Ford's Share-Car Project in India announced at CES show

Ford Motor Company has announced its Smart Mobility Plan and 25 Global Experiments at the ongoing CES show in Las Vegas, United States. This includes the Share-Car Project that will be initiated in India.

With an aim of creating a model for easy vehicle sharing among small communities, Share-Car will be a unique project from the company that will be tested in Bangalore. Small groups including co-workers, apartment dwellers and families will be allowed to share a vehicle among multiple drivers under this project. The company's intention is to help consumers who would want to own a car but can't afford one. The company will deploy researchers to develop a model for vehicle scheduling and managing ownership.

Ford Motor Company wants to help change the way the world moves by solving today’s growing global transportation challenges. Ford's Smart Mobility plan will use innovation and take it to the next level in connectivity, mobility, autonomous vehicles, the customer experience and big data. At the CES show, the manufacturer highlighted both, the semi-autonomous vehicles and the under development fully autonomous vehicles.

They also laid emphasis to the 25 global experiments out of which eight will be done in North America, seven in Asia, nine in Europe and Africa; and one in South America. All these initiatives will gauge what a customer wants from their transportation system and the feedback will be used to design models accordingly. In this way the carmaker will create better customer experiences, more flexible ownership models and social collaboration that can reward customers.

It is very early to comment how the experiments will fare for the Indian customers but we think this is a good initiative taken by the manufacturer. With more people sharing vehicles, the number of cars on the road will reduce, eventually relieving some congestion. Let us hope more manufacturers follow suit and come up with such innovative ideas.