18 Oct Ford, Silicon Valley, & Stanford Solar Car

The Stanford Solar Car project would like to thank Ford and its Silicon Valley Research & Innovation Center for their continued commitment to our innovative work.

Ford’s presence in Silicon Valley speaks to car companies’ growing interest in startup-style innovation, particularly exploring new ideas related to clean energy and sustainability and the future of transportation. Ford hosted us for a visit to their Palo Alto lab where we were thrilled to catch a glimpse of their work in autonomous vehicles, smart mobility, and big data and analytics.

While our solar car is not autonomous, we work out of the Automotive Innovation Lab on campus, the primary home of Stanford’s research on autonomous vehicles (including a fully-autonomous Ford Fusion). As a group, we’re always interested in learning about how automotive technology is changing and partnering with Ford is instrumental to this undertaking. Within the realm of data analytics, our Strategy team is working hard to analyze the data from our past races and optimize our tactical model for the October 2017 race, a similar project to Ford’s analysis of data from millions of vehicles to detect patterns that lead to product improvements.

The Stanford Solar Car Project is excited to continue building our relationship with Ford and the Silicon Valley Research & Innovation Center. While Ford produces millions of vehicles per year and we produce one every two years, our goals to push the envelope in automotive innovation are often aligned.