Ford is trying mightily to change the way it is perceived by its customers. In its third futures conference held at its corporate headquarters in Dearborn, Mich. this week, various executives and experts spoke about mobility and connectivity issues that you wouldn’t normally associate with a company that makes automobiles and trucks.

Some of this becomes clearer when you listen to Bill Ford Jr., the executive chairman of the company and the great grandson of its founder Henry Ford. “We used to think about design as making pretty sheet metal. Not anymore. Our challenge is how can we incorporate design in ways that is useful to our customers, and being able to have opt in/out features where people can customize their own driving experience accordingly.” At the conference, Steve Wozniak, one of Apple’s co-founders, spoke about how important it is for technology to get out of the way of users.

(Woz movie clip)

Let’s look at what Ford (the company) is doing with both mobility and connectivity and what you as a typical car owner can expect too.

In the early part of the 1900s, Henry Ford used to take his staff on walkabouts once a month to explore nature. Back then, “most people didn’t travel more than 25 miles from home in their lifetimes,” said Bill Ford. “The Model T changed all that.” This is why he calls Ford a mobility company first and foremost. Futurist Seth Godin said at the conference, “Ford brought inexpensive mobility that changed everything.”

A big component of Ford’s mobile support is its Sync software, jointly developed with Microsoft that can now be found in 5 million cars up and down the entire Ford line. “The concept is to do all of this with hands on the wheel and eyes on the road,” said Gary Strumolo, Ford’s Global Manager of Interiors and Infotainment Research. Sync can work with your smartphone, handle GPS directions, and more.

I have been test-driving several Fords with the Sync infotainment systems for years. When they first developed the system, they started with 100 voice commands. Now it has more than 10,000 of them and the commands actually are understood by the system too. And unlike some other car markers that only sell these systems in their higher-end models, Ford is more pluralist: 80 percent of people who buy a Ford buy with Sync built in.

Part of the expansion with Sync has been a conscious effort to evangelize new apps. Earlier this year Ford announced an SDK that can help developers build apps more quickly. And if you have a great idea for a voice-activated app but need some help building it, you can turn to jacAPPS, a mobile app development house that will provide development and technical support. One of the Sync apps is Spotify, where just a single voice command – Play – will bring up your music.

But Sync is just one side of what I call the connected car. At the Ford conference, we saw videos of a concept cloud-connected car that would communicate with your alarm clock and give you an extra hour of sleep because of a delayed early morning meeting. While this is for the most part in the future, all of the Tesla Roadster cars do come with built-in broadband connections. At the conference I met one developer who is rolling out next week a Google Glass app that interacts with your car.

This is what Jim Buczkowski, a Technical Fellow at Ford, talked about at the conference. “Every piece of equipment needs to be part of an open standard from garage door openers to the car itself. We need to connect our car’s environment with the consumer electronics environment seamlessly if we are going to succeed.”

In my second article on the conference, I look at what Godin and other big names in the Internet futures world have to say about these and other directions and innovations that Ford is taking.

This week Ford brought together some big names in the Internet futures world including Seth Godin, Sherry Turkle from MIT, Steve Wozniak, and Jay Ward of Pixar to talk about where they see Ford going and how it intersects with some of their predictions about the Internet. Topics that were covered including how brands can be better about telling their stories and how companies can focus more closely on improving the health and wellness of their employees and customers.

Storytelling is at the heart of Ford, and who can’t remember how Henry Ford automated mass vehicle production? But what Henry is less well known for is his inverterate collecting of industrial Americana, which is now housed in the Henry Ford Museum that adjoins his company’s manufacturing complex. At the museum, you can see the rise and fall of numerous industrial technologies, including an automated light bulb glass blowing machine, the first steam engines of James Watt, and an exploded Model T showing the relatively few component parts. You can also see this map of how many electric vehicle charging stations were around at the early 1920s, when they were first popular.

(http://t.co/BJBI2QyIK9   for a picture of this map)

Storytelling can take many forms, as Seth Godin reminded us. Look at the advance press for the new sexy cylindrical Mac desktop. “The new Mac has a story before we even touch it,” he said. Even the storied Model T has a reason for its color: “Henry Ford painted it black because he found out that black paint dried four hours faster. He was all about productivity.”

Jay Ward handles all the “Cars” animated movie related content for Pixar Animation Studios. Certainly, no one tells better stories than the numerous movies they have done over the years. “Storytelling is king – without a story, you don’t have a great movie,” he said. And part of great storytelling is that realism counts, along with compelling content and memorable characters. “Even the bad guys in our movies are memorable,” he said. Part of his process in creating these stories is what he calls being able to “show our work early and show it often, so I can see the rough and dirty intermediate steps and back of the envelope stuff.” Other speakers were also quite precise on this point, saying that perfection is the enemy of the good and other adages.

Another example of strong storytelling is Ford’s own Mustang, which turns 50 this year. Surprisingly, there are more than 3000 feature films with Mustangs of various vintages featured. (Ford is keeping track, to be sure.)

A final example of great storytelling came from Rachel Schectman called Story, a new retail venture in Manhattan that is changing the way retail stores are constructed. Her idea was to combine the concept of magazines that changes as often as an art gallery and sell things like a store. “We tell our stories by putting events that bring the concepts to life. It isn’t a brand that is putting their logo on the wall, and a lot of our store has stuff you can’t buy,” she said at the conference.

One final story from Ford is their attention to health and wellness issues. Bill Ford stated that “Now we have cars that can monitor your health and tell you if you have driven too much.” Ford managers gave examples of such apps that are coming in the near future, including a car seat that will do continuous heart rate monitoring and match that with the current traffic conditions. The car can route an incoming phone call into voice mail if there is too much going on around you. And Ford has partnered with Medtronic to monitor blood sugar levels and trend lines so you can take corrective action. You can pair that device via BlueTooth and you can quickly see the glucose level of your child in the back seat.