• The Detroit Bureau, Friday, January 6, 2012 10:40 AM

Ford Motor Co. is setting up a new research lab in California’s Silicon Valley near Stanford University, part of the automaker's strategy to make cars as much “platforms” as transportation machines. The new facility, expected to have 15 Ford staffers, will be a locus for collaborative development of high-tech safety systems, advanced infotainment systems and the like. It will also be involved in forging partnerships. That would include both Microsoft (which was involved in Ford's Sync system) and startups.

One partnership already in place, with San Francisco-based Weather Underground, is studying the possibility of using car-to-car communications to alert motorists to changing weather.  It would send a signal to so-called “networked vehicles” when the windshield wipers on one of the cars on that network were turned on. Ford joins General Motors, the Renault-Nissan Alliance, BMW and Volkswagen in the high-tech region an hour south of San Francisco.

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