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How do car companies know what the world will want in five, 20, even 50 years’ time? If they’re Ford, they ask Sheryl Connelly, the Blue Oval’s head of trends and futuring. It’s Connelly’s job to figure out how the automotive landscape will change before it’s even thought about changing, to predict what the next big shift will be in the world of cars.
A Michigan native who’s been at Ford for nearly 20 years, Connelly was last year named one of the most influential creatives in the world. So can she actually see into the future? And which horse should we back in next year’s Grand National? Top Gear caught up for a chat…
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TG: So what does a futurist do?
SC: A futurist does not predict the future. It takes at least three years to bring a vehicle to market, so even if we were to come up with an ingenious idea today, it would still take about 36 months for the rubber to hit the road. So, every day within Ford, we have the task of trying to understand what the world’s going to look like three years out. Henry Ford said, “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse’.” If you ask people what you could do to make their life easier three years from now, most people couldn’t answer that question for three weeks, three days from now.
We’re trying to imagine a future yet to be imagined. I help advance the conversation by teeing up global trends in five different categories – social, technological, economic, environmental and political. While we recognise we can’t predict the future, we believe those forces are the things that will shape the landscape going forward.
TG: How does that work?
SC: What I’m ultimately looking for are patterns, things that keep repeating themselves. One of the trends I’m looking at is demographics – where the population is growing, how that will shape. One of the ones we’re looking at is ageing populations.
There are seven billion people in the world, and during our collective lifetimes that number will easily reach nine, 10, maybe even 11 billion people. But in the advanced economies of Western Europe, and North America, the populations are actually shrinking because they’re having fewer children. That means our population is ageing rapidly.
TG: And what does that mean for cars?
SC: It starts to tell you about where the market’s going to be. When you think about an ageing population, there are physiological factors – reduced response time, impaired vision, limited range of motion. So our designers and engineers spend a crazy amount of time trying to analyse and anticipate those situations. We have a full-body suit engineers put on that mimics the effect of ageing, and makes it difficult for you to lift your legs and knees, turn your neck. They’ll put on goggles that are cloudy and scratched to mimic the effect of glaucoma. So a healthy 30-year-old engineer can step into the suit and feel what it’s like to live in the body of an 80-year-old.
Many of the technologies that have come from the insights of this information are on vehicles today. It’s why we have a reverse sensing system that warns you when there’s something behind your bumper. But we want these features to resonate whether you’re 70 or 17.
TG: Is that possible?
Written By:- Sam Philip
More of this article on the Top gear website
