The American automaker Ford Motor Co announced on Thursday its acquisition of Autonomic Technologies Inc and TransLoc Inc for undisclosed sums. The acquisition is a part of Ford’s broader agenda to expand into the ride services and transport businesses.

As per a statement released by Ford, Sunny Madra CEO of Autonomic Technologies Inc will join Ford to run a new unit called “Ford X”. Last year, Ford acquired an undisclosed stake in Autonomic. This month, the CEO of Ford, Jim Hackett outlined the company’s plans to use Autonomic to develop a Transportation Mobility Cloud service which would eventually serve as an industry standard for linking vehicles and public transportation.

Autonomic will help Ford build the necessary infrastructure it requires for mobility services which may rely on autonomous vehicles that are able to communicate with their surroundings. According to the press release from Ford, the Palo Alto, California based startup “specializes in scale, architecture and leverage for transportation solutions”.

On the other hand, the Durham North Carolina based startup, TransLoc supplies software that allows cities to schedule and manages transit services. The startups technology will be essential to Ford’s new logistics business as it will allow the company to route its vehicles around cities in an effective and efficient manner.

Neil Schloss, the CFO of Ford’s Smart Mobility operations, stated that the company could make further acquisitions as it experiments different ways to earn revenues by rendering transportation services and vehicles connected to the Internet.

For instance, Ford is planning to expand the test of a service rendering non-emergency medical transport such as transferring patients from a hospital to a nursing home. As per Schloss, the company is currently working with a hospital in Detroit and is aiming to expand the effort. “We do all the fleet management, we have the drivers and we provide the service,” said Schloss.

On Wednesday, Ford reported a loss of $299 million on investments in mobility services and has forecast higher investment spending in the current year as well. However, the investments made in transportation services are smaller in comparison to the overall spending by the company.

In January, the multinational automaker unveiled its vision for the future of transportation at CES. Although the company is perceived to be lagging behind competitors like Tesla and General Motors in its push toward entering the self driving technology market, however it did use the CES presentation to describe the concept of a logistics business employing self driving vehicles to deliver goods and transport people.

(Picture courtesy: Wikimedia)