In 2007, Bill Gates stepped onstage at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to help introduce Sync, a combination GPS navigator, digital music player, and speakerphone being introduced into Fords. Mark Fields, then the head of Ford Motor’s (F) Americas operations, joined Gates for the sales pitch. He now recalls being met with incredulity. At a show traditionally dedicated to next-generation gadgets, Fields says, the most common questions for the automaker’s delegation were, “Why are you here? Oh, and by the way, why aren’t your knuckles dragging across the floor?”
At this year’s CES, which began its four-day run on Jan. 6, 10 major automakers showed off their latest in-car electronics and self-driving prototypes in sprawling exhibitions that together took up the space of about three football fields. Consulting firm Accenture (ACN) reports that technology is the top selling point for 39 percent of U.S. car buyers, almost triple the 14 percent who care most about horsepower and handling. The industry has taken notice, trying to rebrand cars as jumbo smartphones that are stuffed with apps and can be accessed remotely via other devices. “We’re thinking of ourselves as a mobility company and not only a car and truck company,” says Fields, now Ford’s chief executive officer. “We want to be viewed as being part of this community.”
This year, Fields gave the CES keynote speech, about the dawn of the connected-car era, and Daimler (DAI:GR) CEO Dieter Zetsche talked up an early model of a self-driving Mercedes-Benz. With 140,000 visitors to the exhibition halls, Audi (NSU:GR), BMW (BMW:GR), Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCAU), General Motors (GM), Hyundai Motor (005380:KS), Mazda Motor (7261:JP), Toyota Motor (TM), and Volkswagen (VOW:GR) have piled in. That’s attracted more companies interested in selling the automakers hardware and software—an $11.3 billion business, estimates the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), which puts on CES. In the past five years, the exhibition space dedicated to car equipment has almost doubled, to 165,000 square feet, about one-twelfth the total area, according to show spokeswoman Tara Dunion. “When you look at who’s coming, with Mark Fields and Dieter Zetsche and all of us, it has become an auto show,” says Timothy Leuliette, the CEO of parts supplier Visteon (VC).
Five years ago, Ford’s booth consisted of a single Taurus on a 20-by-20-foot piece of carpet. This year the company’s two-story display included five vehicles packed with digital monitors, a handful of private offices for meetings, and a wall of screens promoting company experiments such as drone cars steered remotely by a driver in Atlanta and an app-based service through which people can swap vehicles. By last year, shortly before he stepped down as CEO, Alan Mulally, Fields’s predecessor, had become a fixture on the CES floor.
(Bloomberg Businesweek)
