DETROIT -- Ford decided to kill Chariot, its shuttle-based ride-sharing service, in part because there wasn’t a regulatory framework for it to continue, CEO Jim Hackett told reporters.
The data gathered -- particularly related to how people used the service to plan daily trips and communication with the cloud -- will still feed into future autonomous-car designs, he said on the sidelines of the Detroit auto show on Monday.
“The issue is that we were ahead of, really, policies that will make this a better business,” said Hackett, who ran Ford’s Smart Mobility unit before he was promoted to the automaker’s top job in 2017. “I’m very happy with what Chariot taught us and what the next evolution of the business is going to be. This is a pivot for us -- a bunch of things have been birthed from the Chariot experience.”
The service will cease operations by the end of March, according to a company blog post last week.
The Ford Smart Mobility subsidiary, formed in March 2016 and led by Hackett at that time, bought Chariot six months later as its first acquisition.
Ford paid roughly $65 million for the company, according to reports. After the acquisition, Ford expanded the San Francisco service to Austin, Texas; New York; Seattle; Detroit; and the United Kingdom. But in August 2018, Streetsblog NYC branded the service "a big, expensive failure," using company-provided data to show that each of its vans in New York were averaging just five riders per day.
Automotive News contributed to this report.
