Ford builds in Silicon Valley -- and talent comes

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- When Chih-Wei Tang tells people here that he works for Ford, they usually assume he means a local dealership.

Tang is a mechatronics engineer at Ford Motor Co.'s Silicon Valley Research and Innovation Center, which opened in January. A Stanford University graduate student when a Ford recruiter called, Tang could have pursued a career with any number of nearby technology companies, but Ford impressed him with the level of resources it's devoting to the area.

"Cars are not something that Silicon Valley people think about on a daily basis," he said. "But it really struck me that they are serious about being here and being part of the community."

By setting up shop in Palo Alto, Ford has begun attracting employees who would be unlikely to join the automaker at its main campus in Michigan. Ford sees their diverse backgrounds and perspectives as vital assets in a rapidly advancing industry.

Some came to Ford from high-tech companies such as Apple Inc. or right out of Stanford, one of the top-rated engineering schools in the country. Some have had experience establishing or working for startup firms -- which fits into CEO Mark Fields' effort to make Ford "think, act and disrupt like a startup."

Even if those employees don't stay with Ford for a 30-year career, or more than just a year or two, as is common in the tech industry, Fields said the automaker benefits from being able to tap their knowledge.

The research lab, which replaced a tiny office Ford had operated in downtown Palo Alto since 2012, already has generated promising partnerships by virtue of being in the nation's high-tech hub.

Ford disclosed last week that it is working with Carbon3D, a two-year-old company in nearby Redwood City that says its technology produces parts 25 to 100 times faster than traditional 3-D printing. Ford said Carbon3D already has helped it make elastomer grommets for the Ford Focus Electric and bumper parts for the Transit Connect.

"They're completely indistinguishable from injection-molded parts," said Kirk Phelps, vice president of product management for Carbon3D.

Raj Nair, Ford's product development chief, said in a statement, "Our ability to innovate depends on how quickly we can move from idea to production."

Carbon3D, which began working with Ford in December, "enables us to quickly create automotive-grade parts for product design prototypes -- and perhaps even production parts -- faster than ever before, so we can deliver new vehicles to customers even sooner," Nair said.

Nest Labs, a home automation company based around the corner from the Ford building, is working with Ford to test ways the two companies' products could work together. For example, a Nest thermostat could adjust a home's temperature after a vehicle drives away or ensure the home is exactly the same temperature as the car's climate control settings when the owner arrives.

Dario Aghai-Yazdi, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate who co-founded a startup that used technology to encourage good nutrition, said he joined Ford as a "new devices and wearables" hardware engineer in March because he saw a chance to do unique work in the automotive industry.

"You really get to pioneer in this space," Aghai-Yazdi said.

A significant part of Ford's focus at the moment is to get the word out in Silicon Valley circles that it's here. It moved its annual Further with Ford event, which showcases the company's latest innovations, to San Francisco, inviting hundreds of journalists and other guests to hear Fields speak and tour the Silicon Valley outpost.

The Bay Area accounts for three of the six U.S. cities that are part of a pilot car-sharing program Ford announced at the event.

After an hourlong ride from San Francisco on the same Wi-Fi-equipped buses that hundreds of Google Inc. employees ride to work in nearby Mountain View each day, Ford showed journalists how engineers here can use virtual reality to look under the hood of a vehicle in Michigan.

A garage in the back provides a place to get hands-on with the company's current and future lineup; last week, it held a silver prototype of the Ford GT and a Fusion demonstrating various lightweighting technologies.

The lab has about 50 employees and is expected to have more than 100 by year end, Ford said.

It's just down the street from the Lockheed Martin technology center where Ken Washington worked until Fields hired him last year as Ford's vice president of research and advanced engineering. The headquarters of Tesla Motors is 1.6 miles away.

Ford engineers here are part of a new global autonomous-vehicle team Ford has assembled. Ford last week said it has moved into the advanced engineering stage of autonomous-vehicle development, the second of three phases leading up to a production vehicle.

"We haven't put a timetable on it," Fields told reporters after a speech announcing the car-sharing program and an electric-bike project, "but when we do come out with an autonomous vehicle, it's very important that that vehicle is accessible to everyone and not just luxury customers, because that's who we are as a company."