Marco della Cava

USA TODAY

LAS VEGAS — Ford announced Monday at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show that it is working with Amazon and Internet of Things platform Wink toward granting Ford owners unprecedented access to their connected-home devices from their cars, and vice versa.

The idea is that a Ford automobile owner will soon be able to use the vehicle's Sync Connect system to use touch or voice commands to open a garage door, check a thermostat setting or turn on home lighting. While at home, that owner could ask a Ford smartphone app what the car's remaining driving range is or even program a time to start the engine.

The voice commands issued at home would be routed through Amazon Echo, a free-standing speaker that interfaces with Alexa, Amazon's cloud-based virtual assistant, similar to Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana.

Information about the status of a homeowner's various Internet of Things devices would be provided through Wink, a venture between General Electric and Quirky. Last fall, failing Quirky sold Wink to Flex. Wink's platform integrates IoT products from companies such as Nest, Philips Hue and Schlage.

"We working to see if we can come up with a product that we can commercialize," Ford CEO Mark Fields tells USA TODAY. Fields is expected to make a variety of company announcements Tuesday morning at CES. "The key is finding the right software protocols, so that the integrations with Amazon Echo and Alexa works. We'll aim to bring it to market as soon as possible."

As cars gradually become little more than rolling computers, automakers are furiously looking for ways to distinguish their brands. These days that means bragging not about horsepower and torque figures, but about connectivity and app integration. Fields acknowledges as much.

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"The question we ask is, 'How do we make the Ford ownership experience sticky?' We think we have a holistic approach that is simply about making people's lives easier," he says. "This is just us aggressively accelerating the integration of our vehicles into the Internet of Things."

According to Gartner, some 21 billion IoT devices are expected to be online by 2020. Automakers, which traditionally lagged behind when it came to in-car electronics, are stepping up their efforts in the battle for buyers, who increasingly expect inside their cars the same smooth connectivity they experience at home.

That push has even led to some collaboration, as with the news Monday that Toyota is among a number of automakers adopting smartphone software technology developed by Ford, which it has shared openly in order to push for a unified in-car app platform.

Follow USA TODAY tech reporter at CES all week @marcodellacava.