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Computerworld reports
Ford engineer called MyFord Touch infotainment system "a polished turd"
Documents in a class-action lawsuit against Ford and its original MyFord Touch in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system reveal that the company's engineers and even its top executive were frustrated with the problematic technology.
The documents from the 2013 lawsuit show Ford engineers believed the IVI, which was powered by the SYNC operating system launched in 2010, might be "unsaleable" and even described a later upgrade as a "polished turd", according to a report in the Detroit News , which was confirmed by Computerworld.
The SYNC OS was originally powered by Microsoft software. Microsoft continued releasing software revisions it knew were defective, according to the lawsuit.
"In the spring of 2011, Ford hired Microsoft to oversee revisions, and hopefully the improvement, of the [software]. But ... Microsoft was unable to meaningfully improve the software, and Ford continued releasing revised software that it knew was still defective", the lawsuit states.
[The week of October 3], a U.S. District Court judge certified the case as a class action.
Consumer groups from nine states are involved in the lawsuit against Ford. The lawsuit describes an IVI screen that would freeze or go blank; generate error messages that wouldn't go away; voice recognition and navigation systems that failed to work; problems wirelessly pairing with smartphones; and a generally slow system.
[...] In 2014, Ford announced it was dropping Microsoft as the platform supplier for SYNC and moving to one based on Blackberry QNX for its SYNC 3 IVI.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @12:58AM
I have the first version of Sync in my 2009 Mercury and have been very happy with it. I have seen the later revisions and they do not seem to add much that's useful. The voice recognition works well enough and I haven't ever had crashing issues. The only pet peeve I have is that the Nav cannot read the addrresaes from the synced address book and the Bluetooth doesn't show song information. Aside from dialing, I use the steering wheel controls so I cannot speak to voice commands.
I can understand why Ford is upset. They lost their competitive advantage. When sync came out, every other fzctory system was abysmal and sync was light years ahead.