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Intel Wants To Computerize Your Car
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).'
Why yes, actually, it is my job to sell microprocessors, and not to ask whether they are the right tool for the job. Why do you ask?
As far as I can see, that solves my infotainment "needs." What exactly am I missing out on?
My car blue screening while hurtling down the highway.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I try my best to avoid buying any car that has a computerized display that is a wannabe tablet or phone. Car manufacturers think they're so cute trying to roll their own solutions when in fact all they're making is dead end technology that makes their cars more expensive.
God spoke to me
The *only* computer i want in my car is my phone, so i can listen to music if i feel like it.
And yes, i realize that means no fuel injection, or other modern garbage, that has no business in *my* car.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I don't want infotainment.. I don't want apps or wifi or cell network connectivity, or ads, or remote government tracking. I don't want large lcd panels or nagging proximity beepers either. Absolutely NO microcontroller driven functionality that might decide spurious negative values mean 'floor it', 'dont turn the radio on until the car is restarted', or 'the alternator needs replacing but really doesn't.' I want simple, tactile buttons and sliders instead of touch panels and tiered menus that require visual inspection. This way I can control the basic functions of the car without taking my eyes off the road. The HVAC controls should only have three knobs for the fan speed, direction, heat level, and AC button. Also, let me open the side vents to let fresh air in even while the AC is on. I am willing to tolerate a certain amount of complexity for the radio/sound system, but that's it. In fact, design the console so I can rip the radio out and put in one of my choice without making a bigger mess out of the offensively curvy and effeminate aesthetics of the interior and dashboard. It's a dashboard, not a catwalk for the sexually ambiguous.
Speaking of aesthetics, please stop overdoing it with the curves and folds and bubble look. Kia is the worst offender, but some of the other makes are pretty bad now. Just because you can mold that plastic into any shape doesn't mean you should. It's ugly. Stop. Also, I am an average height 5'11" male with medium/largish sized hands. Please stop modeling the ergonomics for a 5'2" soccer mom with tiny hands. I'm tired of bumping the signal/wiper blade controls randomly when I turn the wheel over.
I find it hard to drive a car without that type of system in it anymore.
I'd say that qualifies as a problem.
I'm honestly curious is this is going to happen. Much like the Smart house story from a few days back I wonder what's going to happen when more of this rather useless crap gets wedged into a car and someone has a real serious failure that results in a crash. Well... actually we may have already had that. There was some rumors out there that the whole Toyota brake system fiasco wasn't actually caused by some weird problem with the floor mat but was actually a software issue.
Either way I'm really wondering if all this extra technology is really all that useful. Compared to just keep the systems in a car kind of 'dumb' and just sticking to hardened PLC style systems for engine management. Nothing flashy, just something rugged that won't fail.
Self driving cars are absolute nonsense. It requires intellect to decide whether an object is a plastic bear or a real bear about to enter the road, and has to be braked for. Any business/investment into this self driving car design field is setting themselves up for a major lawsuit because the basic principle is that you require artificial intelligence on par with a human to make the same correct decisions while driving, identifying objects and predicting their future behavior correctly. Even a dog's level won't cut it, as shepherds have dogs and sheep, and the trio exists well together, but dogs and sheep can't coexist, or at least wolves haven't figured out a way yet, and you need a human to decide things like we're gonna take that mountain pass yonder instead of the one over here. Alpha wolves and wolf packs make similar decisions, and a whole lot of wolf lives depend on a good or bad decision, in middle of winter, similar to the Donner Party back in the Oregon Trail/California Trail days. Even humans make horrible judgment calls sometimes which way to drive, or in an accident piling up in front of you which way to swerve, how are you gonna trust these decisions to a machine, or intellect less than a human? Driving is a matter of life and death. If anything you need a machine smarter than a human in comprehending the world around it, and predicting actions of objects like insane people as pedestrians, walking in the middle of the road. Saying you ran someone over "legally" does not fly far in court, just because someone crossed the street before you when they had red light and you had green, or stopped in the middle like Rain Man, you still have to judge for yourself what to do.
Well, I for one would totally totally feel better if you were replaced by a machine.
Yes. I'm FREE to voluntarily opt in to a system of my choosing. When things are required by the government, that's a different situation.
There has often been no real difference.
Many people freely opted in to have their data collected by online services. They did not suspect that later, the government would be demanding that data from those services.
So there you have a case in which voluntarily opting in, and the government forcing it from you, have exactly the same result. Do you honestly think it would be limited to such cases?
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.
John
Most cars on the road today certainly aren't going to be on the road in 30 years. Especially not cars with out of date radio systems. This is on purpose you know? Automakers want you to buy a new car every 3-5 years, not every 20 to 30 years. They *WANT* the cars to feel outdated in 5 years. You don't make money selling reliable cars anymore. You make money selling an endless line of lemons that mostly do the job of driving while otherwise having the interior fall apart into exploding bits of plastic over time.
I just want my car to be a car. Hell, I barely even use the plain old stereo in mine. Anything some bullshit infotainment system can do, a smartphone can do faster and better. And you won't end up with a two-ton, obsolete, glorified tablet on wheels a year later (or less).
At most, any such systems should be nothing more than a standardized interface for controlling your smartphone. It could even have hardware buttons with standard control mappings, which would be great.
With the latest witch hunt out there for v"distracted drivers", I'm surprised I've never seen a proposal to ban or limit these things. I'm generally against curtailing technology by force of law, but in case, I would say good riddance.
...General Motors announced that they want to motorize your computer. They plan to install a diesel engine and a steering wheel in every laptop. So far, no computer maker has done so well in providing fast-spinning hard disks and easy to use GUI, and some have seriously damaged their reputation (e.g. Windows 8).