Cars, Coding & Catastrophes

Ford Makeitdriveable challenge in Lisbon, Portugal

Beautiful Lisbon. Image source: Ford

A few weeks ago Lynsay Wright and I, from the LIT Incubator (Dublin & Belfast, Ireland) attended the 2019 Ford Makeitdriveable event in Lisbon, Portugal.

The two day event was aimed at allowing technology startups to meet Ford and see if their products and services would be suitable for integration with Ford’s in car technology, for consumers and businesses.

Although obviously not a startup (although we like to think we operate in certain ways like one), Ford kindly allowed us to gatecrash the event!

As car technology continues to become more advanced, with on-board connectivity, cameras, sensors and more, its importance to the insurance industry also increases. Attending events like this helps us stay up to date on the state of the art in this field.

Ford in-car technology

Ford have two main in-car technologies available to developers:

• SYNC AppLink — using the open-source Smart Device Link to allow access to vehicle information, and the HMI (Human Machine Interface) to display information to drivers; via native mobile applications.
• Ford Connected Vehicle API — REST APIs to allow remote access to vehicle information via on-board modems.

Potential use-cases

This type of data could be used for standard insurance-related use-cases e.g.

• Accident reconstruction
• Fraud detection
• Usage based insurance
• FNOL

The access to the Human Machine Interface — the combination on in-car display screen, buttons and voice control interface — has potential for adjacent services such as:

• Information in the event of accidents
• Information in the event of catastrophes
• Guides to areas — housing, amenities etc.
• Directions to car garages, filling stations etc.
• Parking assistance.

Winners

There were four winners of the event, though Ford stressed that they were interested in exploring many more of the concepts on show further.

and other participants:

Incubator demo — Catastrophe app

Although we weren’t attending to compete for prizes, we’re engineers so still built something!

Just before our demo on-stage

I competed in the same event about 4 years ago and it was much more of a hackathon; this iteration was more of startup pitch event. Only ourselves and one other company attending demo’d a solution on one of the Ford “Technical Development Units” that were available:

Basically, an in-car infotainment system, on a desk

Our demo was of a “Catastrophe App” that would give safety information to customers in-car during disasters like wildfires or storms.

Features we showcased:

• Location based alerts e.g. flooding, wildfire near to the vehicle’s location
• Hands free messaging — sending messages to family members via in-car voice commands (messages sent via a quick integration with AWS messaging services)
• Map augmentation — layering safety information on top of the in-car map display e.g. to show roads which are not safe.

Quick thoughts and conclusions

• It was great to attend and participate in the event to meet the Ford folks, learn more about the available technology and learn what products & services in this space are being worked on by startups.
• The technology itself is developer friendly and offers use-cases for both back-end and customer facing services.
• The REST APIs, offering remote connection to the in-car modems, have potential but are not yet fully available.
• re: the in-car display, I would prefer an OS easier to design with e.g. Android based, though I am aware of car specific considerations, the most important of which is not distracting the driver.
• Voice control is an important form of interaction with in-car apps (at least until driverless cars become more widespread). This was in evidence by one of the workshops at the event ran by Prof. Dennis Neiman on voice control interfaces.

So in conclusion, it was a fun event to join and learn from, in an area — in-car technology — that will continue to grow in importance for the insurance & other industries.

Major thanks to Scott Lyons and his team in Ford for allowing us to join.

One final note — the Swedish Ambassador to Portugal, Helena Ahlin, announced at the end of the event that it will be hosted next year in Stockholm, somewhere I’ve never been to … yet!

If you’ve any thoughts or comments, let me know below or you can get me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out Liberty IT here. Thanks, Andy