Ford explains Smart Mobility Experiments for China's megacities

At Ford's premiere event of the year, the 2015 Detroit Auto Show, Chief Executive Officer Mark Fields showed a map of Ford's Smart Mobility experiments which are designed to envision how transportation will work in the year 2025 and beyond.

The map Fields showed included two dots in China, which represent the Urban Commuter program in Shanghai and the Mobility Integration program in Chongqing, respectively. Both were competitions open to the public.

In an exclusive interview with Xinhua, Ken Washington, vice president of Research and Engineering at Ford Motor Company, gave additional details about the two experiments in China and the overall goals for the Smart Mobility experiments.

Washington highlighted China's extensive public transportation system, and the ways that Ford could supplement its use.

"With applications that enable people to use public transportation with greater ease, those experiments are excellent candidates for megacities in China," he said.

The Urban Commuter program in Shanghai challenged competition entrants to find a way to make commuting in Shanghai more pleasant.

"One of the things we're looking for is solutions for mobility in areas that are densely populated. When you consider what's going on in populations in what we call megacities, one of the biggest challenges is just getting around," Washington told Xinhua.

"The mobility solutions that we're trying to develop are to help people be mobile. Owning a car, parking a car, driving a car is increasingly extremely challenging," he said.

Shanghai's population of 24 million was targeted by Ford to improve their quality of life through apps that help increase mobility and overcome traffic congestion.

The experiment winner, Parkopedia, designed an app for Shanghai that allows users to find parking near their favorite destinations, which has become increasingly difficult as downtown areas grow.

Meanwhile, the Mobility Integration program in Chongqing challenged competition entrants to find ways to tackle cities that require multiple modes of transportation to move people into, out of and through the city quickly and efficiently.

The winner, Kewill, designed an app called the MultiModal Transportation Platform. It combines city-based mass-transit options, including buses and trains with bicycle rentals and rickshaws to get people where they want to go.

The app finds high-traffic areas and calculates alternative routes, then provides contact information for services, pricing, line changes for buses, subways, and railways.

But Washington's vision exceeds supplementing public transportation in China.

"If you have the ability to bring a vehicle to you and to relocate it to the same or near the same location as that vehicle, you are prone to use an on-demand service," he said.

But before Ford can bring on-demand vehicles to China, Washington says he needs to study and then operationalize the data collected from the experiments.

"Behind all of the experiments is a commitment to bring the information together in a way that we can use to bring value back to our customers," he said.