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Ford Fiesta rally car warms up in Sweden

Rallycross is seeing a sudden surge in popularity with two series bringing the racing to the US and Europe. The Ford OMSE team is competing in both championships this season, and it saw no reason not to hold practice with a highly modified Fiesta in the snow of Northern Sweden. It brought together Andreas Bakkerud from the European-focused FIA World Rallycross Championship and Patrik Sandell from the North American-focused Global Rallycross series for some training and fun. They certainly appear to be enjoying themselves, too, with some lovely pirouettes in the powder.
If you're unfamiliar with rallycross, the discipline combines the best of rallying and circuit racing. Drivers (with no co-drivers) race rally cars over a circuit that generally mixes dirt and asphalt, and unlike traditional rallying, multiple cars compete side-by-side at once. Even better, it's often a very two-fisted form of motorsports with lots of car-to-car contact. Global Rallycross and World Rallycross will both kick off their seasons in May. With spring on the way, scroll down to watch the Fiesta kick up some of the last snow drifts of the year.

Ford opens research center in Silicon Valley

These days, the software running a vehicle's myriad of electronic systems seems to be getting nearly as much development focus from automakers as the traditional mechanical parts that keep a car going. Constantly improving that technology requires a lot of experimentation, though, and Ford is expanding its presence in Silicon Valley with the just-opened Research and Innovation Center Palo Alto to make that progress possible. Ford opened its first office in the country's technological hub in 2012 to draw talent and devise ways to deal with vast amounts of sensor data. Apparently, setting up shop in Silicon Valley was deemed a success because the Blue Oval decided to create this new lab in the Stanford Research Park to focus on five areas: connectivity, mobility, autonomous vehicles, customer experience and analytics. Among the center's potential projects, Ford is hoping to develop better natural speech recognition, which is absolutely vital for improving infotainment systems. Assuming the tech eventually works well enough, your voice might even be used to adjust a vehicle's power seats, according to the automaker. The Blue Oval is also letting engineers from Stanford University test autonomous driving algorithms on a self-driving version of the Fusion. In a smaller stakes venture, researchers are working to get a Nest smart thermometer to automatically adjust the temperature at home depending on if an owner's vehicle is leaving or coming back. To really show that its serious about these ventures, Ford hired Dragos Maciuca away from Apple as the center's technical leader. The automaker also wants to have 125 researchers at work there by the end of the year.

Autoblog Podcast #410

Episode #410 of the Autoblog Podcast is here, and this week, Dan Roth, Chris Paukert, and Greg Migliore talk about the Mercedes-Benz GLE, the next generation Audi Q7, and Ford's promise of 12 new performance models by 2020. We start with what's in the garage and finish up with some of your questions, and for those of you who hung with us live on our UStream channel, thanks for taking the time. Check out the rundown with times for topics, and you can follow along down below with our Q&A. Thanks for listening! Autoblog Podcast #410: The video meant to be presented here is no longer available. Sorry for the inconvenience. Topics: Mercedes-Benz GLE 2016 Audi Q7 New Performance Ford/End of MyFordTouch In The Autoblog Garage: 2015 Toyota Camry XLS 2015 Ford F-150 2015 Volkswagen GTI Hosts: Dan Roth, Chris Paukert, Greg Migliore Runtime: 01:28:00 Rundown: Intro and Garage - 00:00 Tacoma - 24:17 Barn Find - 38:27 DB10 - 49:23 Q&A - 01:00:00 Get the podcast: [UStream] Listen live on Mondays at 10 PM Eastern at UStream [iTunes] Subscribe to the Autoblog Podcast in iTunes [RSS] Add the Autoblog Podcast feed to your RSS aggregator [MP3] Download the MP3 directly Feedback: Email: Podcast at Autoblog dot com Review the show in iTunes Podcasts Detroit Auto Show Audi Ford Mercedes-Benz ford performance