Yesterday we posted a report titled "The Fear of Apple Entering the Connected Car Market has Renault Racing to Beat the Clock," and last week we covered how Apple's secret Titan team in Berlin has been in talks with Magna to be Apple's car manufacturing partner after ending talks with BMW and Daimler. Apple's possible entry into the electric car market continues to ripple through the automotive world with a new BBC interview with Ford's CEO Mark Fields who reveals that they're working on the assumption that Apple's intentions of making a car are real. In fact, that's become a motivator for Ford to stay focused on their next generation vehicle solutions.

According to Fields, Apple's possible entry into the car market "provides us with the right motivation to make sure we stay very focused not only on the product but overall on the experience that the customer has interacting with the product and the services that we have."

"Staying focused" means launching a new Ford technology business in Palo Alto - the capital of Silicon Valley - working on "autonomous cars" that can drive automatically and teaming up with technology companies to see how the "internet of things" changes how people interact with their vehicles.

But just like Daimler's CEO who said that they wouldn't be the Foxconn of car makers for Apple, Mark Fields echoed that sentiment by stating that "Ford is not into the contract manufacturing" commodity base business.

Fields later noted in the interview that "The global auto industry will continue to grow and the reason it will grow is you will see the global middle class double in the next 15 years," though," In some cities and congested urban areas, private car use will be increasingly curtailed - such as in Oslo - and even outlawed." For this reason Ford has started a growing bike business, something that I've noticed on a few occasions in the IP world. Here's one such patent that I ran across over the last month. Another one covered a foldable bike that they were working on. 

Ford entering the smart bike market makes me think back to Apple's revelation of such an invention back in the summer of 2010. We covered that invention in an IP report titled "Apple introduces us the Smart Bike." Whether Apple will keep their patent-pending smart bike invention dormant or is simply saving it for a rainy day is unknown at this time.

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