Last month Ford sent letters to 14,000 of its American drivers with an unusual suggestion: For extra cash, they could rent their cars to fellow urbanites wanting a cheap ride.
America’s second-biggest auto giant wouldn’t directly sell any additional cars or trucks under the arrangement; it wouldn’t even take a cut. But it would put Ford closer to the front of a movement in which cars are shared, ignored or Uber-ed — not bought.
The peer-to-peer rental experiment — which has the Bay Area in a prominent role — is only the latest weird move for America’s auto powerhouse, maker of the F-150 and Model T. Last month, Ford launched a pay-as-you-go network of shareable, on-demand cars in London, called GoDrive.
And this week, it introduced a foldable, battery-powered “e-bike,” the MoDe:Flex, with companion smartphone and Apple Watch apps that alert cyclists to weather, directions and even potholes.
Call it a late-life identity crisis. Ford and other carmakers, the chief benefactors of America’s auto addiction, are suddenly facing a future in which car buying is a thing of the past. That future, of course, could still be far off: U.S. auto sales are running at a rate that could hit 17 million new cars this year, a 14-year high.
But in the meantime, car-sharing and taxi services like Lyft, Uber and Zipcar have exploded in cities where traffic and parking prices have soared; even kids are hailing a ride. And autonomous-car boosters promise a future where one self-driving sedan can shepherd a big crew of passengers between work, home and everywhere else, without even needing to park.
Instead of depending on the business model that’s kept them going all these years, rolling new cars and trucks off the lot, Ford is trying desperately to “challenge custom and question tradition” — even if that tradition helped them survive.
The car-sharing program, running through November, will cover cars, trucks and SUVs in six of America’s younger cities: Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, Portland, Chicago and Washington. The Ford-financed vehicles are rented to prescreened drivers through Getaround, a San Francisco Airbnb for cars, for between $5 and $9 an hour.
Getaround takes a 40 percent cut, but Ford gets a few perks, too: Owners get more money to pay off loans, and renters take a test drive that could persuade them to buy a Ford, if they ever buy a car at all.
But Ford isn’t just betting all on car rentals or smart bikes. On Tuesday, Ford announced that its team in Palo Alto focused on self-driving vehicles is moving from research to “advanced engineering.” The carmaker also said it would install driver-assist technologies (sometimes called semi-driverless upgrades, like highway auto-pilot and automatic brakes) across its fleet within the next five years.
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