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Note: InformationWeek 500 Conference preview: Ford CTO Paul Mascarenas will discuss how the automaker is making software an ever more important part of the vehicle.
When Ford upgraded this year the Sync software that's inside more than 300,000 vehicles, the company truly became a software company, making good on a promise to continually improve its in-vehicle software well after the car or truck is sold.
The move shows Ford putting more IT in front of the customer and making tech a bigger part of its products. It's why we asked Ford CTO Paul Mascarenas to speak on Sept. 11 at the InformationWeek 500 conference in Dana Point, Calif., where I'll interview him on the role of customer-facing tech at Ford. (Register to attend and ask your own questions.)
Ford is thinking beyond Sync about more--and more radical--next-gen car technology. What if your car could sense when you're white-knuckling it through a snowstorm, and automatically limit distractions and help you drive better? What if your pickup interacted with the cars around it, and even with the roads and stoplights, to help traffic move safer and faster? What if car designers could test ideas using virtual reality glasses, so they could know without making a physical prototype if making a back window smaller limits visibility too much?
To give you a sense of what Ford's doing, and why we invited Mascarenas to speak at the conference, here are just a few ways it's exploring next-gen car tech, which I saw during a visit to Ford's Dearborn, Mich., headquarters earlier this summer:
Monitoring Your Health
Ford's testing ways to monitor the driver's physical state. It can monitor breathing with sensors tracking the rise and fall of the seat belt. Sensors on the steering wheel can take a pulse, or sense sweaty palms.
Ford isn't looking to start diagnosing or addressing illnesses. If cars have any...