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joekiser writes "In 2010, Ford Motor Company was rated as top-five automotive manufacturer in terms of quality, per J.D. Power and Associates. This was a major turnaround for the automotive giant, which had faced bankruptcy just two years prior. This high reliability rating would be short lived however; Ford began installing touch screen hubs powered by Microsoft SYNC, which were both confusing and buggy.
By 2012, Ford quality rankings had dropped to 23rd, even after numerous software upgrades and a rebranding of SYNC to "MyFordTouch." One customer reported:
"The voice controls typically do not work until the vehicle has been on for five to 10 minutes, meaning short trips require dialing phone calls by hand, only to have the call cut off when the system finally starts up."
This slide continued into 2013, when Ford ranked 27th of 28 brands (as an aside, Ford's premium brand, Lincoln, ranked one slot higher that year at 26th).
Apparently, Ford Motor Company has had enough. On Friday, the Detroit News reported that Ford will make the switch to QNX on future vehicles. This is the same platform currently used by Acura, Audi, BMW, and Land Rover."
[ED Note: "Ford Motor Company's decision to move to QNX aside, I'll be heavily considering a Blackberry for my next phone, especially with rumors of a 64-bit octa-core model for later this year. BB10 also has gotten rave reviews for its design and ease-of-use."]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Monday February 24 2014, @01:22AM
Well, you've hit on the most obvious solution.
Bluetooth integration with the phone already in your pocket.
Stop making me upgrade my In-Dash Maps.
Stop making me have to add music to the in-dash music storage.
Stop making the goddamed car system obsolete the minute I drive off the dealer's lot.
There is enough capabilities in Bluetooth stacks to handle every thing a phone can
provide, so when Google Maps improves, you car gets smarter, and when you book mark a cool restaurant it follows you to the car.
Cars are never going to keep up, so they just might as well Give Up trying.
Even if you have to install one App per brand of car it would be better than expensive built in stuff going obsolete.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Grishnakh on Monday February 24 2014, @02:00AM
Stop making me have to add music to the in-dash music storage.
Actually, many cars these days have built-in USB ports (frequently hidden inside the center console) so you can plug in your own USB thumb drive with your music. If you need more space, just buy a bigger thumb drive (and they're dirt cheap these days). The only problem with this scheme is that you probably can't keep your music in Vorbis or Opus formats, but still, it's fairly convenient. When you want to update your car's collection, just pop out the thumb drive, plug it into your computer, and run rsync.
The rest of your points are dead-on, however. Trying to build stuff into cars isn't working, because computers and software change and are replaced much faster than cars.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday February 24 2014, @02:22AM
My car has USB and SD car inputs, as well as the Bluetooth audio on the phone, which the car finds, and indexes, and makes available for selection.
The problem comes when I get out of the car, and my gets in, it takes it a while to grind through all that music to build it into a catalog for selection from the dash. So for me, its just as easy to drag my entire music collection to the SD card, and let it index that. I can then just speak the command to play an artist or title and do it all hands free.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday February 24 2014, @02:04AM
I just had another occasion to see how old I am (at least as a mind-set): somebody mentioned that "Zimbra allows you to share files". My immediate reaction: "Why would I want to do file sharing through Zimbra?"
Turned out that the UNIX philosophy [wikipedia.org] is not quite in the nowadays users' attitude, but rather "convergence" and "integration".
Well, my mobile does have a camera (which I don't use - but couldn't find a mobile without one), much less Bluetooth (and no HDMI output for sure). But at least I managed make sure that:
If in the future I won't be able to buy "just a car" but only "mobile phone or a flying circus on wheels", it's very unlikely I'll use those modules (probably I'll spend some extra effort to understand how to disable them).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by weilawei on Monday February 24 2014, @03:26AM
I think you're definitely right about the convergence approach. People want their one gadget to do all the electronic stuff, and don't want to carry 14 different pieces of kit.
I do think that the UNIX philosophy and convergence are compatible. Think about how an OS is usually (roughly) structured: kernel, libraries, CLI programs, GUI programs. Transmission [debian.org] as a great example of UNIX philosophy: it uses a core library, libtransmission, and each GUI/CLI/daemon relies on this core library. They don't try to do it themselves, they simply solve their part of the problem.
If you build your system in a modular fashion, with modules that do only one thing, and do it well, you can more easily maintain larger systems--and you can layer stuff over it with ease: a GUI, a CLI, a daemon, a web interface, etc.. The real issue with infotainment systems (and many other products) is that they're designed in a monolithic fashion, instead of being composed of smaller, self-contained units which communicate over well-defined protocols with known semantics. You don't need a lot of overhead here, but you need, at a minimum, a generic convention for boundaries and communication across them.
I'd like to see modern cars designed with this sort of modularity in mind--heck, you can even pitch it as a way for car companies to segment the market further, by downloading new modules for new functionality. Those of us who like our cars for their ability to transport us (instead of being a mobile theater) would be free to skip over the options and save some cash. I'll keep buying older cars, until I can buy something without all the bells and whistles. However, I'd still really prefer to see an open-source implementation. I think a real draw would be a manufacturer supported API (a real one; I'll leave you to argue over the definition of that), but good luck with that, despite the incredibly beneficial effects of fostering a community around your product.