Ford, purveyors of Built Ford Tough Ford trucks, announced today it was doing more things designed to appeal to people who aren’t interested in owning cars (or Built Ford Tough Ford trucks, for that matter). The company is acquiring Chariot, a private, crowdsourced shuttle service based in San Francisco, and is investing in Motivate, the largest operators of bike-share programs in the US. It also announced plans to set up a new division within the company tasked with advising cities directly about “mobility solutions,” CEO Mark Fields told The Verge Friday.

It’s another sign that Ford, one of the oldest and most storied car makers in the world, is aware of that the writing on the wall is not favorable to car companies. Consumers are trending away from personal car ownership, and toward ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft, which have both been recently emphasizing carpooling as the next big idea in transportation. In fact, over the last year, Fields has tried to position his company as an honest-to-god competitor to Silicon Valley upstarts like Google and Tesla by investing in self-driving cars, as well as mobility ventures like car-sharing and private transit.

Ford said that while it is starting out in San Francisco, it plans to expand its new shuttle service to five additional cities over the next 18 months, including one international city. But the company is keeping those cities under wraps for now “for competitive reasons,” Fields said.

five additional cities over the next 18 months

It will also work with Motivate, which operates the Bay Area Bike Share program, to add 7,000 new bikes called “Ford GoBikes” to the city’s bike-share infrastructure, which will be accessible to users of the company’s FordPass app.

Ford envisions both the private shuttle and bike-share programs synced up with one another, which means “users have the opportunity to shift back and forth for all kinds of different reasons, if weather changes their priorities or we have different incentives if we want to move people in the system differently,” said Jim Hackett, chair of the company’s spinoff company, Ford Smart Mobility LLC.

Chariot, which has been operating in San Francisco since 2014, is part of a recent trend of bus startups that use algorithms to develop transit routes based on user demand. Using the app, customers can book a seat in one of the companies blue-and-white shuttle vans for around $4 a trip.

And unlike its flashier, more tricked-out competitors, Chariot has managed to successfully navigate the twin challenges of high-stakes venture capitalism and municipal bureaucracies to emerge as one of the only bus startups left in the Bay Area. Chariot founder and CEO Ali Vahabzadeh, as well as the rest of the company’s leadership, will move over to Ford to work on the build-out.

Hackett said he hopes Chariot can fill in the gaps in cities’ transit maps, as well as compete with increasingly popular (and cheap) carpooling services like UberPool and Lyft Line.

“If you think of mass transit on the lefthand of the page, and private car ownership on the right, you know the livery systems, the Lyfts [and] the Ubers, are more expensive to operate per mile than your own personal car, and mass transit is the cheapest,” he said. “This shuttle is next-in-line as the most efficient to mass transit. Cities are going to love this because it’s going to be highly accessible based on pricing.”

“Cities are going to love this”

Private shuttle services, especially those operated by huge tech companies like Facebook and Google, have been magnets of criticism from those who correctly note they are mostly unavailable to most low-income residents who lack transit options. But Fields argued that Ford’s new shuttle company will be different.

“This will allow us to serve underserved parts of the communities,” Fields said. “Today your options are if you’re living in the city, you either take mass transit, which is low-cost but you’d need to rely on their route, so you need to go to the metro station or the bus stop, which could be out of the way, versus a dynamic shuttle, which costs less than a taxi or a rideshare service. The shuttle comes directly to you. We think this will actually be an aid to underserved areas.”

This isn’t Ford’s first flirtation with quasi-public bus services. Last February, the company teamed up with Bridj, a data-driven pop-up bus company, and the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority to roll out a fleet of shuttle vans that residents can summon with the tap of an app. Ford has also unveiled several “smartbike” prototypes in recent years that it envisions as part of a broader mobility system that integrates cars, bikes, and various other forms of transportation into a seamless, networked whole.