Ford, Google form 'strategic partnership' on cloud services, Android

> Rumor is Ford outsourced to Microsoft who outsourced to someone's cousin who wrote it in Adobe Air or something

That's actually pretty close. From what I understood Microsoft and Ford worked pretty closely on SYNC and that was a large success. Ford came back to Microsoft to have them do Sync 2.

Microsoft gave them a quote saying it would take $X and Y time. Ford said it needs to be cheaper and faster. Microsoft told Ford "We can't do that, here are some of our preferred contractors for Windows Embedded, maybe they can."

Some time later Ford came back to Microsoft saying "Please fix this" and that was around the time I joined. I actually heard a Ford VP say "This is the worst quality problem we've had in my time at Ford." He had been there during the Firestone tire debacle. (He was talking about cost in lost sales, obviously iPods not working wasn't as bad in the grand scheme of things as cars rolling over.)

The "backend" of the system was written in C++ on Windows Embedded. The user interface was written in Flash with some insane stringly-typed interface to talk back and forth with the C++ layer. And that's how I became an action script developer at Microsoft for a (very) brief time.

iPhones worked decently with the system. Android barely worked at all (Ford didn't care much about that at the time). Windows Phones actually worked pretty well since all the employees at the time had them and that's mostly what we'd use for developing.

It was the worst job I've ever had.

Considering that the lifecycle of the average Ford is many years longer than that of any mobile device, this is clearly going to be problematic.

The latest available from Samsung. It takes 60 days for updates to get down the pipe to OEMs.

This caught my eye because I'm not sure what you mean here -- AFAIK, the current "tvOS" release runs on all Apple TVs released from late 2015 on, and they kept updating the 3rd generation model that came out in early 2012 up to 2019. This still seems to be a pretty good track record, all things considered. (There's a pretty huge CPU jump between the 3rd generation and 4th generation, including a move from 32-bit to 64-bit.)

Unrelatedly, though,

> I want a dumb TV with good HDMI and other specs, to which I can connect whatever display device I want (or many).

I would have loved to have found one of those that also met the 4K HDR requirement I'd set to upgrade from my blissfully dumb plasma set. I'm not unhappy with my my LG OLED by any stretch, but it would be really damn nice if there was a "turn all of WebOS off and just be a TV set" feature.

Because on my Mazda I can do all that with the physical builtin car controls. Or I can just tap the voice control button and say it.

Also the navigation on a 7" dashboard mounted screen is significantly more glanceable than squinting at a small phone screen.

It's all a great benefit for the 8+ hour highway drives I need to regularly do.

It sounds like a $9 smartphone mount and a mini headphone to cassette adapter (or FM audio adapter) you can get 95% of the benefits in any vehicle manufactured since 1980.

I've only used CarPlay, but the messaging app is a perfect example. The phone's native messaging interface is of course inappropriate for safe driving, being primarily visual. CarPlay's messaging app only gives you a glanceable list of contacts, and you tap one to dictate a message, which is then also read back to you for confirmation (no message text is ever displayed on the screen). I've had entire text conversations without taking my eyes off the road.

For maps and music, the difference may be somewhat less profound, but the same design principles combined with a larger screen that equates to fewer milliseconds scanning for information or steadying your finger to touch a small button, still have a significant effect in keeping driver app use as safe as possible.

The fact is that a lot of people use such a mount anyway, but they are technically breaking the law and can be sent fines (eg if spotted by a motorway/freeway automated camera system).

It kind of makes sense.

Devices built into a vehicle have to meet safety specifications and it can be proved that they have. There is no such reassurance on a dash mounted phone. It could easily switch mode and distract you and cause an accident.

I have a similar (but magnetic) mount in my car, and if I'm not careful my phone will fall off and cause a distraction.

I'm similar to the parent; I have a "dumb" head unit with an aux cord + dongle. I suppose one benefit would be if it could suggest faster routes around traffic or detours.

Even when I know where I'm going, it's very useful to have an accurate ETA. If I get a call, I can tell someone quite precisely when I expect to arrive.

[0] I usually left halfway through rush hour, most accidents seemed to occur just before I left but I never crunched the numbers so just an observation.

I do agree that for car functions I like physical knobs, but for infotainment? being able to say "hey siri play X" is awesome.

> There's no need to view, listen to, or reply to messages while you're driving. It's dangerous, even hands-free. You shouldn't even be having voice conversations while driving. Sure, we all do it from time to time, but it should be rare and under exceptional circumstances. It's dangerous and unnecessary. Pay attention to the damn road.

You know people are going to do it, so it should be made less dangerous, no?

This just means that you're blindly following older, possibly out-of-date directions. What happens when you discover that a road is closed? Do you pull over, pull out your maps, and try to guess what the next best path is, possibly involving a fair amount of backtracking? I've done that before - I drove east to west across the US with just printed maps - and it's not anything I look back on with nostalgia.

1. Map apps give duration information about different routes - this is interesting as it calibrates my own mental model of potential routes. However I also often optimise my routes for things apart from time.

2. I am in a hurry, and map apps are better at avoiding roadworks and traffic jams than my own mental model. I ignored a route suggestion the other day because I thought I knew better, which delayed me by 15 minutes because a flyover I wanted to use was temporarily closed.

3. Map Apps are great when I am travelling across town on a route I would rarely drive, so I am unfamiliar with the possible routes (e.g. I often go to A, and I often go to B, but I rarely go from A to B).

4. Edit: and map apps are fantastically safer in cities or towns you have no familiarity with. You can pay attention to your driving and not be distracted looking for street names or other route waypoints.

> It's dangerous and unnecessary. Pay attention to the damn road.

Opinion or fact? My opinion is that voice directions makes it possible to pay attention to the traffic, and I am not stressed, and I don’t have to have uncertainty about road choices (which is safer). It certainly makes looking for unknown street numbers or businesses safer - scanning for street numbers or business frontages is very distracting.

Use your tools sensibly and safely - don’t use them like a fool.

A good mapping solution enables all sorts of things: * Seeing alternative routes you don't know about or expect along with their anticipated time difference * Easily adding stops on the way (gas stations, restaraunts, you name it) * Letting you know what you need to do soon (such as seeing a pattern of four lanes on the freeway and learning that you need to be in the second from the right) * Giving you a solid idea of when you have to be watching for your next turn and when you can simply focus on the road without reading street signs. "Next turn in 3 miles" means look at the road, "next turn in 0.2 miles" means you need to start looking at street signs * Automatic rerouting. If you DO miss a turn or get stuck behind traffic from an accident, you don't need to immediately start thinking about how best to get back on course. You can focus on the driving instead.

In the music scenario, it gives both voice controls that let you focus on the road ("Play Modest Mouse in Spotify" rather than having to dig through albums or radio stations), integration with your car's controls (next track involves lifting my thumb rather than reaching for a knob in the middle of the car or my phone).

Saying "no one should ever hear a text message while driving" is just abstinence-only education at this point, and the message works about as well as it does for sexual education. That ship has sailed and it's simply not a valid line of argument. "No one should reach for a touch screen" isn't any better - it's not a good model, but it's the reality in a huge percentage of vehicles sold today.

This isn't over-optimization - it's simply a quality of life increase. Most people don't want to have to micromanage every detail of their trips - they want to get from point A to point B safely, reliably, and rapidly. Good car systems make that simple. If you want to sit your Rand McNally atlas next to your manual transmission and your 8-track, that's your right, but other people want to focus on the parts that they HAVE to be involved with, not the parts technology can help with.

I don’t want privacy derangement to break my favorite features of AA. I like that I can ask it to navigate to that Vietnamese restaurant I went to last week. Or “to school” and have that work correctly.

Example: http://toyota.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/7954/rela...

I've heard that SOS collections can be turned off by activating it and telling them you want to opt out.

It would be nice if someone documented where models wifi/cellular antennas are. Perhaps there's a market for faraday cages built by model.

To change settings on the ADAS behavior, you have to use buttons on the wheel to control a menu that appears directly above the steering wheel: The entertainment unit has no ability to control settings for vehicle motion-related behaviors, so you have to deal with a less friendly menu that isn't touch capable to set them.

This is also why Tesla is particularly unique (reckless?) in pushing OTA updates which can change the car's driving behavior. Nobody else would use OTAs that way, and most OTA-capable hardware in cars can't actually interact with driving behavior components.

I wonder what the privacy story is here?