Ford Ousted Its CEO And Is Doubling Down On Self-Driving Cars (qz.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: At a press conference today, Ford announced that it had replaced CEO Mark Fields with Jim Hackett, director of the company's autonomous-car research. Previously the CEO of furniture company Steelcase (and a former athletic director at the University of Michigan), Hackett took a seat on Ford's board in 2013. He has been running the company's Smart Mobility subsidiary since March 2016. Smart Mobility is tasked with securing Ford's long-term future. The division houses Ford's self-driving car program, which plans to start ferrying employees around its Dearborn, Michigan campus in 2018. Outgoing CEO Mark Fields previously said that Ford would sell autonomous vehicles to consumers by 2025. [...] Hackett is expected to continue the push into self-driving cars. "We have to re-energize our business, we need to modernize our business," executive chairman Bill Ford said about the company's initiatives into new technologies at the conference.

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Re:take my money

[TWX]

That's actually a good point, in that vehicle performance matters a lot less when the occupant does not directly operate the vehicle. Performance is no unimportant; most people want to be conveyed to their destinations in reasonable amounts of time and don't like unnecessary waiting, but if one looks back on the late seventies during the fallout from the OPEC oil embargo, most full-sized cars had less than 200 horsepower while weighing in at over two tons and they still managed to sell. Even what were considered mainstream performance or sports cars of the '60s and early '70s have acceleration rates that can be met by most mid-market, "boring" cars today.

If true autonomous vehicles become the norm, I fully expect that the entire nature of auto body design will change. The traditional three-box design of sedans and coupes and two-box design of wagons, SUVs, vans will almost undoubtedly be re-examined as there will no longer be a need for the driver to face forward, and if powertrain efficiency continues to improve then there may be less need to continue streamlining. While autonomous vehicles and driver-controlled vehicles are mixed on the road I expect that autonomous vehicles will still have to pass crash-safety testing, but it may not be unrealistic to see fully autonomous vehicles start to re-examine traditional carriage design where occupants are able to face each other instead of everyone facing forward, and you could even see tabletops inside of vehicles that are intended for long over-the-road travel.

If petroleum-burning powertrains continune to increase in efficiency, then it's not unreasonble to consider relocating a smaller, barely-adequate powertrain to under the passenger compartment rather than in front of it, similar to the old Skateboard concept that GM worked on in the early noughties, especially if they do a more thorough job of divorcing the duties of the body control module and the powertrain control module such that some bolts and a single umbilicle connect the passenger body from the chassis. Service would be rolling the car into a bay, securing the lift to the body, unbolting the body and the umbilicle, lifting the body off, and having room to work on the chassis. Boxer-type horizontally-opposed engines would fit this chassis well. Obviously electric drivetrains would be even easier.

Future vehicle development would probably center on the configuration of the passenger compartment along with amenities, while attempting to define vehicle exteriors that meet expectations but don't necessarily have to exceed them for most buyers. If one looks at vehicle design now and historically, everyone follows each others' leads anyway, so it would be no stretch to assume that future autonomous passenger cars would continue to follow suit where everyone mimicks everyone else with the occasional halo-car coming out to stir-up interest.

It'll be interesting to see what happens long-term.