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Ford Authority

100% Of Ford’s New US Vehicles Will Pack Connectivity By 2019

During his strategic update to investors earlier this week, one key point outlined by Ford Motor Company President and CEO Jim Hackett is that the company is hard-at-work on accelerating the introduction of “smart, connected” vehicles engineered for the motoring environment of the future. We imagine this mostly means vehicles with built-in modems providing onboard 4G LTE and SYNC Connect services from a customer’s mobile device, but it could also conjure vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications.

Ford says that by 2019, every new Ford vehicle in the US will ship with connectivity, and its global products will follow a similar path, with 90 percent of new vehicles in China, Europe, and other markets packing connectivity. V2V and V2I communications will play a pivotal role in the future of automotive safety, but Ford has made no attempt to forecast a timeline for the arrival of those technologies in its own cars. SYNC Connect, which allows customers to remotely start, lock or unlock their Ford vehicle; check the fuel level or charge status; and more, debuted on the 2017 Ford Escape.

Placing an embedded modem in a vehicle can enable other nifty features, as well, such as allowing the vehicle to broadcast a mobile WiFi hotspot, stream multimedia, and receive over-the-air software patches or real-time traffic updates using mobile data.

Aaron Brzozowski is a writer and motoring enthusiast from Detroit with an affinity for '80s German steel. He is not active on the Twitter these days, but you may send him a courier pigeon.

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Comments

  1. Dumb Consumer

    Where is the modem located? First thing i would do is disconnect it.

    Reply

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