At Ford World Headquarters, a 12-story 1950s-era edifice for 3,000 of the company’s 160,000+ global employees, there’s a statue of Henry Ford and a car showroom featuring the company’s greatest hits, from the oldest surviving Model A (1903) to Executive Chairman Bill Ford’s 2017 GT Supercar performance vehicle.
The showroom doesn’t yet feature a self-driving car, but it will soon. The company has several test sites—Miami, Pittsburgh, and around its Michigan HQ—and plans to roll out a fully self-driving car by 2021. The 115-year-old multinational automaker is pivoting to reflect changing consumer behavior from a focus on car ownership towards mobility, autonomy, and electrification as part of its City of Tomorrow initiative.
Ford’s self-driving car track wasn’t taking passengers the day I was in Detroit, so I didn’t get to take an autonomous vehicle for a spin. But I did sit down with Sherif Marakby, VP of Autonomous Vehicles and Electrification at Ford.
Marakby, who has a background in electrical engineering, is in charge of rolling out the autonomous vehicles and electrifications program. Apart from a year at Uber, his entire career has been at Ford, including international postings, since 1990. Now Marakby is building out the future for Ford, working with Argo AI to develop a virtual driver system, and the human-centered designers at Greenfield Labs in Palo Alto, while actively recruiting new talent.
He’s also moving his team into a 45,000-foot former factory that’s being re-imagined as a geek-friendly, stripped-down industrial chic lair in the up-and-coming Corktown neighborhood of Detroit. Eventually, Ford will own 1.2 million square feet in the neighborhood, as it also plans to take over the now-abandoned, 18-story Michigan Central Station, CNN Money reports.
Here are edited and condensed excerpts from our conversation.
Sherif, what was your first job at Ford?
In 1990, my first role was in Electronics Engineering. Ford used to have an Electronics division, basically designing electronics for audio systems, and that’s what I went to school for.
And briefly outline your role now.
I lead the autonomous vehicle development and delivery for Ford. This includes the business model, and making autonomous vehicles work profitably for the company, and the industry as a whole. I’m also leading on strategy and planning for the EV—battery electric vehicles—business, globally.
After 25 years at Ford, you left Michigan for Silicon Valley and joined Uber. But then, a year later, you came back.
I did.
As everyone knows, 2016 and 2017 was a troubling time at the ride-sharing company. Was there anything positive you brought back here from your time there?
The agility and speed and the culture of Silicon Valley.
Any specific concepts that you’ve put into practice here?
We have a lot less meetings now; less email, and we are moving the team into Corktown, in downtown Detroit, in a very Silicon Valley way, so we can work together. It’s a converted factory which has been converted to three very open-plan floors. It’s all open desks, all technology-focused, allowing communication to flow, with open areas for collaboration.
Cool snack-dispensing kitchens and Soylent in the fridge style?
Yes, exactly. All of the things that you see in Silicon Valley we’ll be bringing to this new building. We’re very excited about it. In the neighborhood, there are lots of restaurants and walking areas, so we think it’s going to create a lot more interest from tech talent, who want to work in that environment, but also want to work at somewhere like Ford. Essentially it’ll be a showcase for the future of Ford.
Unlike unproven Silicon Valley startups, Ford is one of the few companies that can create a software/hardware end-to-end solution and it’s still standing 100 years later.
Agreed. Ford, as you said, is a company that has created products for over 100 years and has sustained through ups and downs of economies, including technology changes, and industrial innovations. We spend a lot of time focusing on the core capability of the company and how to preserve that. When we created “Team Edison” for the battery-electric vehicle division, we took what’s strong in the automotive industry and used that, including the durability of manufacturing at scale, that we know how to do, while bringing the trends we’ve learned within Silicon Valley.
Did you have to explain who Edison was to any of your Team Edison staffers?
[Laughs] Well, we have a picture of Thomas Edison and our founder, Henry Ford, together in our office, so they get the idea.
You’ve worked all over the world for Ford, are you still looking outside the US for inspiration in your new role?
Absolutely. One of the advantages of Ford is that we sell cars everywhere and we know that there are very different behaviors in different places around the world. In fact one of the things I did was take Team Edison to China. We spent time in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. We went to dealerships, to suppliers, we saw how the consumer responds to battery-electric vehicles, how the customer that is already buying battery electric vehicles.
What was the biggest lesson from your China experience?
We found that the battery-electric vehicle customer isn’t necessarily looking for the best vehicle dynamics. They want the best technology. So we started to investigate better Human-Machine Interaction, putting in better screens so the vehicle communicates in a new way with the driver.
Talking of human-machine interaction, you’re one of the few people I’ve met who’s actually sat in the back of a self-driving car.
Oh yes, many times now.
What was it like the first time?
It was several years ago now, here in Detroit, in a Ford vehicle which was part of an early research program. It had a safety driver, of course. You do feel different when there’s a safety driver, I haven’t yet been in an autonomous vehicle without one as yet. There was also a passenger engineer that was monitoring the systems, and they were both communicating with each other.
So you were in the rear seat?
Right. The biggest thing is a sense of apprehension. You ask yourself, “Is it really in autonomous mode now?” “Will the safety driver need to intervene?” Having said that, most of the autonomous vehicles today have a screen in the back which shows you what the car is seeing.
The screen gives you the car’s POV? How does that help?
When it spots obstacles—other cars, bicycles and pedestrians,—it puts a box around them as if to say: “Yes, I can see that,” which lessens the anxiety. The vehicle knows what it’s doing, it’s observing things.
Are there “signatures” denoting different styles of driving?
Yes, that’s one of the key points in autonomous cars. Sitting in the car, you feel some of them are more aggressive than you would expect the car to be, while some of them feel too slow. That’s obviously an issue because if it takes longer to get to where you want that’s not good.
Will you be “recording” classic driving behaviors? For example, when I was at HRL Laboratories in Malibu, they’re using brain-machine interfaces to “record” signature landings of highly experienced pilots. It would be cool to select a “Sebastien Bourdais in a Ford GT” setting for an autonomous ride somewhere.
Right now we take the DNA of what an average human would do, while driving a car in normal traffic, and you start there.
Finally, can you share anything new from the delivering Domino’s pizza experiments?
One thing we definitely observed is the willingness of the customer to come out to the autonomous car to get their delivery. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, it was relatively easy, more so in the summer season of course. But in Miami, getting someone to come down from their 20th floor apartment to the curbside was more difficult. Environment is very important for the context of autonomous cars. It’s easier, we’ve seen, for deliveries in suburbia.
Perhaps next you need to start developing a fleet of drones that crouch on top of the autonomous vehicles and then fly up to the 20th floor to deliver the package?
Our team in Palo Alto is working with drones, but I can’t talk about that yet!
S.C.Stuart was a guest of Ford Motor Company for this trip to Detroit.