Ford may be a long-term Microsoft partner, but Google's cloud is apparently too tempting to ignore. At Google I/O today, Ford announced that it's working with Google on smart-car technology, using Google's "Prediction" API to guess where drivers are headed and change settings accordingly.
For now, it's all about fuel efficiency. Ford is looking at recording a driver's travel routes and times, and then feeding that data—encrypted and protected—to Google, so the car can predict where a driver is going in advance. For instance, if you always commute at the same time, the car will guess that you're commuting when you start up at that time on a weekday.
Then, the car would alter its powertrain and fuel usage settings for the kind of drive it expects. If you're in a hybrid-electric vehicle, for instance, it can reserve battery power for the parts of the drive where it's anticipated to be most useful.
"Ford already offers cloud-based services through [Microsoft-powered] Ford Sync, but those services thus far have been used for infotainment, navigation and real-time traffic purposes to empower the driver," Johannes Kristinsson, system architect, Vehicle Controls Architecture and Algorithm Design, Ford Research and Innovation, said in a press release. "This technology has the potential to empower our vehicles to anticipate the driver's needs."
Like a lot of the tech I saw at Ford's Dearborn, Michigan research center last week, the new Google cloud technology is years away from making it into any retail car. But figuring out how to make decisions based on data, and not just give raw information, seems to be a trend with next-generation car interfaces.
For instance, I saw a demo that went beyond just searching for restaurants by voice, to be able to ask the car "what is the best reviewed Japanese restaurant near me?" In that case, the car's cloud API—in this case, Microsoft's Bing—would combine local search with Yelp ratings, filter, and return suggestions of places you'd actually want to eat at. That's a big step beyond just reading out a list of search results with no contextual information.
The ultimate goal, Ford researchers told me last week, is to let drivers stay focused on getting the car where it needs to go. The less drivers have to fiddle with controls, change settings, or punch menus, the better, and cloud-based predictive technologies can play a role in that.