Applied Intuition | Ford Mustang Mach-E

The Job

Project

SDS Japan — featuring the Ford Mustang Mach-E

Client

Applied Intuition

Vehicle

Ford Mustang Mach-E

Location

Tokyo — Ginza streets & the Shuto Expressway

the film

The Mission

prove the self-driving system belongs on Japanese roads, not just American ones.

The Format

a sizzle. A handful of clean beats — no interviews, no talking heads.

The Signature

the driver's hands lift off the wheel. The car keeps going.

the drive

Narrow Streets

Ginza and Namiki-dori, threading past pedestrians and shopfronts.

The Expressway

full speed on the raised Shuto, over the upper deck of Rainbow Bridge.

The Camera Car

a permitted rig running ahead of and behind the Mach-E.

the challenge

The Route

one loop that strings narrow, crowded and fast into a few hours of light.

The Read

sell Japan in every frame — Japanese signage, Japanese roads.

The Mandate

Real roads.
Real Japan. — Not a proving ground. Not a soundstage. The car at home on the streets it's built to drive.

Production Diary

Some jobs may be small in scale, but pulling them off still requires an experienced team. This was one of those. I've shot cars, trucks and bicycles on the streets of Tokyo many times. The brief is almost always the same: use the city as a dynamic backdrop for the product. In this case it was a Ford Mustang Mach-E using Self-Driving Systems, but the brief went further. We needed to show the vehicle navigating narrow roads, maneuvering among pedestrians and going full speed on the highway. We also only had a few hours to pull it off.

Putting together a route that made sense for the shots we needed was the first challenge. Anyone who's been to Tokyo knows it has a raised highway that winds through the buildings all across downtown. It also has one of the best views of Tokyo from the top layer of Rainbow Bridge. Choosing this road felt like a no-brainer; the key was to find the right on-ramps and off-ramps so we could zoom through Ginza down Namiki-dori, among the shoppers popping in and out of fashion boutiques.

But that's just one route out of an infinite number we could have chosen from. We could have shown the neon lights of Shinjuku, the high-rise office buildings of Marunouchi, the narrow backroads of the cultural mecca Harajuku, or even Chiba-fornia, the palm-tree-lined road in Chiba across the bay. Instantly all these options and more came to mind, along with a web of connecting roads, timetables and traffic patterns. For me, this kind of planning is like second nature — but maybe not for the reason you'd expect.

Out of the 17 years I've lived in Tokyo, I've spent almost all of them commuting by bicycle, and for a big chunk of that Ginza was my cut-through to and from work. There's no way to prove this, but I'd bet I've spent more hours biking through Tokyo than 99% of the people who live here. The Tokyo subways are great for a rainy day, but they come at the cost of being able to build your own mental map of the city. Seeing how neighborhoods connect, discovering those touristically dead but locally vibrant hidden gems, is one of my joys when speeding from meeting to meeting on my “mama-chari” — which, for those who don't know, is the slightly misogynistic name for bikes with child seats.

The biggest secret is that downtown Tokyo — the Tokyo everyone thinks about when they imagine “Tokyo” — isn't actually that big. It's about 10–15 kilometers across and top to bottom. So traveling by bicycle is, 9 times out of 10, faster than a taxi and even the train. It's also a great way to experience the seasons, especially when zipping through cherry blossoms in Yoyogi-koen in the morning before the deluge of drunk office workers arrives.

So yeah, that's a bit of a digression — but filming a car through the streets of Ginza and the highways of East Tokyo is something I feel confident doing 100% of the time, because I spend so much time exploring the surface of Tokyo rather than shuffling around blind underground.