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Comment by jakejake | Hacker News Reader

This sounded awesome right up to the point that they said that this was a hotly pursued space due to advertising potential to a captive audience. If I am in my own car and my music is interrupted with an ad every time I drive by a McDonalds - I would find that extremely annoying.

On the other hand, if you could lease a car at a subsidized price in exchange for ads, that might be an attractive offer to some.

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Yea I couldnt believe that when I read it.

Once you got past all the requirements these 'ads' would have to adhear to, to not be distracting or dangerous, it becomes a pretty limp form of advertising.

The reason people own nice dash-systems, and iPods is so they dont have to listen to ads. There is absolutely no way anyone would buy a car that forces ads on them unless it was HEAVILY subsidized.

This is beyond retarded, and if advertising really is their motivation, this will fail hard.

Why isnt having a cool fancy dashboard without ads enough? Doesn't that do enough to make the car desirable, and competitive?

It ought to be flatly illegal to visually advertise through an in-car app. An ad is designed to engage attention; visually engaging a driver is the last thing we want on the road. It's beyond stupid.

YOU ARE PASSING A GAS STATION. PLEASE STOP AND BUY IT.

YOU ARE PASSING A SANDWICH SHOP. PLEASE SWERVE LEFT AND BUY SANDWICH.

5 POINTS IF YOU CHANGE TO THE FAR RIGHT LANE!

>> 5 POINTS IF YOU CHANGE TO THE FAR RIGHT LANE!

This had me in stitches, I can't help feel something of this nature is a plausible outcome.

Hm. I wonder if anyone has ever attempted to ban billboards under the guise of being worried about distracted driving.

This is actually already the case in a few European countries I am aware of. Not all streets, but next to the highways there can't be any visible billboards.

Like Germany. The one country where there is no general speed limit on highways.

Actually, everytime I visit countries with billboards on highway, it seems really bizarre and stupid to place ads next to highways.

Ban, I don't know. I recall that Denver regulated billboards in the mid 1970s for just this reason--certain flashing signs had to be shut down.

CarVille, anyone?

Interesting. Same could be done by docking a Tablet in Car

A chocolate company in Cleveland ran a promotion where the company would pay you $150 per month for three years if you bought a specially wrapped and painted Volkswagon Beetle with their colors and logos plastered on it.

http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2012/08/would_yo...

In Switzerland, most car shops offer a deal that when you leave a big sticker with the garage's name and slogan and perhaps a marketing claim on your newly bought car, you get some reduction on the maintenance work each year.

Trivia fact: you can get a ticket in the UK for driving an obviously commercial vehicle through a Royal Park. A few years back my wife got a ticket in Holyrood Park in Edinburgh for driving along a road that cuts through the edge of the park in a car that had the logo of the company she worked for at the time.

The NY Times added the part about the captive audience and advertising potential.

Ford's developer page and its press release concern themselves with apps of the type they already bundle with Sync (i.e., ad-free). Indeed, Ford's developer page warns that content which distracts the driver (including but not limited to visual distractions) will not be accepted into the Sync app store.

My new BMW has a Yelp app, which might be the kind of thing they're talking about. I'm pretty sure your car isn't going to advertise to you without you asking for it; that sounds like a regulation nightmare.

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