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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: 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.