Say you're taking a romantic, winding drive through the mountains. The car in front of you at some point might disappear around a corner. It might also encounter a family of adorable baby quail scurrying across the road just beyond the bend, and decide to slow to a stop to avoid them. You didn't expect them to hit the brakes anytime soon-it's not like their car bore a bumper sticker proclaiming "I Brake For Quail"-so you tear around the bend with wild abandon, and promptly rear-end them.
Inching us ever closer to the connected car of the future, Ford today announced plans to crowdsource the next generation of driver-friendly apps. The 150-year-old company is opening its code libraries and other resources to developers worldwide. The idea? Consumers know what they want, so let them design the apps that'll keep them entertained - and safe - on the road.
Detroit automakers have recently been locked in a competition straight out of the 1960s: a race to create the fastest and most powerful muscle car. This summer, Ford takes the lead with the 485-kilowatt Mustang Shelby GT 500. To break the 320kph mark, engineers departed from the muscle-car tradition of throwing a truck engine under the hood and calling it a day. Instead they redesigned the engine with lightweight materials, refined the car's aerodynamics, and installed driver-assistance systems that allow anyone to drive the Shelby as it's designed to be driven-aggressively.
Engineers from Dematic, a firm that builds automated parts and storage-retrieval systems for Boeing, Ford and IBM, designed a five-story underground storage area managed by five robotic cranes. Dematic has built 17 automated library systems worldwide, but the University of Chicago's is the most complex. The company has three more libraries under construction.
