High-tech cars unite Detroit, Silicon Valley

Associated Press

PALO ALTO, Calif.

The office has all the trappings of a high-tech startup. There’s a giant beanbag in the foyer and erasable, white-board walls for brainstorming. Someone’s pet dog lounges happily on the sunny balcony.

Welcome to the Palo Alto home of the Ford Motor Co., six miles from the headquarters of Google.

Meanwhile, in a squat, industrial building in suburban Detroit, a short drive from Ford’s headquarters, workers are busy building a small fleet of driverless cars.

The company behind them? Google.

The convergence of cars and computers is blurring the traditional geographical boundaries of both industries. Silicon Valley is dotted with research labs opened by automakers and suppliers, who are racing to develop high-tech infotainment systems and autonomous cars. Tech companies – looking to grow and sensing an industry that’s ripe for disruption – are heading to Detroit to better understand the auto industry and get their software embedded into cars.

The result is both heated competition and unprecedented cooperation between two industries that rarely spoke to each other five years ago.

“It’s a cross-pollination. We’re educating both sides,” said Niall Berkerey, who runs the Detroit office of Telenav, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based firm that makes navigation software.

There’s also plenty of employee poaching. Apple recently hired Fiat Chrysler’s former quality chief. Ride-sharing service Uber snagged 40 researchers and scientists from Carnegie Mellon’s Pittsburgh robotics lab. Tesla’s head of vehicle development used to work at Apple.

For years the fast-paced tech industry showed little respect for the plodding car industry. Google and Palo Alto-based Tesla, with its high-tech electric sedans, helped change that.

“People think it’s shiny Silicon Valley versus grungy Detroit, but that’s garbage,” said Chris Urmson, who leads Google’s self-driving car program. “If you look at the complexity of a vehicle, it’s an engineering marvel.”

Dragos Maciuca, a former Apple engineer who’s now the technical director of Ford’s Palo Alto research lab, said he’s seeing a new excitement about the auto industry in Silicon Valley. For one thing, cars provide a palpable sense of accomplishment for software engineers.

“If you work at Google or Yahoo, it’s hard to point out, ‘Well, I wrote that piece of code.’ It’s really hard to be excited about it or show your kids,” Maciuca said.

“In the auto industry, you can go, ‘See that button? The stuff that’s behind it, I worked on that.’”

But cocky tech companies have had to adapt to the tough standards of the auto industry, which requires technology to work perfectly, for years, in all kinds of conditions. Maciuca spends much of his time educating software and app developers about the industry’s needs.

“Silicon Valley goes toward this model of a minimum viable product. It’s easy to throw things out there and try them and see if they work,” Maciuca said. “We can’t do that.”