop One:

“Hyperloop One is pleased to announce that it has reached a confidential resolution of litigation with its former employees and looks forward to continuing to execute on its business plan.”

CEO Rob Lloyd:

“Team,

I am pleased to inform you that we have resolved the lawsuit that was filed this summer against Hyperloop One by several of its former employees.

Lawsuits can be distracting for companies; they often halt momentum until they can be resolved. That didn’t happen here.

The resilience we have shown as a company since June has been nothing short of remarkable. Let’s just take a moment to reflect on just some of the accomplishments since.

On construction: We opened Metalworks, the world’s first hyperloop fabrication facility. This week we installed the first tubes on columns, a major step in our development loop. Today we have 65 full time team members working in Nevada at both Metalworks and our Test and Safety. We remain on track to have our Kitty Hawk moment in early 2017.

On partnerships: In Dubai, we announced the Port Jebel Ali feasibility study with DP World and we were selected for Dubai Future Accelerators. We then revealed our designs for the world’s first hyperloop to go from Dubai to Abu Dhabi in 12 minutes in coordination with RTA. And in Europe, we established working groups with the Dutch and Finnish governments for project feasibility.

On financing: We announced a $50 million investment led by DP World and hired Brent Callinicos as chief financial advisor.

This is an impressive list and none of this would have been possible without the entire team, from top to bottom. This is an amazing group to be a part of and we are on the cusp doing something extraordinary together.

Now let’s keep our focus on achieving our Q1 milestones and show the world the first working Hyperloop One system to the shape the future of transportation. The world is watching!

Regards and thank you,

Rob Lloyd
Chief Executive Officer”

Source: CNBC, Recode

‘Netflix Vista’ imagines binge watching inside ‘Black Mirror’

Sure, lately it feels like we’re living an episode of Charlie Brooker’s tech-gone-wrong series Black Mirror, but what if we really were? This “Netflix Vista” short just posted by the company takes that idea to its preferred conclusion. Including technology reminiscent of the first season’s third episode (“The Entire History of You”), it imagines a world where everyone has implants that allow them to augment reality with video overlays.

The only difference is that instead of running through their own past highlights Instaclip-style, people are watching (what else?) Netflix. As ads go, we’re not sure this one makes us want to plug into Netflix more deeply, but it could probably be worse — at least it’s not the world of Playtest, or Fifteen Million Merits.

Source: Netflix (YouTube)

BMW and Baidu aren’t making self-driving cars together anymore

German automaker BMW and Chinese search giant Baidu might not be getting along too well these days.

According to Reuters, the two companies have ended their partnership and are no longer cooperating on nor testing self-driving cars in the US and China. The break down of their relationship reportedly resulted from “different opinions on how to proceed with research”, Olaf Kastner, BMW’s China CEO, told Reuters. They apparently had a different development paces and ideas, though he failed to be specific about the disagreement.

• The Grand Tour now available on Amazon

Last April, Baidu gave people another reason to call it the Google of China; it began investing deeply in a Silicon Valley self-driving car team. The company, which as of last December had 657 million monthly active users conducting mobile searches, has solidified its status as a Chinese search giant, but it’s also so much more. It offers close to 60 additional services, such as Baidu Encyclopedia (an index sort of like Wikipedia), Baidu Space (a social network), Baidu Games, Baidu Youa (an eCommerce platform), Baidu Yi (a mobile operating system). And it’s developing self-driving cars.

The company formed a team in Silicon Valley specifically for autonomous car efforts. The team, which is part of Baidu’s Autonomous Driving Unit, has been working with BMW on a joint project to produce a self-driving car for the Chinese market. Both companies completed the first successful tests of their driverless car in December 2015 using a retooled BMW 3 Series. BMW entered into a partnership with Baidu in 2014 and has been testing their mutual car tech in Beijing and Shanghai. But now that partnership has come to an end.

• Chinese search giant Baidu is forming a self-driving car team

BMW’s Kastner said it parted ways with Baidu after they jointly developed “automatic overtaking capability”, which is a key milestone for self-driving technology, as it gives autonomous vehicles the ability to pass other cars at various speeds. BMW still plans to expand its research and development team in China, and it will continue to be partners with Baidu on high-definition maps, which are essential to autonomous navigation.

Baidu explained to Reuters that it’s using Ford vehicles for testing now. It’s been said that Baidu is looking to produce a car by 2018. Keep in mind that China published its roadmap last month for the development of self-driving cars that can drive in most situations.

China wants nearly every car to have some self-driving capability by 2030.

Earthquake science explains why election polls were so wrong

Polls are not predictors.

This is the message that American University history professor Allan Lichtman has been screaming at the world since 1981: It’s not that the polling system itself is broken — instead, polls behave exactly as they’re designed. The problem is they aren’t designed to predict the outcome of elections.

“Polls are snapshots,” Lichtman says. “They are not predictors. They are abused and misused as predictors because they’re so easy. If you’re a journalist, you don’t even have to get out of bed in the morning to write a story about the polls and tell where the so-called ‘horse race’ stands.”

Lichtman has accurately predicted the winner of the nine US presidential elections since 1984, relying on his 13-point Keys to the White House model. He even got it right this year, when most pundits and polls were wildly, disastrously incorrect. But Lichtman didn’t just get it right; he predicted in September that Donald Trump would win the presidency, more than a month before Election Day. That was also before a swathe of potentially game-changing October surprises rocked the news cycle, including a tape of Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women and FBI director James Comey reigniting conspiracies about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server as Secretary of State.

Despite these massive revelations and in direct opposition to nearly every pre-election poll, Lichtman stuck with his September forecast: Trump was going to win the presidency. And, he did. For most pundits, commentators and voters, it was a shocking result.

“And, this is not the first time,” Lichtman says. “Maybe this is the most spectacular instance, but of course, you know we also had 1948, when all the polls pointed to Harry Truman losing to Tom Dewey. We had the last — in 2012, when the points were inconclusive. They didn’t predict a four-point Obama victory in an electoral college near-landslide. In 1980, the polls didn’t predict a Reagan landslide.”

And when Lichtman says “landslide,” he means it.

The Keys to the White House

Lichtman’s prediction system is founded on geophysics, using the fundamental ideas of earthquake science to predict social and political disruption. He created the Keys to the White House system with Vladimir Keilis-Borok, founder of the International Institute of Earthquake Prediction Theory and Mathematical Geophysics, in 1981.

Essentially, Lichtman and Keilis-Borok changed their thinking about elections. They applied geophysical terms to the process, getting rid of ideas like Democrat, Republican, liberal and conservative. Instead, they reinterpreted the system in terms of stability and upheaval.

Stability means the party currently in power remains, and upheaval signals a change in ruling party. Here’s how it works:

There are 13 keys, or scenarios, that have a true or false value. These are things like, “There is no sustained social unrest during the term,” and “The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.” When five or fewer keys are false, the incumbent party wins. If six or more are false, the challenging party wins.

Using this model, Lichtman has accurately predicted every election since 1984, sometimes years in advance. So even though he predicted the 2016 results more than a month ahead of time, Lichtman was relatively late this year. That’s Trump’s fault.

“It was an unusual election,” Lichtman says. “On the one hand, you had Donald Trump, the most unusual candidate we’ve ever had. We’ve never had a candidate with no history of public service and a history of enriching himself at the expense of others.”

He cites a handful of scandals that should have ended Trump’s campaign on the spot, including his refusal to produce his taxes, the fact that the Justice Department accused his business of engaging in racist housing practices, and his history of attracting allegations of sexual assault.

“In 2012, Herman Cain for a while was the favorite for the Republican nomination,” Lichtman explains. “Three or four women came out and accused him of sexual harassment and it drove him out of the race. A dozen women have accused Donald Trump of sexual harassment or assault, he bragged about it, gave a blueprint of how he did it, and he still survived.”

Throw in the numerous other ways in which Trump is an unprecedented candidate, add a dash of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, and 2016 was a tricky year to predict. Still, when the majority of pundits, analysts and pollsters were wrong, Lichtman’s model got it right.

Part of that comes down to Lichtman’s knowledge of American political history. Every key value is decided in context, using decades of elections, close campaigns and policy information to inform his decisions.

“I didn’t just randomly look at past presidential elections to see what patterns are associated with victory and defeat for the party holding the White House,” Lichtman says. “Rather, I was guided by a theory based upon my previous study of history for many years. And that theory was that elections are primarily referenda on the strength and performance of the party holding the White House.”

This is not how polls approach presidential elections.

Why the polls are wrong

“First of all, I have nothing against the pollsters,” Lichtman says. “A lot of them are friends of mine; they’re perfectly good, competent people. It’s not that the pollsters did anything wrong. It’s that there are inherent problems with the polls and particularly with how the polls are used.”

He begins his explanation with this caveat because he doesn’t hold back when critiquing the political polling system or the way the media covers polls. After 35 years of telling journalists, students and peers that polls are not and can not be predictors, they still dominate the election conversation.

Lichtman sees value in polls as snapshots of the country’s feelings, and nothing more. They simply aren’t designed to be predictors, he argues, for three critical reasons:

• There’s no reality against which to measure the polls because no votes have actually been counted.
• It’s impossible to know how the snapshot might change in the future without taking another, inherently misleading, poll.
• Polls use voter samples, but no one knows who is actually going to vote.

Algorithms designed to measure voter turnout only provide a probability, not an actuality, of who will cast a ballot. This is a built-in error, Lichtman says. Plus, when reporting on polls, pundits and journalists will note error margins of plus or minus 3.5 percent, for example, a practice that lends false credibility to the numbers.

“That is entirely misleading because that’s just the sampling error,” Lichtman says. “That is, the error that covers the fact that you’re not looking at the whole population, you’re only looking at a sample within the population. It doesn’t take into account any other type of error.”

These inherently misleading characteristics are compounded by poll compilers like FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver, Lichtman says. FiveThirtyEight’s final election forecast gave Trump a 29 percent shot at winning the electoral college.

“Nate Silver and others commit — and I think this is something really important — what I call the fallacy of false precision,” Lichtman says. “They give you these very precise estimates; Nate Silver would say something like, ‘There’s a 71.4 percent probability of a Clinton win.’ It’s sounds really precise and really scientific. In fact, there’s no science behind it at all. Nate Silver does not do any independent scientific analysis, Nate Silver is a clerk. He simply compiles poll data. And, to the extent the poll data is not entirely accurate, those probabilities are not going to be entirely accurate. If you build a castle based on sand, the castle is going to collapse.” (We reached out to Silver for a response to Lichtman’s polling thoughts but have yet to hear back.)

Make no mistake, Lichtman is not saying that polls themselves are broken. They’re driven by complex calculations to provide the best snapshot that they can. Polls function as they’re designed, but they’re misused as predictors by pundits and journalists, largely because it’s easy to build a story around them, Lichtman says.

“Pollsters make huge amounts of money doing what they do,” he explains. “And the media has to write a story every day. …Without the polls, you wouldn’t have this day-to-day horse race drama to pontificate about and to report. This is when the broadcast outlets and others make their money, covering these elections. So absolutely, it’s been driven by the power of money.”

The modern 24-hour news cycle only exacerbates this problem, Lichtman says.

“There’s a built-in dynamic to all of this; it’s not by accident that the pollsters and the media have this intimate dance with one another,” he says.

It’s unclear how much the major broadcast networks will make directly from their coverage of the 2016 election, but it’s estimated that the candidates spent $2.8 billion on ads for local television alone. This is actually a decline from 2012, mostly due to Trump’s focus on digital ads this cycle. In May 2015, Tribune Company CEO Peter Liguori, the head of one of the nation’s largest media conglomerates, said he expected $200 million in political advertising revenue this election cycle, up from $115 million in 2012.

“Pretty much you can explain anything in life by sex, power and money,” Lichtman says.

A new electoral college

Here’s something that Lichtman and Silver agree on: The popular vote and electoral college are increasingly divergent.

In 1981, when Lichtman developed the Keys to the White House, the popular vote drove the electoral college, but changing demographics have skewed this relationship in recent years. This first became apparent in 2000, when Lichtman predicted a win for Al Gore. Gore won the popular vote, which is why Lichtman still counts it as a victory for his system, but that election changed how he approaches the electoral college. Today, he predicts who will win the election, not only the popular vote.

The rift between the electoral college and popular vote is exemplified by New York and California, two large and overwhelmingly Democratic states. Essentially, they pile up millions of useless popular votes.

“Those votes count for nothing in the electoral college,” Lichtman says. “You can win New York and California by 10 votes and get the same electoral college turnout.”

Republicans simply aren’t concentrated in particular states on the same level as Democrats. Texas is the closest example, but it’s far more competitive than California or New York.

“Small victories, as we saw for Trump in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, count for vastly more than these huge majorities that the Democrats pile up in New York and California,” Lichtman says. “We have a severance of the popular vote and the electoral college. Obviously in a big-win election, that’s not going to happen, that doesn’t matter. In any close elections, you’re going to see the popular vote and electoral college vote diverge if Republicans win.”

This is yet another reason Lichtman’s 2016 prediction took longer to calculate than previous elections.

“That didn’t change my keys, but it kind of led to a rethinking of how I interpret the keys,” he says.

A perfect world

If Lichtman were in charge, US election cycles would look completely different.

“I would take all the pollsters during the election cycle and send them off to a beautiful Pacific island for a very nice, long vacation,” he says. “Then, I would tell the candidates, ‘Completely revise the way you campaign. The way you campaign is useless and detrimental.’”

For one thing, negative ads don’t work, he argues.

“If negative ads worked, Hillary Clinton should have won in a landslide,” he says. “She had vastly more negative ads, vastly more ads period than Donald Trump. So get rid of all the negative ads. People hate them; they don’t help you win.”

This perspective is shared by many election scholars and researchers, but officially, the jury is still out on whether attack ads help or hurt a candidate. Campaigns keep using them, which suggests that high-level strategists see value in going negative.

Also in Lichtman’s perfect poll-free world, candidates would focus on building a blueprint for governing. They would discuss policy proposals in terms of the big picture and minute details. This is what the public wants, after all, and actually governing well is the best way to get reelected, Lichtman says.

Of course, alongside the negative ads, Clinton ran a relatively positive campaign packed with details about her proposals and a clear vision for the country. Still, she lost — and Lichtman predicted it. That’s one reason his system features 11 keys about the context of the election and only two keys relating to the candidates themselves. Individual candidates can sway his results only if they’re exceptionally charismatic or a national hero, and that’s it.

Back in the real world, miles away from a fictional island filled with vacationing pollsters, Lichtman has a message for voters themselves. It’s the same one that he’s been touting for the past 35 years:

“Forget the polls. Forget the pundits. Forget the day-to-day events of the campaign. Keep your eye on the big picture. Look at the implications of the leadership and policies of these candidates to the future of the country. That’s what really matters. All the rest is fluff.”