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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: 4, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 25 2016, @02:50AM
My younger brother is an engineer at Ford. He took me for a test drive at a dealership in Ann Arbor in one of their models that had the software, and it was pretty awful. Couldn't get it to do anything. He went on and on about how it didn't matter how well he and his fellow Mech-E's designed the hardware when the Ford management chose to put such dogshit software into the console--it completely killed every sale. Indeed, it did kill the sale because my wife and I were shopping for a new car at the time.
To be fare, though, the software in his BMW wasn't much better. He put us in stitches last summer trying to get the voice recognition to call our sister.
I don't know who does both things well. Maybe Tesla? Who knows.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @03:32AM
The manager who insisted on Micro$oft is probably VP now, while the peons who advised against it are still peons.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @05:44AM
Not too surprising. WinCE (which that whole mess is) was never that good. At a few points it was better than the competition but not usually.
BMWs system is OK for what it is. Voice recognition is *very* particular in how it works. The whole iDrive system is much better than it used to be. However it has taken them nearly 10 years to make it 'kinda' usable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @07:15AM
To be fare, though,
Ford Dealer! Sale away, sale away, sale away! Perhaps they did loose a sail, on this dey.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 25 2016, @01:50PM
Auto-complete on a smartphone is the most annoying feature...
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @04:30PM
I don't know who does both things well. Maybe Tesla? Who knows.
I've had a fair bit of luck with my Acura system. The voice recognition system gets it right probably about 90% of the time (even for some non-trivial street names for GPS directions). Of course, 10% it goes horribly wrong, but the manual type-in system isn't terrible, either.
My main complaint is that it disables the manual typing system when the car is moving, even if I have a passenger in the passenger seat who could safely enter data.