This is the year that many of the technological innovations that Ford has been working on will start to come out. That’s the message that Ford CEO Jim Hackett is telling the media at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit which started today. Hackett says that the vehicles of the future will be so intelligent that they could drive themselves.

Hackett indicated that many of the innovations that will start to appear in Ford vehicles will related to the Internet of Things. IoT features would allow cars to be connected with other intelligent cars on the road which would ultimately make autonomous driving a much safer feature. They could also connect to intelligent cities of the future via the cloud to improve traffic flow.

Jim Hackett, CEO of Ford, talks about technological innovations that Ford will be announcing in 2019 with Fox Business:

Ford Working on Vehicles of the Future

It’s my history to take some time, not too much time, to be very thoughtful about a very powerful way that Ford’s going to win. We are through that phase. This is the year that we start execution.

A series of announcements are staged in time for when they need to come out. That together forms what we believe are the vehicles of the future. They will be ever more intelligent and ever more fun to drive. They are so intelligent that could drive themselves.

They relate to a world that in itself has gotten even more intelligent. For the listeners, it’s called Edge Computing. For others, it’s called the Internet of Things. All it means is your vehicle and the things it has to interact with will suddenly be talking to each other through vehicle connectivity, the cloud, and the brains that are inside the vehicle itself.

This is the Year of Intelligent Vehicles

There’s a period where all this is evolving and people are going to wonder if we are getting out of the car business. Not at all. It’s just the adoption of all this kind of performance changes what the vehicles can do. We’ve been hard at work mapping all that out and thinking all that through. This year you are starting to see some pieces of that come forth.

New Ford Investors Focused on New Technology

The market has begun to see these new technologies as attracting outside investors. There’s news in the last three days of people buying into artificial intelligence drive systems and of people putting money inside other car companies. It’s all about them investing in this new technology.

Ford is probably even more attractive to people like that because of how run the company is and how well architected the vehicles are. There’s not as much risk in that part.