This year, Ford, announced it was opening a research and innovation centre in Silicon Valley. But it’s not just computer geeks that the great American carmaker is hiring these days. It has recently taken on a plethora of social scientists as well, in its research labs in Michigan and around the world.
These psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists are trying to understand how we interact with our cars in a cultural sense. It is a striking development and one worth pondering in a personal sense if, like me, you spend much of your life rushing about in a car.
In the early days of the company, Ford executives did not seem to be overly concerned about “culture”. The founder, Henry Ford, was cavalier about his customers, famously declaring: “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.” But while the company has become far better at offering a customised service since Ford’s day, its cars generally seemed to have been designed by clever engineers who tended to assume that everyone liked the same things that they did: mostly flashy gadgets.