John Musser, Ford

All right, here we are again for another episode of Breaking Changes. I’ve got another close friend of mine from my Rolodex that I wanted to bring to the conversation. But he’s not here just because he’s my friend, he’s here because he’s doing some pretty interesting things with APIs at a pretty interesting company that I think most of you are familiar with. I brought in my friend John Musser, who is the director of data and analytics for Ford Autonomous Vehicles. Thanks for joining us, John.

Hey, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. Always love talking APIs with you.

We’re going to dive into your background a little bit, which will get out a bit of our history, but I wanted to start with the company you work for, because I think we’re all pretty familiar with what Ford does. But for the sake of discussion, and because after you sent over information on what you do and who is part of your role, I was actually a little surprised at everything you all are doing, so what does Ford do these days?

So yeah, we all know Ford as Ford Motor Company that makes vehicles, right? For 118 years, iconic vehicles, whether it was the Model T, but today it’s the Mustang and the F-150 and now the Bronco. So we have these iconic vehicles to produce, but it’s changing. We’re much more into connected vehicles now. This spring we announced Ford Plus, and Ford Plus is this idea of an always-on, always-connected experience, leveraging all of these technologies to grow our existing businesses and then to build new ones.

Wow. I just bought a new car during the pandemic. I told myself I wasn’t going to buy a brand new one, I was going to just buy older ones, but I bought a brand new one. It wasn’t a Ford, unfortunately, but I’m amazed at where the cars have gone, because it’s been a few years since I bought a new one, so I’m actually pretty excited about where the potential is. But why do APIs matter in this world?

Which is a great question. Well, first of all, you may have noticed that your car is becoming a computer. Some people describe them as giant iPhones on wheels now. And so software is eating your car. And while software is eating the car, what’s more important in software these days than APIs? So the two go so hand in hand, and that’s sort of why it was super appealing to me when this opportunity arose four years ago to come to Ford, having come from the API world, knowing nothing really about the automotive space. But here you have this iconic brand name, you have this industry in disruption, and then on top of that you have APIs, you have platforms, this idea of vehicles as platform and cloud platform so important. I couldn’t resist.

That’s pretty huge. When I was doing my research for the show, I went to the website, spent a lot of time just looking around, grabbing the description, and as I was looking through the description, I saw the word “experience” used the most to describe what Ford does. How do APIs fit into that delivery of an experience when it comes to a modern vehicle?

I think it’s a really interesting question, and I think you caught onto that because it is part of what we’ve always experienced cars as, very emotional things. Culturally they’ve been very emotional, and throughout all their history people get quite passionate about cars, whatever that type of car is. So there’s that kind of experience, and then there’s the experiences that we can now do even more because they’re connected, because they’re just an integral part of these IoT devices on wheels. They can be connected to our smartphones, our homes, you name it, and so that experience can be even more so. Part of what Ford launched this spring around Ford Plus and this always-on connected relationship with customers, how it used to be, you would go to the dealer, you’d buy, like you probably did the same thing, you go buy a car and then you deal with whoever that manufacturer was, and then you’d come back in three or five years, however long you had your car. But that was really, other than repairs, the extent of your relationship with the OEM. And that’s not what it’s going to be in the future, because now we have connected vehicles. Tesla pioneered this. You enable a whole swath of things you can do with that car that you couldn’t do before. And for Ford it’s not going to be that you leave and we don’t talk to you again for that period of time. There’s so much more value that we can provide.

Yeah, it’s a regular part of our experience in the vehicle. It makes a lot of sense, and I can see how APIs help you subscribe to, iterate upon, evolve, and do so much with that experience and relationship. But before we dive into the nuts and bolts of that, I want to zoom way out, because I know who you are, and you and I have known each other for a while in the space. I would say I owe a significant portion of who I am and what I’m doing to the groundwork you’ve laid, as well as helping me define my voice in the space. But I want to hear from you, when it comes to APIs, what was the aha moment for you, when you knew there was something going on here?

Well, I do appreciate that, the kind words, and indeed you and I have the gray hair to prove that we’ve been in this business for a long time. I started to program the web in 2005, so gosh, over 15 years ago. I don’t know if there was an aha moment. I would say it was necessity as the mother of invention. So at the time I had this crazy idea for a startup around product arbitrage. We were going to buy products in one online market like an eBay and then sell another one and do it all in an automated way. And at the time, 2004-ish, I could see that a lot of these API things, these web-based APIs, were being offered by some of these e-commerce sites, so that seemed important. As I was doing the research, long story short, I realized, oh, there isn’t really, that’s kind of surprising, the internet has kind of a site for everything but didn’t have a site for APIs. And again, they were brand new, and “mashup,” the phrase, started in, what was that, 2005. So that’s what led me to think, I can’t be the only person with this sort of need. So I took the 25, 30 APIs that I had found and put them up. I registered the domain name of ProgrammableWeb and built the site, put these APIs up there, and it took off. Clearly I wasn’t the only person that had this interest.

So that early vision when you started ProgrammableWeb, of what APIs were about, does that still pencil out till today? Does today look like what you had in your head as far as the future of APIs would look like?

You know what Yogi Berra said, predictions are hard, especially about the future. So at the time it wasn’t necessarily making predictions per se. I mean, they were obviously important, and as you remember, we used to use that phrase, mashup, remember that one? I miss that phrase a lot. We used to call them mashups, and at some point we might call things apps, but it’s so second nature that this is what had happened. The time was relatively clear, it could take a long time, okay, well, APIs are just going to become ubiquitous to some extent, and then like some of these technologies, you kind of don’t pay attention, it’s the air you breathe. One thing I definitely did not anticipate was, early on we saw these ideas of calling these things API-first companies, like Twilio, that came in 2007, ‘08, ‘09, and it was a new thing. It’s a new way to sell a product, where developers were your audience. You weren’t selling the thing, the API was kind of the add-on, like they were for e-commerce. But that they would be 50 billion dollar companies just a handful of years later, it’s crazy. And that whole industry of API-first companies, it’s just phenomenal.

So how does this translate back to the modern vehicle, the car experience? Is this about Spotify and messaging getting into my cars, or are the APIs connecting more than just that experience?

It’s going to be a little bit of time, because this is where it starts to run. First of all, we even talked about the B2B market, which, similar to APIs, the B2B market’s huge, but it isn’t necessarily where we first started out. It was all, again, the mashup of what consumers would say. You as a user would see, like, housing maps with real estate plotted on a map. But that wasn’t really the bigger chunk of the pie. To use the iceberg metaphor that Daniel Jacobson started, the tip of the iceberg is kind of what you see publicly, but the bigger part of the iceberg for APIs in automotive as well is behind the scenes, either because it’s what we use internally at Ford or it’s what we do with B2B partners, where you have this happening in a bunch of commercial spaces that aren’t necessarily front and center to the user. So maybe to break that down a little bit further, what you might see in the car is what you just talked about, where you’d be able to connect Spotify and messaging apps, and you see an expanding list in your dashboard, and those are all API-keyed, and sometimes through CarPlay and Android Auto, we’ll talk about that in a minute. And then you have all the data coming off. You cannot buy this year, 2021, a non-connected Ford vehicle. They all come off the assembly line with a 4G modem. So that’s just out of the box, and that’s a huge shift from just five years ago. So now you have that ubiquitous platform for all the new cars. We’re not alone, you’ll see it in the majority of OEMs. So now that you have that, what do you start to build on top of it? It opens up a whole bunch of new opportunities. One is getting the data off, so you pull that data off into the cloud and the things you can do up in the cloud with it. So there’s data, and then there’s functionality. There’s things like, if you’re a Ford retail customer, you’ll have the FordPass app, that’s the iOS, Android app you use to interact with your car. Well, how does all that communication between the app ultimately get to your car? You can do things like, hey, start my car, how much gas is in my car, my tire levels, all that is API-driven. So it’s not in the press release for the FordPass app, but again, as you know, APIs are often hidden beneath the covers making life better. Funny side note about “start my car,” it’s a seasonal thing often, because for example in the dead of winter you don’t want to go out to a cold car, so you can sit there and say start my car and let the car warm up in your driveway in the Minnesota winter, and then come back and your car’s all warmed up for you. That’s an API-driven experience. Another way to do that is you could say to your smart home device, speaking of APIs and ecosystems, you can talk to your connected home device, Android or Alexa, and say, hey, Alexa, start my car. And then through the magic of APIs, it’ll go from what you said into your voice assistant into the Amazon cloud to the Ford cloud over to your car, and lo and behold, your car started, through this invisible stack of APIs that’s all going on behind the scenes in a secure, reliable way. And then the same would be true on the fleet side or commercial B2B. You’re a fleet owner, whether you have five vehicles in a local repair delivery operation or some large national fleet owner. You want to know what those vehicles are up to all the time. You want to manage them as a whole, you want to get the telematics, the GPS data off of them, all that kind of information. Now you can do that out of the box, and then Ford has built an entire business unit called Ford Commercial Solutions, and a bigger one now called Ford Pro, that’s all oriented around being able to offer better services, better experience, and lower cost of ownership to fleet owners because of, as much as anything, APIs.

Yeah, that’s so powerful. There’s so much to unpack in there. The other use case of the “start your car” that I learned, and you’re in the Pacific Northwest, I was in Portland during that heat wave, it was the first time I started my car so the AC would be on. That’s the application, and I had to get out there and it was 115 degrees in Portland, which was a brand new one for me. But you described that the car itself has APIs, so the fuel gauge, being able to start, all those components. The car itself is a platform, but because it’s connected it automatically expands that ecosystem from just being what most folks would think of as just an IoT device. You have one device, it’s a whole platform of IoT devices all working in concert, but then you’re part of the Android ecosystem, you’re part of the Alexa ecosystem, and it just grows from there. So you’ve got a lot of different providers playing. What sort of data is available nowadays when it comes to driving your car? I’m sure everything, right? What do you see on a regular basis?

Yeah, it’s a bit of a challenge, because when you think about it, there’s a “too much” statement. Think about, first of all to take a step back, in the car business one of the things I’ve learned is that within the modern automobile there’s anywhere from 50 to over a hundred of these ECUs, these electronic control units, these little silver boxes embedded all through your car, whether it’s for your seat belts or your engine or your HMI for your entertainment system. They’re all little microcontrollers, and they all have their embedded operating system, but they’re all programmable. And each one has, you can imagine, whether it’s RPMs off your engine or your fuel level or your speed or the temperature or the radio volume or the window up or down or your seat belt on, and so part of the trick is to figure out how to, it’s almost a quintessential huge-scale IoT problem of computing at the edge, smarts at the edge, edge computing, and then what do you filter there, how do you do that intelligently, how do you get that back up to the cloud at volume? So I think that gives you some sense of the type of data that’s available.

And so you can make decisions around it that influence the experience. What experience are you influencing? Is it the daily drive, is it the overall health of the car? And you said in a B2B environment, business to business, and so, knowing the classic automobile supply chain, there’s a lot of partners, a lot of vendors who are working with you all to help figure out those pieces of the experience that are either dependent on their part or because they’re a wider platform player. So I’m guessing there are monetization opportunities and partnership opportunities available within all of that?

For sure. There’s a huge ecosystem plan. And speaking of those messages you could send to your car, one of them we didn’t talk about was to unlock your trunk, and also locate the vehicle. And there’s a whole bunch of privacy issues, we’ll get to those in a minute, but within keeping those factors in mind of safety and privacy, one of the things you can do now is that we partnered with Amazon, and you can opt in, totally opt-in, to their program called Amazon Key, the same service to let them deliver packages to your garage, the whole integration in their delivery mechanism. But you can now register your vehicle as a delivery location for an Amazon package delivery. So when you’re in the checkout you say where to deliver to, you could say Kin’s car, and then that delivery driver could find out where your car is, and again this is like your notifications, you get approval for this whole process, and they can deliver the package to your trunk. So if you’re at the office during the day, you can have it delivered there. And it’s kind of a niche convenience, but it’s a nice thing to have, and you can imagine other things over time enabled by that combination of a connected car and APIs, and then an ecosystem built on top of that with partners, which services you as a retail customer can opt into.

Well, yeah, the intelligence, the processing of that data, you have a lot of partners who are going to help you figure all of that out and how to do grocery delivery. I’m at work, I can have packages, but then I can have food, so that as soon as I get home I’m able to cook dinner, or I can have food delivered in my trunk. That’s just touching on one piece of it.

Or you could have, in some locations you can have fuel, so your car can get fueled up, same kind of API-driven. Startups are doing remote fuel delivery on demand, so you don’t go to the gas station, the truck comes to you, again through APIs it figures out where your car is, it unlocks it, you put the gas in, the delivery person pushes another button, it locks your car back up, turns the alarm back on, you come back to your car, your groceries are there, your laundry is there, and it’s full of gas.

So we talked about a few of the challenges, the too-much-information one. What are some of the other challenges you’re facing? Privacy, security?

Yeah, I think the two big ones are safety and privacy. So Ford, part of what we’re known as, the world’s most trusted company, we have this legacy, we value that customer trust, and privacy and safety are part of that. And as you know, there’s been plenty of API-related privacy issues out in the industry, so we’re trying to be really careful and take a slow, measured approach to how we roll these sorts of things out. So you can’t just go tomorrow, you can’t go sign up on our site and get access to the APIs tomorrow. It just can’t work that way for those two reasons primarily. It’s a highly regulated industry, you could get killed on this thing, so you’ve got to be super careful. And we’ve dedicated large cybersecurity teams, looking at cybersecurity in the vehicle, through the cloud, in the cloud, that whole stack, that would be super aware and a lot of attention to the security piece. And then on the privacy side, any of the services I listed, they all have to be opt-in. You have to opt in to say you have to transmit data through your modem, otherwise you won’t get those services. So that’s a classic trade-off as a consumer. And then in terms of the data itself, our biggest use cases are around how to improve the services, and how do we, for example, do prognostics, predicting, taking some of that data off of those devices in your car, whether it’s the brakes or the engine or you name it, getting that data up to the cloud so we can run AI/ML and algorithms on this data to then predict, oh, you’re due for this on such a date, but you may need it sooner, you may do it later, be able to use that intelligently and then feed that back to you for mutual benefit.

Yeah, that’s such an important balance to strike between privacy and security and trust, so that, you know, I want all of these conveniences, I want to have them happen, but I definitely have concerns about privacy and security. But I think the safety one, the API space is fairly new, we’re used to moving fast and breaking things, which may be a little tougher in this market.

A little bit, because the breaking thing could be more than just your leg. So yeah, you’ve got to be super careful about that.

So you mentioned you can’t sign up right away and get access. I know there’s a pretty well-established supply chain that Ford works with, that’s evolved with Ford as a company. Is it something that new players can get involved in and be part of, or is it just the old suppliers doing most of the heavy lifting?

It’s both. In terms of the new opportunities, now you think about it, we have connected experiences, in this idea we’re just talking about, ecosystem. So it doesn’t just have to be Ford or some OEM working with the Amazons of the world. Let’s talk about data, here’s a good example. There’s an Israeli-based startup called Otonomo, and they might even, I think might have been a billion dollar valuation this year, been around for a few years. What they do is they have 40 million across OEMs, they’ve taken data and then provide access to that at an aggregate level. So there’s a startup doing a sort of data roll-up. They work on anonymizing some of that data and then providing aggregate data for specific use cases back to customers who are paying for some anonymized connected vehicle data. And again, they have their own intake process where they have constraints for what you can or can’t do, but there’s a startup that wouldn’t have existed 10 years ago, because now you have this connected vehicle data. So that’s one. Another class is what we just talked about, where there are startups like, I think one of them is Spiffy, who do a car wash, so they can come to your car and wash it. So again, delivery, car washing, or fueling, mobile fueling. Those are all new opportunities that are enabled because you have a connected vehicle, a smart connected vehicle with APIs. So does that answer, are those the ideas you were thinking of?

Yeah, those are definitely good examples, because when we talk about APIs, at least me as the evangelist, I used to get people excited about what it is, and I’m guessing there’s still a part of that in what you do at Ford, getting people excited about building things. And in a heavily regulated, well-established industry, sometimes it’s harder to get in and do things, but as I was going through, there’s plenty of examples of some of these new players. And another layer that I noticed, maybe you can speak to this, is global. It’s not just the North American market, right?

No, absolutely, that’s a really great observation. And I know we were going to talk about the EV market, the electric vehicle market, and really they go hand in hand, connected vehicles, APIs, and EVs. Again, Tesla pioneered it, but Ford is really focused, and the other OEMs as well, investing billions of dollars in the EV market, particularly in Europe where there are national mandates, requirements, that’s true in China as well, and some state levels up here in the States, of needing to meet these mandates for emissions and so on. So having, in Europe, those two go really well together, having sort of the increase in electric vehicles and the increase in connected vehicles, and then thirdly, Ford in particular has a very strong commercial vehicle presence in Europe, even maybe the leading provider of commercial vehicles, and leveraging those together in the B2B space. Again, you can imagine all the different types of fleet services that we can provide in that market is huge, with of course the added layer of GDPR, and having to sort of deal with the reality, that’s just the way it is, so you figure out how to work with that, and again it ties into making sure that we adhere to those forward-thinking privacy regulations.

Well, and I think those regulations, one, they can be good or bad or hard, or they make innovation happen, and I would say they’re kind of leading the conversation at a global level. California’s kind of following in the shoes, being the sixth largest economy in the world. So I think that type of regulatory but platform-driven innovation at that scale is really how we move into the future in a global way at scale. But you have these different aggregators who are coming and working across the OEMs, but you guys are investing in a platform too. I came across Autonomic, how do you pronounce that, and it’s a cloud platform that has a set of standards for how all of this should work. So what is this platform, how does it work, and why does it matter?

It’s a great question. You clearly do your homework, awesome research, that’s also your passion about this space. So Autonomic, long story short, it’s a startup based out of Palo Alto that Ford was one of the earliest investors in, in 2017 I believe, and within about two years we acquired them. So they are owned by Ford, but the real vision there was the whole idea of a connected vehicle, that you’re going to get this messy, old-school, low-level data off of a vehicle, and there’s going to be this need to pull it off at scale, be able to rationalize it, and provide nice, pretty, clean JSON RESTful APIs that you cleaned and made accessible to a much wider audience. So that’s the mission there, that’s Autonomic’s mission, and they did an amazing job of doing that. One of the best examples of what they’ve done is, when I talk about our commercial services that we provide to a whole range of fleet operators, that’s all powered, we have something called Ford Telematics Services and Data Services, those all come through that low-level Autonomic API below the covers, and then those fleet customers can use those APIs. So we provide data, if you want this data, but the main mechanism for getting that data is you can query those APIs, either subscribe to a feed where those notifications just come off, or then historical data that you want filtered in some way.

And I’m guessing this helps make it easier for developers, because going into this world there’s a lot, any API you’re onboarding with there’s a cognitive load, but a vehicle ecosystem that, you’re just a programmer, you don’t understand, it’s got to help reduce friction there, right?

Yeah, and I think they’ve got great classic things that you and your audience know, like great developer documentation, getting-started guides and videos and reference guides, all the kind of tooling that you need. And you also need additional tooling, because, I think one of the overlooked things in the API space is that you can’t just throw up a Swagger document or OpenAPI spec and say you’re done. That’s not a great, it’s an important piece, as you all know, super important, but it’s not the only thing. And in the vehicle space, think of all the other things you need, because you’re talking about, you want to be able to do it virtually at first, you want to be able to test, you need to trial vehicles, you need to get all the way down this stack from a cloud to a thing and then back again. It ain’t easy.

Yeah, well, especially if it’s 4G, you want to be sensitive about what you’re passing and smart about it. You don’t want to just send anything over the wire all the time, so it has to be pretty intelligent transmission of data and moving things around. So beyond the car, are you guys struggling, like any other company, with internal digital transformation and doing APIs well internally?

Why would you think that a 100-year-old enterprise, a 1450 company, would be having digital transformation going on? Of course we do, and part of what’s in there is really interesting to me, and I didn’t really expect it coming in, because I was mostly thinking about the external piece. So one of my learnings personally in coming to Ford, again super interesting, is all of the API usage is happening behind the firewall. A lot of digital transformation efforts in different parts of the company. We also have Ford Credit, which is a multi-billion dollar, very strategic piece of what we do for car loans and other services, insurance, etc., very digital, because they’re a finance company, so they’ve always been very digitally forward, but they’re becoming more and more API-driven with these new services. So everywhere we have APIs, and then we have, just like every large company, it’s a hodgepodge. We have things from acquisitions and legacy systems, and so there’s a real internal passion around building APIs for the new stuff plus around the old stuff. And one of the things that I wound up doing a couple of years ago, we worked together with the leadership team, because we have buy-in from the CEO on down for this whole API mission, which, as you know how important having that executive top-level buy-in is, so that’s been great, a real belief in this. And then we set up a team called the Platform Enablement team, a new team, kind of started off with just a handful of folks, much larger now, but three years ago when we, the nascent little thing, our mission was to do things that you’re familiar with, which is build a unified internal API catalog, set up a program where we’re measuring what we’re doing, so an API metrics program, set up an API tooling program for API publishing and consumption and reporting, because we have a variety of internal systems and not just one API gateway and all that kind of stuff. So how do we start to build, but not take it on as a center of excellence, this centralized piece, but a federated piece, so that we could scale it? And that’s turned out to be really fruitful, because then we can teach other teams how to fish and how to do this, and then they can take it on and evangelize internally, and we have a lot of automation around it, because you know how important that API automation piece is. And I think really forward-thinking, the way that we’ve been able to pull all those pieces together. You can go to api-catalog.ford if you’re behind the firewall, api-catalog.4.com, and there’s your API catalog, and then having the documentation and all the other things, try to grow that. And we don’t want to boil the ocean, you can’t do that, so you have to have a foothold and then go from there, and it’s an ongoing effort.

So what you just described, I hear a lot of our customers that I talk to call governance, but you called it enablement. Why is that important, would you say?

Ah, you are attuned to words. Yes, because I think we want to, it’s a nuance. It’s sort of like, within there there’s some degree of governance, we want to make sure that these things are reliable and secure and those sorts of things, but really the idea was to enable the teams to do it themselves. We want more the carrot than the stick. Like, what’s in it for me, why do I care about having an OpenAPI spec? Well, as it turns out, if you have an OpenAPI spec, there’s a whole bunch of goodness you get, a whole bunch of great stuff. So now all the new teams as they start to do this, they’re going to have an OpenAPI spec, so right into one of your home courts there. Or you can plug it into Postman, speaking of, against your world. So we use a ton of Postman, and those teams that are doing it can use those together. Or whether it’s a linting process, we have a linter, an API linter, that as you know some of the teams have started to use, so as they go through the publishing process we can make it our own best practices and conventions. And again, you could call some of that governance, but really it’s like, hey, I can get my stuff, as a product owner in Ford, I can get my stuff done faster by using these tools. So it’s making my life easier. It’s not making my life like governance often is, like this hammer or gatekeeper department. We don’t want to do that.

Yeah, federated enablement, just, it works better than a centralized hammer. It just seems like you’re going to be equipping, and it’s going to speak to folks a lot better in what they’re trying to accomplish. So zooming back out to the car and the ecosystem and the huge opportunity there, what are the different ways you can get involved? Do you have to be a startup playing with all the OEMs and operating at a certain scale, or are there other ways? You mentioned Alexa. Could I just build an Alexa app or an Android app and play in this ecosystem?

Typically you are going to still have to go through a level of indirection. So for example, you go to autonomic.ai and there’s a “contact us,” and there’s that process you’re going to go through there to get access to that documentation and talk to them about what you’re building. We have developer.4.com, which is really focused on, it’s actually a thing we haven’t talked about at all, but it’s really our traditional in-vehicle APIs, and those are going to be evolving over the next stretch of time, and let me go back to that in a second. And then if you’re on the B2B side, you can talk to our Ford Commercial Solutions. So it depends on where you are as to where to get started. But I do want to go back to one thing real quick that I just remembered. So Google, you’ve heard of them, in I think February this year we announced a partnership with Google. That’s both focused on, it’s a really big deal because it’s focused on using Google automotive services in the car. So starting in, I believe it’s the 2023 model year, you’ll start to see that rolling out, and then in the cloud, using a lot of the Google Cloud services. So we’ve got both of those, and I think as part of that you’ll start to see another class of opportunities, whether it’s through doing Android Automotive type of in-vehicle things, or the type of things that we’re building more of on the back end, the cloud connected services. There’s a lot more, stay tuned for a lot more of this coming really soon.

And if I’ve already baked, my company, what we’re building is baked into Google’s ecosystem, meaning we use Google Maps, we use Google Docs, Google Meet, those things are going to be much easier to access as part of the Ford ecosystem?

And again, if you’re in Android, if you’re already using the Android Auto SDK, which you can build against today, and if you’ve already built an Android in-vehicle app, or an Apple CarPlay app, those are also going to be a conduit for you to then get on that. You do it today, because all the Ford vehicles support, all the new ones support, Apple and Google. So if you want to be in-vehicle, then you build one of those. And again, you’re going to have to get it certified, because in the vehicle there’s a safety concern of driver distraction. You don’t have to be watching YouTube videos while you’re driving, that’s kind of a no-no, so we don’t want to enable that. Oh, and here’s another category that we did get to, because I know it shows up in the corporate world, but you’re going to see, as your car is connected, two other things, just food for thought, on the fleet side. As a fleet owner, you have to fuel all your vehicles. Of course, combustion engine cars in the future will be electric, but say for combustion engine vehicles, the fleets of today, that’s kind of a pain for fleet owners. But now with them being connected, you can manage that more centrally, first of all, and then secondly, in some cases you’ll be able to drive up to the pump, and then the car will talk to the pump, and through the magic of connectivity that can happen automatically. It’ll know how much is available, what needs to be done, the transaction will be effortless for the driver and the fleet manager. And then on top of that, we just announced this month, Ford acquired a Silicon Valley company called Electriphi. So we just made another Silicon Valley acquisition of a high-tech startup that’s focused on connected fleet management and connecting into the grid. So Ford sees this as so important, so do all the other OEMs, how are you going to do EV vehicle management at scale? And again, it’ll be API-driven. With this acquisition we’re going to integrate that into a smart connected EV vehicle management platform.

Yeah, the relationship between the software eating and the electrification, it just seems like it’s endless, and it’s almost kind of the same as the cloud. You’ll pull up to the fueling stations, the whole network, with a physical network as well as the virtual network, it seems like there’s just a symbiotic relationship that’s going to happen there.

And one other network of note, one other symbiotic relationship, which is going to be farther down the road, there’s two that are farther down the road, but they’re happening. One is something called V2X, letter V, number 2, letter X. Are you aware of that one?

No.

So V2X is vehicle-to-everything, and a good example of that is vehicle-to-infrastructure. There’s some pilots going on now where you can have a connected traffic light, and your vehicle and the traffic light could talk to each other. So you could think both at a micro load between your vehicle and that light, it’ll know what’s happening and when it’s changing, et cetera, and the vehicle might be able to adapt and prevent you from running the red light, so the safety aspect. There’s a lot of good stuff that can happen there, but that’s just going to come over time. Vehicle-to-vehicle, again, as vehicles can talk to each other, how can you, in a secure and private way, have enough communication between vehicles to enable safety and that kind of thing? Also important in the fleet space, you can imagine what they call platoons, of semi tractor trailers, of trucks talking to each other, so you can have a lead platoon vehicle with a series of following ones that can be in the drag of that vehicle, a much more efficient and centrally managed convoy of vehicles that are all connected, which are more efficient, easier to manage, and that ultimately can be autonomous and self-driving. So maybe you might have a driven first vehicle and then a set of autonomous vehicles behind it, as another flavor. So anyway, there’s all that, and then at least the other part of the life that I’ve been leading, which is around self-driving cars, Ford Autonomous Vehicles. We’re investing billions of dollars, primarily focused in a partnership with Argo AI, argo.ai, you go there, you can see what that’s about. It’s a startup out of Pittsburgh, where a lot of the self-driving work is happening around CMU and so on. And in partnership with Argo, which again has APIs all the way up and down, APIs all the way down, between Ford and Argo we build a self-driving system, and then customers would go to market whether they’re doing moving goods or moving people, robo-taxis. This is all future, API-driven self-driving ecosystems.

Wow, yeah, this is definitely the future of APIs that I think a lot of us are thinking about. That first network piece you talked about, I did get access through my government connections and people I work with at the Department of Transportation, to a couple of intersections. I got approval to build a read-only app, I couldn’t do anything but read the data, but it was a couple of intersections in Michigan that they were doing some pilots on, and it was not just the lights, it was the roadway, there were sensors on the whole intersection that worked with the different sensors on the cars. And you all have some pretty interesting things going on in Michigan when it comes to that. So it was impressive. I could only imagine what’s going on in Europe and other parts of the world that are moving forward. Because I think a lot of folks think a Department of Transportation, they’re not thinking about innovation, but they run all the roads, all the lights, that’s a huge network opportunity. But you went to the self-driving car, and that’s one area we’ve been hearing a lot of promises for a while. Is it reality? What is it? Is it going to just be incremental like everything else that we’ve seen with AI and other things? What’s the future of the autonomous car? Can I expect that in the near future?

So you can expect it in the near future, but in limited, it’s going to grow quite incrementally. Bryan Salesky, CEO of Argo, has talked a lot about this. Some folks have gone out there and said, hey, it’s going to happen tomorrow, or it’s happening now. The reality is it’s happening now, but it’s incredibly complicated, and it requires so many constituents to work together. So what you’ll see is, like Ford’s doing, we’re piloting AVs in six cities right now, but within specific domains, so you can learn and grow, and to take that safety-first approach. People have to get comfortable too. It’s not just that you have to work out the technology, but you have to make, you walking down the street, saying, wait, there’s this car but nobody’s driving, how are you, or as a passenger or another driver, there’s a whole swath of implications to self-driving cars. So we’ve barely started to scratch the surface. So it’s not a matter of if, it’s just a matter of when, and it’s also a matter of where. So we’re going to start with specific locations, specific use cases. There’s also self-driving vehicles in mining, these giant gargantuan, it’s not our space, but there are self-driving vehicles out there in these other domains, or there’s autonomous shipping and so on. In these other focused areas there’s self-driving learning and autonomous activity going on, they’ll all feed one another, and so we’re part of that in self-driving, and self-driving trucking. Trucking and moving goods, that’s a huge space, so we’re working that as well.

I think that really speaks to the importance of data in all of this, and the APIs on the individual controllers on the vehicle and then getting that data into the cloud, the partnerships with all the different companies and startups as well as the government. I think it’s an evolutionary cycle, and I think those of us in the API space focus on iterating our APIs, we’re hyper-focused on that, but that’s what I would say is kind of the API economy at scale, is how do we not just iterate our APIs, how do we iterate APIs collectively in a way, and then share data in a way that is private, respects privacy, security, safety, but helps move this massive thing forward, so that we can have self-driving autonomous experiences. But it’s not just all day, every day on, it’s, oh, well, when we’re visiting downtown London, there’s some cabs, the taxis that’ll do it for us, because we know what congestion is like in downtown London, so it’s a much more controlled experience. But I agree it’s coming, I just think we have to, as storytellers in this space, be a little more responsible. Some of us haven’t been too responsible, I think there’s some expectation management that has to happen.

For sure. And you mentioned people are the hardest thing to educate and get on board and change behavior. We’re the ones that are just not that easy. But you have to build trust.

Yeah, well, it’s a fascinating space you’re in. I’m super jealous of where you’re at and what you’re doing, and as far as an API trajectory it’s pretty impressive. But usually on the way out of these conversations, because we’re approaching the hour, I want to make it a little bit personal. You talked about the memory of road trips and cars and the whole car experience. What’s one memorable road trip that you’ve got in your history of driving?

Yeah, the most memorable one is the one in which I got married in a car. How’s that, would that be countless memorable? I would say that’s pretty memorable. And the marriage lasts, my dear wife, 18 years ago we were married in a drive-through in Las Vegas in a Ford Mustang convertible. So it must have been meant to be, that I was going to get work at Ford. And we took a fantastic road trip through the desert, that was the original light. But cars can be this in a fantastic way, that they’re about a journey.

Well, I have to add to that, I didn’t know that. Andre and I got married two years ago at a drive-through in Vegas as well, in a car.

No! Oh, my gosh, small world. Was it the little white wedding chapel?

I think it was actually, oh, my gosh.

That’s too much, that’s hysterical. She’s going to love hearing that.

Yeah, well, that’ll be one of the stories we’ll have to talk more about when we all get together in person as the world comes back together. So you’re going to head back to, you’re telling me before we started the show, you’re going to head back to work. I was a little bummed, I talked at Ford pre-pandemic, you would talk me into doing a talk with your internal teams, which got postponed, I ended up doing it virtually, but I was really looking forward to coming because I hear you guys have a really nice building and physical, in-person experience.

Yes, so you’re still invited, we’re going to do it again. It was awesome to have you virtually, huge crowd, amazing turnout, I don’t know how many, hundreds, I mean, there were really big questions that we had. Again, it speaks to the passion internally. But yes, you’re going to have to come out, we’ll take a rain check on you actually coming out to Dearborn and spending some time at headquarters.

Yeah, definitely, I look forward to it. Well, you’ve got a dream job, sir, I’m super impressed. I’m in a pretty dreamy job right now myself as the Chief Evangelist at Postman, I couldn’t think of other places I would want to work, but Ford Autonomous Vehicles is pretty top of the list, man, I’m jealous.

Yeah, well, I appreciate it. We’re both lucky to be in the jobs we have. It’s a great business to be in.

Yeah, well, I think as far as doing something with APIs that are going to touch such a significant part of the world, I think you’re in a pretty sweet spot, sir.

They’re hiring, by the way.

Oh, okay, where should they go to get plugged in?

Ford Jobs, just search on jobs at Ford.

Okay, well, we’ve got 15 million developers, I’ll send them your way, so I’m sure a few of them will be what you’re looking for.

Well, with that said, I think we’re at the hour. I think this was lovely.

Likewise, thank you so much, it’s great to reconnect, it’s fun to chat, and we’ll do it again.

All right, well, I look forward to seeing you in person soon, and taking journeys out to headquarters, and we’ll talk again soon. Cheers.