Ford announced on Thursday it has acquired two companies, Autonomic and TransLoc, that will help Ford work toward a future business model with an increased emphasis on autonomous vehicles that can deliver goods for business and transport people.
Autonomic will help build the infrastructure Ford needs for mobility services that may rely on autonomous vehicles that can communicate with their surroundings. The startup “specializes in scale, architecture and leverage for transportation solutions,” according to a press release from Ford.
Transloc is “a provider of demand-response technology for city-owned microtransit solutions,” according to the press release. The startup’s technology will be key to Ford’s new logistics business because it will help the company better route its vehicles around cities.
Ford also plans to reorganize the teams that are building its mobility services into four groups:
- Ford X will help the company discover and develop new business ideas and oversee the Transportation Mobility Cloud, which Ford hopes will allow vehicles, objects, and city infrastructure to communicate with each other.
- Mobility Business Group will work on scaling Ford’s current and future mobility businesses including the microtransit service Chariot and future services designed for business deliveries and non-emergency medial transportation.
- Mobility Platforms and Products will design and develop the technology Ford needs for its planned mobility services.
- Mobility Marketing and growth will promote and sell the company’s mobility services.
Ford unveiled its vision for the future of transportation at CES in January. While the company has been perceived as lagging behind competitors like General Motors and Tesla in its pursuit of self-driving technology, it used its CES presentation to describe a logistics business that could use self-driving vehicles to deliver goods and transport people.
