Ford’s Sync doesn’t get a break. It attracted undue attention from LaHood’s distracted driving crusade. Consumer Reports had issues with the system. Sync sank Ford in the 2011 J.D. Power Initial Quality Survey. Can it get any worse?
Yes, it can. Ford is being sued for patent infringement. Read More >
Usually, we don’t report on recalls. If we would, we would be reporting on recalls all day. Sometimes, we make an exception, if the matter has wider ranging implications. This is one of those times.
The recall: BMW recalls “approximately 50” BMW X3. They have electric power steering. There is nothing wrong with the power steering. But there is everything wrong with the computer that runs the power steering. The steering has a position sensor, and the sensor’s calibration data pertaining to temperature balancing was mistakenly overwritten.” At some point, the computer finds out that something is wrong, and shuts off the electric power steering (EPS).
The wider ranging implications:DARPA challenges colleges to build autonomous vehicles. Google already has “look, ma, no hands” cars drive autonomously through the city, now they want some that read your mind. Cars drove autonomously from Italy to China. Nevada paves the legislative roads for driverless vehicles. What do they all have in common? Read More >
„When will it discharge?“ asked a reporter on Monday at Nissan. I ducked under my desk. “In one or two years,” answered Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn. I broke cover when I realized that they were talking about the Leaf powering the house. Read More >
Careful when transiting Nevada by car: Soon, there can be driverless cars on the roads of the desert state, legally. Nevada passed Bill 511 (full text here) that lays the framework for autonomous vehicles.
For instance, the bill authorizes the Nevada DMV to come up with rules for driverless cars. Just think of it: Will you need a driver’s license to operate a car that needs no driver? Read More >
We (well, some of us) await the autonomous auto that leaves the driving to a robot, such as not to distract us from twittering and uploading pictures of our cats to our facebookies. That technology is not quite there yet. Volkswagen however thinks “an important milestone on the path towards fully automatic and accident-free driving” has been set. So said Volkswagen’s Prof. Dr. Jürgen Leohold at the final presentation of the EU research project HAVEit (Highly Automated Vehicles for Intelligent Transport – who comes up with that stuff?) Read More >
Ford’s President of the Americas Mark “MKF” Fields (sorry, the joke is just too funny to let go of) is responding to recent allegations of slipping quality by Consumer Reports and JD Power, by telling Bloomberg that
We’re largely back on track on some of these early issues
He’s referring specifically to issues with the MyFordTouch system that has been the central issue in the recent quality flap, and the fix for that isn’t particularly complicated.
Ford has reworked software on MyFordTouch to prevent random rebooting that had afflicted the system, said Sue Cischke, vice president of environmental and safety engineering. The touch controls also have been recalibrated to respond more quickly to a driver’s touch, she said.
Ford is encouraging dealers to spend as much as 40 minutes training drivers to use the system.
“If you’re trying to figure it out as you’re driving, obviously that’s not a good thing to do,” Cischke said.
Ford’s problem, it turns out, isn’t so much a product quality problem as a customer quality problem… because why would consumers need 40 minutes of training on a system Ford insists they are “demanding” (despite, it must be pointed out, the government’s murmured objections)? Unfortunately for Ford, Michael Karesh argues convincingly that Ford’s quality problems go beyond the MyFordTouch issues… but because its quality was so weak before Mulally took over, at least Ford (and the “PR friendly” auto media) can continue to claim “improvement.”
Since Nissan’s PR and communication folks are probably having a busy morning anyway, we thought we’d bring this video to their attention. According to this apparently quite tech-savvy Leaf owner, the Leaf’s CarWings system will automatically send your location data to any third-party RSS feed you sign up for. As he puts it in the video
“There’s a lot of personal data there. I’m not sure if you really want Fox News to know exactly where you’re at, how fast you’re driving, that kind of thing… when you read those RSS feeds in your car, you might want to think twice about hitting that button”
Why would signing up for an RSS feed require that constantly-updated locational data be sent to the RSS provider? The video’s maker assumes the data is for “CarWings internal use” and yet he shows that it gets sent to third parties. We know GM monitors Chevy Volt user data anonymously through Onstar, but one assumes that this kind of data is fairly well protected from third parties. In the case of the Leaf, that may not be the case. We’d sure like to know if this is true, and why…
[UPDATE: Nissan tells us: “Owners have to opt in or agree to share their data every time they sign in. If they don’t, then they pass on the benefit as well. They will however, lose any remote control or data logging capability but the choice is in the hand of the driver every time.”]
I’m not in the business of helping people Tweet better, I’m not in the business of helping people post to Facebook better. My job is to make sure we keep people safe behind the wheel. I’m not going to deny the fact that people want these things. They do. Especially the generation behind us. They’re used to being connected 24 hours a day.
A car is not a mobile device — a car is a car. We will not take a backseat while new telematics and infotainment systems are introduced. There is too much potential for distraction of drivers.
NHTSA Administrator David Strickland took the war on distraction to the enemy in a speech to an auto technology conference, reports Bloomberg. With nearly every manufacturer racing towards ever greater implementation of connectivity, communication and entertainment systems in cars, Strickland’s rhetorical line in the sand foreshadows a serious confrontation between industry and government. Either that, or this is just Ray LaHood-style hot air calculated to make it look like something’s happening.
AOL’s Translogic [via PopSci] takes a look at the LAPD’s brand-spankety new Chevy Caprice PPV, the born-again Pontiac G8 that you can’t buy at a dealership. But rather than looking at the Caprice’s cop car-creaming performance (as did the Michigan State Police), this report focuses on the LAPD’s high-tech toys… which could just make the Caprice’s V8, rear-drive abilities less necessary than ever. Still, between the Holden-powered, rear-drive performance, the footprint-spying night vision camera and the automatic license plate recognition system, the Caprice PPV will probably make you think twice about speeding the next time you’re visiting the City of Angels.
In conclusion of today’s Volkswagen-heavy fare, a peek into the future of Volkswagen’s most boring, but nonetheless highly successful car: The Passat.
Germany’s Auto Bild thinks it knows what the 8th generation Passat will look like when it hits the showrooms sometime in 2014. While their renderings most likely don’t reveal the exact likeness of the future Passat, Auto Bild’s Passat companion story probably has more than a few grains of truth. Read More >
Last January, Toyota’s Prez Akio Toyoda visited Salesforce.com CEO and cloud computing proselytizer extraordinaire Mark Benioff in Benioff’s sprawling compound on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Explaining the many features of a car has always been a challenge. Manuals remain largely unread. When I was at Volkswagen, someone had the brilliant idea of making interactive CD-ROMs. I protested: “So that car stops with a cryptic trouble light, and now the poor customer is supposed to go home, find the CD, pop it into the computer and check what that light means?” My protests fell on deaf ears, and the CDs were made. Now, someone at Audi had a better idea … Read More >
While 3D has been getting a big push from Hollywood and the video game and television set industries, consumers have not yet wholeheartedly embraced 3D when it comes to home tv. Stereo photos and videos can be visually stunning and emotionally evocative, but for many people 3D is a no-starter because current 3D tv requires using special glasses of one kind or another. It’s possible though, that consumer acceptance of 3D may come from an unexpected area, the automotive sector. While the technology for autostereoscopic, glasses-free, displays exists right now, there are cost, distance, and viewing angle issues that keep them from being currently applicable for home television sets. Those issues, however, may not exist for automotive applications. In fact, 3D technology is advancing so rapidly that cars may present particularly appropriate applications for the current state of the 3D art.
So, will this MIT-developed “virtual dashboard” render that car you’re about to hit? After all, a three-dimensional representation of the world on your dashboard seems like it would be at least as eye-catching as… you know, reality. And, believe it or not, according to PopSci this is actually a development of a program that was determined to be too distracting. This system, named AIDA 2.0, was developed from
a little robotic dashboard companion called AIDA (for Affective Intelligent Driving Agent), an MIT creation that essentially read a driver’s facial expressions to gauge mood and inferred route and destination preferences through social interaction with the driver. Apparently that was deemed too distracting, so now MIT is back with AIDA 2.0, which swaps the dashboard robot for a massive 3-D interactive map that covers the entire dashboard–because that’s not distracting at all.
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