Ford Motor Company

2024 Ford Mustang

Unreal Engine

As Lead Programmer at Ford Motor Company, I played a key role in transforming the in-car user experience by leveraging Unreal Engine to develop the next-generation Human-Machine Interface (HMI). My work involved customizing the engine for QNX and Android, optimizing performance for automotive hardware, and integrating Ford-specific technologies into a seamless and interactive user interface.

• Led the Unreal Engine migration & customization for Ford’s HMI system.
• Developed and optimized engine support for QNX & Android, improving performance.
• Designed an advanced boot metrics system for tracking and enhancing system efficiency.
• Created an HMI prototype in Unity & Unreal, leading to Unreal’s adoption at Ford.
• Optimized rendering, input systems, and memory management for low-power hardware.
• Integrated Unreal Engine with Qt/QML for Sync 4, ensuring a unified platform.
• Developed automated testing frameworks to maintain system stability and performance.

As Lead Programmer, I spearheaded the development and maintenance of a highly customized Unreal Engine branch tailored to the automotive industry. This involved:

• Integrating Ford-specific services directly into the engine, ensuring compatibility with existing vehicle systems.
• Customizing Unreal Engine for QNX and Android, enabling seamless HMI deployment across different in-car hardware platforms.
• Creating a Ford-specific Unreal Engine branch, maintaining stability while integrating backported features and bug fixes from Epic Games.
• Optimizing Unreal’s architecture to support automotive use cases, including real-time rendering, input handling, and system boot performance.

By bridging game engine technology with automotive requirements, I contributed to one of the most advanced HMI systems in the industry, setting a new standard for real-time, interactive vehicle interfaces.

I led the effort to bring Unreal Engine support to QNX, a real-time operating system used in Ford’s in-car infotainment system. This involved:

• Developing a custom build system to streamline QNX and Android packaging, improving deployment efficiency.
• Creating an Unreal Engine QNX integration from the ground up, closely mirroring Epic’s Linux architecture while incorporating optimizations for Ford-specific hardware.
• Enhancing memory management and performance tuning to ensure smooth execution on automotive-grade hardware.
• Resolving critical compatibility issues between Unreal Engine and QNX’s driver and system-level architecture.

My work enabled seamless Unreal Engine applications to run on Ford’s Sync 4 system, bringing high-fidelity 3D interfaces to next-generation vehicles.

Optimizing real-time rendering, input systems, and overall performance was crucial to delivering a smooth and responsive HMI experience. My contributions included:

• Refactoring Unreal Engine’s rendering pipeline to reduce frame processing times and optimize rendering for in-vehicle displays.
• Reducing boot and load times by streamlining asset streaming, texture compression, and shader preloading.
• Enhancing Vulkan support for Unreal Engine, enabling next-gen graphics rendering on Ford’s HMI hardware.
• Minimizing Unreal’s resource footprint for in-car use, ensuring the system remained fast and reliable, even on lower-power automotive processors.
• Implementing low-latency input handling, improving touch responsiveness and voice command interactions within the Mustang’s HMI.

Several of these performance improvements were later adopted into Epic Games’ official Unreal Engine branch, benefiting the wider development community.

Before Unreal Engine was fully adopted at Ford, I developed a proof-of-concept HMI prototype using both Unity and Unreal Engine. This prototype was:

• Presented to Ford investors, demonstrating Unreal’s superior capabilities for real-time graphics, interactivity, and extensibility.
• Designed to showcase advanced UI/UX features, including gesture-based controls, seamless menu transitions, and high-resolution instrument cluster displays.
• Built to compare Unity and Unreal Engine for Ford’s needs, ultimately leading to Unreal’s selection as the primary engine for future HMI development.
• Configured to integrate with automotive backend systems, proving Unreal Engine’s ability to handle real-world vehicle telemetry and data visualization.

This early work was instrumental in securing Unreal Engine’s place in Ford’s technology stack, influencing how future vehicles will present information and controls to drivers.

To enhance performance monitoring and diagnostics within Ford’s HMI system, I developed a custom boot metrics system, which:

• Tracked boot times for Unreal Engine applications, identifying bottlenecks in startup sequences.
• Monitored Unreal Engine plugin loading phases, optimizing which modules were initialized at launch.
• Measured map load times and texture memory usage, ensuring the HMI remained performant under real-world conditions.
• Integrated with Ford’s internal debugging tools, providing engineers with detailed performance insights.
• Enabled real-time analytics, allowing developers to analyze how individual screens performed within the Mustang’s infotainment system.

This system became a critical tool for diagnosing performance bottlenecks, ensuring the fastest and most efficient HMI experience possible.

Reliability was a key requirement for Ford’s Unreal Engine-based HMI, so I developed a robust automated testing system, which included:

• Porting Unreal Engine’s Gauntlet testing framework to QNX, enabling automated performance and stability tests on automotive hardware.
• Creating a custom unit testing framework, ensuring that Unreal Engine components worked flawlessly within the Mustang’s HMI system.
• Automating stress tests for rendering and UI responsiveness, detecting and fixing issues before deployment.
• Developing automated validation for software updates, ensuring that every update maintained system performance and compatibility.

These efforts dramatically reduced the risk of software regressions, enabling Ford to deliver stable and reliable software updates to vehicles over time.

Collaboration across disciplines was essential for integrating Unreal Engine with Ford’s automotive software stack. I worked closely with:

• Qt/QML teams to create a unified platform, bridging traditional automotive UI frameworks with real-time 3D rendering.
• Ford’s embedded systems engineers to ensure Unreal Engine applications could seamlessly interface with in-vehicle sensors and telemetry data.
• Design teams to implement a visually stunning, interactive HMI while maintaining strict performance and safety standards.
• Epic Games engineers, contributing optimizations and bug fixes that improved Unreal Engine’s performance across different automotive applications.

This cross-disciplinary effort set new industry benchmarks for how real-time graphics technology can enhance automotive user interfaces, making the Mustang’s infotainment system one of the most advanced in the industry.