Uber and Lyft have been disrupting cab companies with their app-based ride hailing services. Cabbies have a lot to be upset about and are taking their dissatisfaction to court, while one of Detroit’s Big Three, Ford, has nothing to lose from the likes of Uber, and is jumping on the bandwagon with its own service.
Mark Fields, the first Jewish CEO of Ford, calls the ride sharing service the Dynamic Shuttle Experiment. He told Buzzfeed that the service will pick up and drop off passengers that will be “dynamically determined based on the demand of users.” Fields says Ford has the three things it needs to get Dynamic Shuttle off off to a winning start: vehicles, and advanced app and demand.
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Fortune raises the question of whether this is a new business for Ford or if the operative word in the Dynamic Shuttle Experiment is “experiment” to see if the entire trend of car ownership is fundamentally changing. Fields says that while he doesn’t envision the possibility of people wanting to share their cars happening in the very near future, he said, according to Fortune that Ford will, “pivot to a certain degree from just being a core hardware business to providing a service.”
