Ford Spearheads Mobility Living Lab For Real-World Workout Of Self-Driving Tech And More

Imagine this. A self-driving car is whisking brother and sister youngsters over to their elementary school, doing so while the in-car AI-based tutoring system is interactively getting them prepped for their classes that day. Zipping past the smart car is a petite sized autonomous delivery vehicle, carrying prescribed medicine from the local pharmacy to their grandmother at home, she had helped the kids get dressed that morning and didn’t have time to go out to get her needed meds.

Pedestrians walking along on the sidewalk nearby and hoping to cross the street have been receiving text messages to their smartphones notifying them to stay out of the roadway until it is clear for crossing. Traffic lights meanwhile were beaming out special electronic signals aiming to balance the flow of traffic in this area and communicating directly with the cars and pedestrians to efficiently guide them and keep them safely out of harm’s way, using V2I (Vehicle-to-Infrastructure) and V2P (Vehicle-to-Pedestrian) transmissions.

This futuristic scenario is going to become daily reality at a real place in an existing Detroit locale called Corktown, selected as part of a major initiative that’s being spearheaded by Ford.

Considered to be Detroit’s oldest neighborhood, the Corktown area is being reimagined and revitalized to become a showcase urban setting that seamlessly leverages advanced mobility capabilities. With the active participation of a myriad of key stakeholders, including city and state regulators, businesses, colleges, engineers, AI developers, and the like, Ford is aiming to collaboratively create a living lab of mobility that can explore how real people in real cities can best leverage the latest in mobility solutions.

Indeed, as the overall renaissance of Detroit takes place, one of the perhaps most illuminating and transformative efforts will be this innovative mobility corridor involving Corktown.

As a microcosm of how the future of mobility might well be smartly designed and astutely emerge among us, this groundbreaking initiative provides a vital signpost for city and neighborhood planners everywhere and will demonstrate in a practical everyday way how people and tech-advancing mobility options will best blend and enable the transport of us all, including too those today that might be mobility marginalized.

I recently had an opportunity to speak with Dr. Ken Washington, Ford’s CTO and VP of Research & Advanced Engineering, doing so at the TechCrunch TC Sessions: Mobility summit held in San Jose, California on July 10, 2019, and we discussed the latest progress on Corktown and the overarching vision and approach being evolved.

Let’s unpack what this pioneering initiative is all about.

The Big Picture Being Envisioned

First, as readers of my column know, I have extolled many times that the advent of autonomous driverless cars will be a massive form of “change agent” which will spark and activate many other changes in how we travel, where we go, how we get there, along with a restructuring of the landscape of our lives.

Most roadway tryout efforts today that are aimed at adopting self-driving cars are being done in a rather isolated and disconnected drop-it-in manner.

Driverless cars are essentially being substituted for conventional human-driven cars as though it is a simple one-for-one swap. The surrounding environs are as they exist today, absent of other upcoming advances in micro-mobility such as e-scooters, e-bikes, e-skateboards, etc. There’s no interconnectedness being tried out with these mobile forms of transport and nor with the traffic lights and roadway status systems, and there’s decidedly no effort to immerse pedestrians into what will soon enough become a networked transportation-aware ecosystem.

This belies the true likely impacts of how autonomous cars and other new mobility advances will ultimately enter into and spark a reshaping of our society.

Two of my rules-of-thumb about driverless cars are:

• A self-driving car must not be an island unto itself

• It takes a village to design and deploy autonomous cars

We need to look ahead and seek to coordinate and integrate what otherwise could easily become a morass of disparate mobility options. It is important to anticipate the interactions needed among multiple modes of mobility, along with how us humans will use and gain from the advanced tech being devised and deployed.

That’s where Corktown comes into the picture.

The idea is to insightfully and collaboratively enhance an entire locale that can be a testbed for the latest in mobility.

You could do this in an artificial manner at a closed track or proving ground, but it would lack a sense of realism and be unlikely to reveal the day-to-day dynamics of what really works and what doesn’t.

In a bold manner, it would be better to work with an area that is desirous of being revitalized and get a twofer by not only aiding the rebirth of the neighborhood but also dovetail advances in mobility at the same time. This is an overtly conceived urban-favorable experiment that will be a win-win in many significant ways.

A cornerstone of the Corktown effort involves the rehab of a cherished Detroit landmark, Michigan Central Station, a former train station that Ford acquired last year and has committed to spending several hundred million dollars to reconstitute into a centerpiece for the innovation hub.

Creating A Vibrant Mobility Living Lab

Ken explained that the Corktown setting will consist of about 1.2 million square feet encompassing the already being revamped Michigan Central Station and a number of nearby properties that were acquired and are also being revitalized or reconstituted (properties such as an old public-school book depository, a brass factory, a hosiery factory, and so on).

This all will now become a modern-day mix of office space, up-to-date retail establishments, contemporary housing, community meeting sites, open spaces for parks, and other new developments.

Besides establishing these new properties, the notion is to ensure that there is an entire community of people that will be living, working, and playing in a dynamic neighborhood, primed to explore state-of-the-art transportation mechanisms and provide feedback about how it is meshing together.

Envision entrepreneurs, artists, scientists, teachers, government workers, doctors, baristas, and everyone of all walks of life being able to actively participate in a living lab that is trying to explore new mobility modes, doing so while everyday life is happening, and yet at the same time being able to share their feedback and then watch and respond as adjustments occur accordingly.

As Ken keenly articulated, this Corktown revitalization will illuminate and test mobility of the future, creating tomorrow together, doing so in an energizing way and hand-in-hand with the community.

When the Corktown initiative was initially announced, Ford had also predicted that about 5,000 new jobs would be created in the area, of which about half from Ford and the other half by the numerous business partners aiding in making a go of the mobility living lab. Already there are many of these new jobs arising in the venue.

Conclusion

The driverless car industry needs a place where mobility is built into the DNA of the community and can allow for open exploration of emerging new tech and do so in a real-world setting that involves the messiness and unexpectedness that comes with real people trying to go about their hectic lives.

Autonomous car startups don’t have the kind of clout or resources to tackle a community-wide, interconnected, roadway sharing, pedestrian involved, eclectic kind of environment.

That’s where a major automotive firm like Ford can leverage its size and brand strength, bringing together the varied set of stakeholders that would need to be enjoined into such an effort and spurring them into believing in the possibilities of an endeavor of this magnitude.

As Ken and I discussed, there are some mobility developers and engineers that carp that mobility is arduous to design and implement because people make the problem hard, but those developers must come to the realization that it is a needed and core requirement that people are and must be an integral part of the mobility systems development life cycle, ensuring that appropriate mobility options are discovered and put in place. A mobility living lab like Corktown can bring this robust kind of systems thinking to fruition.

Corktown, listed in the National Registry of Historic Places and revered for its historical significance, now stands at the forefront of making essential contributions to the future of Auto 2.0 and can foster mobility advances in a practical and usable way that every city USA and globally can gain from.

Keep your eye and hopes on Corktown.