Ford Working With Amazon To Link Cars With Homes

Ford is developing plans to connect its SYNC in-car technology platform with Amazon Echo and the Wink home automation platform, thereby allowing consumers to use their car to communicate with smart devices in their home, and vice versa.

Although the automaker didn’t provide a specific timeline for the planned integration, the move is part of a broader trend to connect vehicles to a variety of external devices and services, including smartphones, cloud services and in-home systems.

“Consumers increasingly want to stay connected to their homes while on the move,” explained Don Butler, Ford’s Connected Vehicle and Services executive director. “Linking smart devices like Amazon Echo and Wink to vehicles via SYNC would fulfill that desire, and allow consumers to connect with their vehicles even when they aren’t behind the wheel.”

And when the owner is at home, they would be able to ask a Ford smartphone app to tell them the car’s remaining driving range, program a time to start the engine, determine the location of their vehicle if someone else is driving it, and much more.

At home, the voice commands would be routed through Amazon Echo, a free-standing speaker that works with Alexa, Amazon’s cloud-based virtual assistant, which is similar in nature to Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana. Information about the status of a homeowner’s Internet of Things (IoT) devices would be provided through Wink, a venture between General Electric and Quirky. Wink’s platform integrates IoT products from companies such as Nest, Philips Hue and Schlage.

“We’re working to see if we can come up with a product that we can commercialize,” said Ford CEO Mark Fields. “The key is finding the right software protocols, so that the integrations with Amazon Echo and Alexa work. We’ll aim to bring it to market as soon as possible.”

Certainly, the world of automobiles has been radically changing in recent times, with connectivity and app integration coming to the forefront of technological developments. As this evolution continues, automakers are seeking out ways to distinguish their brands.

“The question we ask is, ‘How do we make the Ford ownership experience sticky?’ We think we have a holistic approach that is simply about making people’s lives easier,” said Fields. “This is just us aggressively accelerating the integration of our vehicles into the Internet of Things.”

Gartner estimates that there will be 21 billion IoT devices online by 2020. With consumers increasingly expecting their cars to provide the same smooth connectivity as they experience at home, many automakers are stepping us these efforts to attract buyers.