Intel Wants To Computerize Your Car 191
cartechboy writes: 'Google just unveiled its cute self-driving car prototype, and now Intel is the next tech company looking to get in on the rapid digital change coming in cars — a potentially lucrative area for expansion. Intel is releasing what it's calling an "in-vehicle solutions platform" — processors, an operating system and developer kits Intel is hoping automakers and others would use to build in-vehicle infotainment systems. From the developer perspective, there is a chance the Intel release makes building easier and cheaper. But is it good for automakers to be building these systems instead of Google and Apple? So far, no automaker has done so well on software, and some have seriously damaged their reputation (ex: MyFord Touch and Sync, Cadillac CUE).'
How did you guess? (Score:5, Informative)
Integrated Infotainment, why do I want it? (Score:4, Informative)
As far as I can see, that solves my infotainment "needs." What exactly am I missing out on?
Re:Integrated Infotainment, why do I want it? (Score:4, Informative)
Closed systems that go out of date quickly and are incompatible with anything newer.
Want an Example? BMW 525 Iphone cradle system. doesn't work with the iPhone 5, 5c or 5s.
Re:Question about school zones (Score:2, Informative)
I don't believe that the Google self-driving car actually reads signs. That stretch of road is coded in its database with the speed limit.
I always thought that "Speed Limit X when children are present" really means "during school hours". With a little bit of logic ability, the car would know what the speed limit was for that time and date.
Re:Damaged reputation? (Score:5, Informative)
My 2011 Taurus' Sync interface is a Microsoft UI designed in hell. It starts out where the destination selection is as awkward as it gets: instead of entering a nice friendly address like 1234 County O, Wausau, Wisconsin, you have to enter an address according to computer hierarchy rules: "State: Wisconsin. City: Wausau. Street "County O". Number: "1234". The first problem is that the autocomplete kicks in late, but still takes the buffered touch as the next input: W..A..U..S ... up pops the WAU listings of Wauketon, Waunakee, and Wausau, and Wauketon happens to be located where the S was. Guess who has to start over again? The next problem comes if all you have for an address is 1234 County O. The auto complete demands that you specify which County O. Do you mean North (1-4799), North (4800-9999), West, South, or Southwest? Hell if I know, I'm from Minnesota and I was just reading an address off a web site. It turned out that only one of those four choices actually happened to be located in Wausau, but the damn machine felt the need to offer me all four.
For a machine with 40GB of hard drive, limiting the address book to 100 destinations is simply insulting my intelligence. I can't have a hundred and one places to go?
There is very poor integration with smart phones. The most it can do with an iPhone is play music, but only after spending minutes downloading the entire catalog of tracks before letting me even play a song. I can't send it a contact's address for navigation, nor can it dial an entry in my contact list.
The icing on the cake was the first time I really needed to use the voice interface. As a lifelong Minnesotan, I have a flat, boring, monotone Midwestern accent, yet the so-called voice "recognition" couldn't recognize common words like 'courthouse', 'capitol', or 'state capitol'. Instead it offered me really odd choices that were nothing like the words I spoke, such as answering my saying 'capitol building' by asking 'Did you mean pizza?' (yes, that really was its clarification.) Neither my wife nor I ever did get it to take us to the State Capitol building in Madison - (we ended up stumbling upon it because it's located at the center of a pretty small city.) At one point I gave up on the voice interface and said "exit". The machine had the temerity to ask me "Did you really mean to exit, yes or no?" A freakin' pop-up dialog box in a voice interface?!?! At that point we nicknamed it "Useless".
Thankfully my car is slightly too old to suffer from MyTouch, which was inflicted on the model year 2012 cars, and newer. The problems are as obvious as a cold sore: next to a touch screen interface, capacitive buttons are about the worst possible user interface possible in a car. When driving, you need to access controls by feel, as your eyes need to keep looking out the windows. And tactile feedback is a simple concept that people intuitively understand: when you reach for a knob, you feel if it's the twisty kind or the clicky kind, and you can easily adjust it without looking. But if you reach a touch-button by feel, though, you are by definition touching it - therefore you are also triggering it. If you would normally expect to run your fingers down the dash, feeling for the third button in order to turn on the defroster, you can easily trigger the air conditioner and the fog lamps before reaching the defroster. And it turns out they don't even work at all with gloved fingers (cf. Minnesota and Wisconsin in the winter!) When you hear "touch" and "driver", if they're not talking about the car's handling, you are listening to a very stupid person.
Consumers who hate Sync and the MyTouch interface are not alone: Consumer Reports consistently reduces the scores of Ford vehicles so equipped by 4-6 points, which typically drops them from a tie for a top-of-the-class rating to a middle-of-the-class rating. They are really, really bad systems.