Everywhere you look there’s a promise of a connected device about to change your life.

Transit workers and Ford agree: Innovation is only good as the problem it solves.

And for workers, pants full of barbecue sauce from lunch is a problem worth solving.

It called for a different kind of connected device.

The Connected Tray.

A simple, collapsible and portable tray that ‘connects’ to the Ford Transit steering wheel, providing a convenient eating table for workers, anywhere.

Compact, smart, with specially designed grooves to place a healthy lunch PLUS hold their other connected device, the smartphone.

The Connected Tray is convenient, foldable so one can easily put it in the door’s compartment.

The prototype is made of ABS. The black painting and the satiny lacquer give it its fancy look. Since we are planning to produce it at a larger scale, the production techniques will be different. An ABS plastic injection with an in-mold graining will be used to gives the tray its matt aspect and strength.

So far, the Connected Tray is a protoype, presented to the public through a short video to measure interest in the innovation ahead of production.

The Tray is at prototype stage and interest is being measured via response to the social video – targeted at our Transit audience’s social feed during lunchtime.

The tray will be available online and in dealerships so that one can easily obtains it.

In only a few days, the Connected Tray generated discussions all around Europe with more than a million views and over 3 million media impressions. We were able to reach an audience that is usually not so easy to catch through social media. It impacts our brand image in a very positive way.

The Connected Tray is for us a way to claim our desire to be the best workmen ally in the automotive industry.