The people at Ford Motor Co. are making moves to become a technologically advanced car company. The Ford Research and Innovation Center in Palo Alto opened a year ago to further the company’s branching into connectivity, mobility and autonomous vehicles. Hosts John Furrier and Jeff Frick of

John Furrier and Jeff Frick, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, recapped their conversations with Marcy Klevorn and Ken Washington of Ford about the company’s technological ambitions.

According to Furrier, the company’s biggest challenge is to shift from an old line manufacturing business to a consumer-driven technology company. The transformation to a company offering not just conventional vehicles, but proprietary technology is possible, but Furrier said, “To compete with Tesla and Uber, they have to up their game big time.”

Ford needs to move quickly with Multimodal

Ford plans to incorporate multimodal technologies — a move Furrier sees as smart, as long as Ford can deploy the technology fast enough. Jeff Frick agreed that multimodal is crucial for tech-driven companies now, and he said that in some ways “mobile is no longer the side dish now; it’s the entree.”

Ford is engaged very busily in its Silicon Valley project. The opening of its Research and Innovation Center last year marked a serious effort on the company’s part to pull ahead in the automotive tech world.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Ford Innovation Day 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE