MyFord Touch Arrives

It's not often that a huge multinational corporation confesses to being too big and unwieldy to innovate properly.

The question for a company like Ford is: How do you get to grips with this, how do you rediscover that pioneering spirit?

Or put another way, how does a business like Ford continue to make mistakes?

The answer for Ford lies in the appointment of a Silicon valley design consultancy, IDEO, who according to Ford sources have revolutionized their in-car driving experience.

Their method is experimentation. Picture if you can the process which led to the development of MyFord Touch:

A dashboard ripped from a car, a Play Station 2 console, a projector showing the racing game Gran Turisimo 3. The point of this was to allow IDEO to study how people listened to music, found directions and answered calls.

But does this sound like a recipe for designing a successful driving experience for the average suburban, or commuter?

You would think not. But Ford is increasingly relying on in-car technological developments to drive sales and profits.

MyFord Touch relaces many of the standard equipment of the driver?s cabin, the knobs and buttons we are all so familiar with, and replaces them with LCD screens and five-way buttons. Drivers can personalise data screens, ambient lighting colour, temperature settings, radio channels, access turn-by-turn directions..

And as if to stress the importance of this sort of innovation, 32 percent of buyers cited the company's voice-activated Sync entertainment?s system as critical to their purchase of a Ford car.

The endearing picture, of a ripped-out driver's console and a projected computer game, is of children at play. And it is interesting surely that Ford sees the future of sales as lying in the whimsy of the home entertainment scenario.