Ford has announced it will open a new research and development lab in Silicon Vally later this year. Representing Ford’s first dedicated R&D facility on the west coast, the lab will focus on “innovations in personal mobility.”
“ Ford has an incredible heritage of driving innovation in the transportation and manufacturing sectors during the past 107 years,” said Paul Mascarenas, Ford chief technical officer and vice president of Research and Innovation. “Now it’s time to prepare for the next 100 years, ushering in a new era of collaboration and finding new partners to help us transform what it means to be an automaker.”
Ford is keeping quiet on the exact responsibilities of the lab, but Ford President and CEO Alan Mulally will elaborate more on the subject during his keynote speech at the upcoming CES show in Las Vegas. However, Ford says the lab will lead the charge in areas of personal transportation for megacities, open-source hardware and software development and the implementation of using “the car as a sensor.”
The R&D center will be located San Francisco Bay area, providing good access to Silicon Valley, Stanford and technology partner Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. Ford has yet to announce how many new jobs the facility will create, but says the “new lab will be comparable to what you expect of a startup, with an emphasis on quality over quantity.”
