Ford doesn't think everyone needs to own a Ford, but it still wants non-car-owners to drive them. The company said this week that it will be testing a car-sharing pilot program to learn about how willing Ford owners are to share their vehicles. As part of the program, people who buy their cars through the company's credit arm, Ford Credit, will be invited to offset their monthly payments by allowing drivers to rent their cars by the hour. The company also launched an in-house car-sharing program in London.
The pilot program in the US will take place through Getaround—an existing mobile platform that lets users list their cars and rent them out to pre-screened drivers. Getaround already operates in California in Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, as well as Portland, Oregon; and Washington, DC. Ford's pilot program, called "Peer-2-Peer Car Sharing," will also take the program to Chicago, where Getaround has yet to launch, and to London through a car-sharing service called easyCar Club.
Ford will reach out to 14,000 US car owners who financed their Fords on credit, asking they if they'd like to participate in the program. It will do the same for 12,000 such customers in London.
Predictions on how private-car sharing will play out? However it does, Ford seems to have been ahead of other American car manufacturers with its integration of information technology.
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Yahoo Autos reports that Google and Ford will be teaming up for a joint venture that will commercialize autonomous vehicle technology. The venture will be formally announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January:
By pairing with Google, Ford gets a massive boost in self-driving software development; while the automaker has been experimenting with its own systems for years, it only revealed plans this month to begin testing on public streets in California. Google has 53 test vehicles on the road in California and Texas, with 1.3 million miles logged in autonomous driving.
By pairing with Ford, the search-engine giant avoids spending billions of dollars and several years that building its own automotive manufacturing expertise would require. Earlier this year, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said the company was looking for manufacturing partners that would use the company's self-driving system, which it believes could someday eliminate the roughly 33,000 annual deaths on U.S. roads.
While exact details of the partnership were unclear, it's understood the venture would be legally separate from Ford, in part to shield the automaker from liability concerns. Questions of who will be responsible for any crashes involving self-driving cars have been seen as a major hurdle to putting them on the road; earlier this year, Volvo said it would accept responsibility for crashes in autonomous mode, a pledge followed by Google and Mercedes-Benz.
The deal is understood to be non-exclusive; Google has been talking to several other automakers for some time about using its self-driving systems. Most major automakers and several auto parts suppliers are developing their own self-driving controls as well, with a few—Nissan, Volvo and Mercedes-Benz among them—promising advanced vehicles for customer sales by 2020.
Related: Uber vs. Google: The Race to Monetize Autonomous Vehicles
In Pilot Programs, Ford Embraces a World Where not Everyone Owns a Car
Ford Investing $4.5 Billion to Bring Electrification to 40% of Its Vehicles by 2020
Ford to Test Autonomous Cars in California in 2016
Is California Overregulating Driverless Cars?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kaszz on Friday June 26 2015, @01:27PM
The news is that the manufacturer provides a slim financial way to handle this. Car sharing, not renting as Hertz etc does is a regular business in many places. The consequence is that fewer people owns a car themselves but have access to one when they need one.
Consequence:
* Less car owners
* Less need for inner city parking space
* Higher use of existing cars, ie more wear and tear
* Less profits on car selling and maintaince but the ones in use will have higher value.
* Higher threshold for customization.
* More financial room to buy an electric car.
(Score: 2) by nyder on Friday June 26 2015, @01:47PM
Sounds great, until you get the legal side into it.
Mainly when Owner A no longer has a car because Renter B totaled it, and his insurance won't cover it. Hopefully Owner A has the car insured for any driver. Oh, wait, that doesn't cover when you rent your vehicle to another person? Oh, that must hurt.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 26 2015, @02:09PM
I assume Ford has covered this or that deal is off. And if not there's got to be an insurance that says "If renter B crash the car, I get a new one next week" without exemptions or buts or ifs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 27 2015, @04:22PM
...without exemptions or buts or ifs.
I see you're new to insurance...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2015, @03:37PM
I didn't read how Ford does it, but for standard car sharing, there's not a dedicated owner, but the car is owned by the sharing organization formed by those sharing the cars. I guess insurance-wise it's handled the same way as a rental car.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday June 26 2015, @03:39PM
Or driver B is just an idiot who puts undue wear and tear on my car.
Sounds nice in theory, but there is no way in hell I'd want to let some total stranger borrow my car, even if he had proper insurance and it *wasn't* a manual.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2015, @08:08PM
1. Like closing the doors too hard
2. Unncessarily raising and lowering the windows
3. Running over bumps and potholes at speed
4. Driving over the footpath at times, especially when turning
5. Using the brakes too hard
6. Riding the brakes, causing disk warp
7. Using windshield/windscreen wipers when dry
8. Using the floor as a rubbish dump for bodily fluids and waste
9. Paint scratches
All those and many more in an automatic car. Wear and tear doesn't show up quickly in a car. It may take years to find out what that guy did.
Once I had someone put water (or another fluid) into the power steering oil, brake oil and gear oil in my car that I lent to him. Another one killed the engine the same day I lent him my car.
Cars were never meant to be rented or driven by more than one person. If they want a car, they should buy one.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday June 27 2015, @12:43AM
1. Accelerometers in the doors?
2. Log the system bus (CAN) of the car?
3. Accelerometer?
4. Accelerometer?
5. Accelerometer and system bus logging?
6. System bus logging?
7. Measure wiper motor current and humidity sensor?
8. UV-light?
9. Chassis scanning using special light?
It can nowadays all be measure.. and billed.
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Friday June 26 2015, @02:03PM
Who gets to decide on the makeup of the happy couple? I know I'd not want to be sharing a car with someone else's old pizza under the seat or who-knows-what sticking to the floor. The hygiene issue alone makes me think this idea won't fly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2015, @02:46PM
Car-sharing has been up and running [washingtonpost.com] in major US cities for awhile.
(Score: 2) by scruffybeard on Friday June 26 2015, @04:33PM
They could implement a feedback system for both the owner and renter. You could ask a few questions like was the car returned clean, and on time? The renter could enter comments about mechanical problems. Future owners/renters could see these comments before deciding to enter in an agreement.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2015, @07:55PM
But don't give any bad comments about the tattooed thug who cleaned his nose on your upholstery, or he might kill you. Just smile and walk away. And stop renting your car afterwards saying you need the car 24 hours a day now.
It didn't work with online thugs (bad reviews get taken down quickly and they sue you), and it definitely won't work in real life. In real life people can and will harm you.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Friday June 26 2015, @05:14PM
I know I'd not want to be sharing a car with someone else's old pizza under the seat or who-knows-what sticking to the floor.
Forget pizza. How about a plastic bag with leftovers of a drug? How will you prove to the police dog that it isn't from your stash?
(Score: 2) by tathra on Friday June 26 2015, @05:31PM
hopefully it'd learn people to stop volunteering away their rights and consenting to searches. if they search without consent and with bullshit, made-up-on-the-spot probable cause then its an illegal search, which should be thrown out. maybe that'd be the first step in waking people up to just how totalitarian, oppressive, unfair, and unconstitutional prohibition is so we can get rid of it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MrGuy on Friday June 26 2015, @02:08PM
...it's like Zipcar, without any of the solved issues around service, disputes, gas, insurance, fleet management, vehicle access, or end user convenience.
(Score: 3, Funny) by gidds on Friday June 26 2015, @03:11PM
I know houses are expensive in London, but I didn't think they were that big!!
[sig redacted]
(Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Friday June 26 2015, @03:24PM
(Score: 2) by soylentsandor on Friday June 26 2015, @04:47PM
That's a big car. This [wonderfulengineering.com] is a small one :)
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday June 26 2015, @06:00PM
It's so small the web server couldn't find it! :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2015, @10:57PM
If you only need something to keep the rain off you while you get 40lb of groceries from a couple of blocks away, it's practical transportation. [google.com]
OTOH, the 1st time I saw a picture of one of these, I got this image of it getting blown into a ditch from the turbulence when a freeway-capable car passes it.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by gidds on Monday June 29 2015, @01:23PM
No, they're not small, just far away [tedstees.com].
[sig redacted]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday June 26 2015, @03:48PM
There's lots of car sharing inside our house, but it regularly ends up in tears, screams, and require third parties to step in and arbitrate.
Ford will have to force their dealerships to add timeout rooms.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday June 26 2015, @03:26PM
Ford Embraces a World Where not Everyone Owns a Car
I'd embrace a world where not Everyone Applies Arbitrary Capitalisation to Headlines.
I know, I've ranted about this before, and frankly it caused far more excitement and discussion than I expected.
But anyway, to summarise, title case never conveys any useful information and can sometimes do just the opposite by introducing ambiguity. And sometimes it just looks plain weird, as with this one.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 26 2015, @03:56PM
My extension has had a title case button for a couple of weeks now. It produced this:
" in Pilot Programs, Ford Embraces a World Where Not Everyone Owns a Car"
It lowercased 'in' because of the leading space. I should fix that.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday June 26 2015, @07:35PM
That was the one section of English grammar that never took: capitalization. This is the first time it has ever been an issue. Well, I installed the firefox plugin to handle it. We'll see how it does.
Washington DC delenda est.