Ford boosts research for connected cars

DETROIT: US auto maker Ford announced it will invest Can$500 million ($376 million) in Canada to create 300 research and engineering jobs amid its drive to connect cars to the Internet. The governments of Canada and Ontario province also pitched in with grants of Cad$102.4 million each.

The monies will go to support a new Ottawa lab focused on infotainment, invehicle modems, gateway modules that allow various vehicle systems to communicate with each other, driver-assist features and autonomous vehicles.

Also Ford said it would increase staff at facilities in Windsor and Oakville, Ontario, developing new powertrain technologies, alternative fuels and lightweight materials for use in cars and trucks, as well as technology to capture industrial emissions and convert them into fuels. The Oakville facility and another in Waterloo, Ontario, will work in parallel with labs in the US states of North Carolina and Florida. A further 100 jobs are being created in the United States. According to The Wall Street Journal, the new employees being hired by Ford from Canadian firm BlackBerry, which recently outsourced manufacturing of its smartphones to focus on software development.

Ford’s “infotainment” system uses software developed by QNX, a BlackBerry subsidiary, it noted. The new hires more than double the size of Ford’s mobile connectivity engineering team. The global market for connected vehicles will exceed $131 billion by 2019, after growing 30 per cent annually, according to a study by Transparency Market Research that was cited by Ford. — AFP