ASM: Congratulations to the team and yourself for winning those awards. It is quite an achievement. Next up, I want to focus on the technology of these EVs. Younger customers, who are largely driving EV adoption, favor advanced technological features. Recently, I heard that Ford was working with Google to implement the Android operating system into its vehicles. As Ford moves into the future, looking at the next ten years and even beyond that, how does Ford plan to create electric vehicles that are attractive to younger customers while still being accessible to older and more traditional demographics of Ford?

DP: Yes, so it is a very good question there. So there are a couple of points to that accessibility. So one, this customer is more technologically aware already. But no matter what age people are, they are a lover of “new”. It is more a state of mind than age. I have met young people who have bought the car and a lot of older people too. We are putting technology in from known partners like Google. But the key thing is those systems we designed from a human-centric standpoint. So, for example, we did not start from saying well this is a screen, what do I do? We started with what tasks people have to do and how they want to feel and design the system around that. So the system in the Mach-E was designed using real customers in real time and is designed to adjust to you. After about 1 hour the system adapts to you. What I mean by that is that the things you do, personally comes to front. Because one person uses Google Maps and the other uses Waze and iHeart radio. We can’t know what that is and we don’t want you to sit down and configure that. So our system watches what you do and you can select from a whole menu of apps but when you do select them, they come to the front and stay there. 

There are four things at a time on the screen in Mach-E. People do about four things usually music, navigation, telephone and data on the screen. Most people we watched and we have watched thousands. So your version of those will appear on the front screen and we have tested that on all ages. We found that people adapt to that quickly and to be more precise the car adapts to you. So we are finding that all age groups enjoy that. That’s just a human thing. But the answer to your question is because we come from a human centric development background for these cars now. It was not what our engineers think, it is what tasks do you want to do and how can I help you. Let me give you an example. When we said what door handle should I have, when you work with a human centric method, and this was a method pioneered by a company called IDEO, and they use a particular method that helps you reframe the question because you start with what door handle i should have and then it says to you, well what are you trying to do and that is you are trying to get into the car. After looking at the first round you say “wrong question.” you are already giving the answer when you say “what kind of door handle to use.” What you should say is “what do you want to do.” The answer to that is “I want to get into the car.” Good, now how might I make it easy for you to get into the car. Along the way you might think you need a door handle but maybe. So in this car, it turned out we did not need a door handle because when your hands are full and you have coffee and a laptop, you can’t hold onto the handle. So this car does not have door handles in the way of a normal car. When you approach the car, you can poke the little button with your elbow and it pushes the door open for you. Then you can put your elbow and sit down without needing a door handle and it is very aerodynamic. So those are two specific examples of how we came at the design from a human centric way instead of us saying the traditional answer of what people want and that’s how you make them compatible for people, you solve for what people are trying to do not what your preconceived idea of what a door handle is. 

ASM: Yes that is a good sort of strategy to approach these situations with. Now actually I want to talk more on a topic that is related to door handles which are electric vehicles in extreme weather conditions such as extreme cold, like here in Michigan. A common concern people have with electric cars like Teslas in cold weather is that features of the car such as the battery, door handles are affected by weather conditions. So how does Ford plan to alleviate concerns with electric cars such as range anxiety and poor performance in cold weather?

DP: Right, very good question. So the first step, the one we can get right out of the way quickly is that we test the car in every condition that is possible in the region it is sold in. We have been doing that for a hundred years plus and we have massive facilities and we can test all of those weather conditions any time in the year because we have a facility somewhere. We tested our car to those extreme levels, this is normal for Ford, every car goes through it. That means if there is any possibility of any issues with those we find that during testing.  But that’s the more obvious. The less obvious is that electric cars are different. So there are two parts to it. One part is education on behalf of the customer: we have to help them learn how it works and what is important. Number two is that we have to anticipate their issues and make it easier for them and help them. Because well no one has time to read a manual today and we don’t expect them to. So we have to learn what they are going to and help them get through it through the help of connected data. This car and all of our electric cars going forward are highly connected, they are essentially computers on wheels. Every single module in the car is updatable even if we don’t know what we are going to do with it. The gear shift selector is updatable. We don’t know what else we are going to do: it goes forward, backwards and stops. But we come up with a new idea and then we would need it to be updatable. So we did not ask questions, we made everything updatable. Then we watch customers’ usage data. I have got an example for you. We noticed that in the very cold weather in Michigan some people are leaving their cars unplugged but the car automatically prepares for you, when you arrive. But when it’s unplugged it can’t do that or it would use up energy. So we want to tell the customer that you should plug it in. So we saw that happening and added a message to the car which informs the customer when it’s cold. So we saw the customer’s issue and gave them advice before they asked for it and by that way we saw their problem and helped them with it before they knew it was a problem. Furthermore, we watched some of them and they wanted the best performance and longest range and they noticed it’s worse when it’s cold. So we are going to send a notification to every customer that will appear on their app on their phone and it will give them advice on how to improve their range in cold weather. It talks about ways to reduce the load on the car and will teach them how to do it. We give them the lesson using connected data when they need it and when we see that they need it and we will carry on doing that. We never had the ability to do that before and so we will be with them on the journey as they learn to use these cars, that is the key really, and there is a lot to learn with an electric car, it is not the same. When you have learn that, people have pride in that they love that they learned that and so that is really cool but they do have to learn something but they won’t read a manual and the material we put out, we know that because we put it ot and they still don’t read that [laughs]. But we can watch them and give them advice when they need it, that is the new way now.