Ford, one of the world’s biggest car manufacturer with revenue of some $150 billion, has began looking for a blockchain engineer to “develop new enabling mobility technologies to support the Ford Smart Mobility solutions,” according to a job posting.
“We are looking for a strategic thinker and researcher to lead and pioneer work in the branch of Blockchain technology applied to mobility use cases that would help deliver superior user experiences for our customers,” they say.
They want someone with five years experience in blockchain technology, nearly disqualifying Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of Ethereum. Which suggests what they probably mean is someone well versed in this area and around mid to senior level rather than an out of uni junior.
That is supported by their preferred qualifications of a “Ph.D. in Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics,” as well as someone who has “experience with digital currencies like Bitcoin.”
Which probably translates to a sufficiently mature individual who has a fairly in-depth understanding of blockchain technology and how it can be applied towards smart mobility.
Smart mobility is a new trend as self driving cars start becoming a thing, with digitization and their electrification developing as an area of exploration.
It’s all at a nascent stage, so completely new products and new infrastructure has to be created, opening a somewhat rare opportunity of combining all the recent advances in technology.
That allows for easier incorporation of bleeding edge tech, like blockchains, especially as it concerns what many think of as futuristic. Blockchenized smart cars automatically paying charging stations and acting as autonomous taxis in a world where machines can transfer value without human involvement.
It’s a world Toyota, the world’s biggest car manufacturer, has dived into. It’s also a world RWE’s subsidiary, Innogy, has championed, with South Korea’s biggest electricity provider following.
Mercedes-Benz, on the other hand, seems more focused on blockchain’s application towards finance, but for finance very old systems few understand need to be slowly upgraded with new tech. For smart cars, the entire system is very new, which means everything is sort of being built from scratch.
That’s shown by Ford introducing Smart Mobility only in 2015 with the aim of using “innovation to take the company to next level in connectivity, mobility, autonomous vehicles, the customer experience and big data.”
With one such innovation being blockchain technology, so joining Toyota in what appears to be a new race towards the practical application of blockchain tech in the nascent, but very significant, mobility sector.
We, therefore, look forward to hear who will fill this position, not least because that individual may have immense influence in the future trajectory of this tech’s application at Ford specifically and in the automobile sector more generally.
