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Ford Ditches Microsoft Partnership On Sync, Goes With QNX
Freshly Exhumed writes: Ford's in-car infotainment system known as Sync will soon evolve to add a capacitive touch screen, better integration with smartphone apps and, eventually, support for Android Auto and Apple CarPlay in version 3, thanks to a switch of operating systems. After years of teaming with Microsoft, the automobile giant has switched to BlackBerry's QNX, a real time operating system renowned for stability.
And if the they make it Android/iOS agnostic, with proper support for Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, its even better news.
Of course, both windows phone users must be feeling let down by now...
It's a car, not a fucking tablet.
Fusion owner here with the "my ford touch" sync system + touch sensitive climate/media controls on the console. Having to take your eyes off the road to make sure you're touching the right 1x1 inch area on the screen, or small indentation seems silly.
Every car I've had prior had physical buttons for these things that after about a week of owning the car could be operated completely by touch alone.
QNX has been the choice for realtime OSs for a long time. Blackberry has little to do with that but they certainly are trying to cash in on it.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
When did a "car infotainment system" become mandatory? Im a millenial, and I get that in order to sell us cars you need to make them as popular as the other thing we love, phones, but it feels like a car in and of itself is becoming a massive, distractive, pain in the ass in the 21st century. I rented a full sized ford sedan over the thanksgiving holiday and was rewarded with 'climate management' instead of heat and AC which was buried several menus into the infotorture system. changing a radio station felt confusing and annoying. Worse yet, the damned thing was relentlessly trying to pair with my phone and my laptop. So heres a suggestion or two.
Pair with Bose, or Bang, or Jensen, or some other audio company and make a damn good stereo. give me back my buttons and knobs, and for the love of god put XM/Sirius out of its wheezing gasping misery (its shit quality anymore and nothing but ads.) ditch the navigation, my phone does that better than you ever will. Keep the cool rear view camera. No one under 70 listens to AM radio so pair it down to 5 presets instead of 30.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Completely agree. We're throwing tech into these cars for the sake of tech.. not functionality.
This is certainly welcome news. My sync has had issues from day one. A few examples (some fairly humorous)
1) I tell it to call someone. It responds "The requested contact is currently unavailable." No clue what that means. I assume it is having trouble figuring out the number since it hasn't synced phone numbers or something. It usually happens if I try to call shortly after dialing.
2) I tell it to call someone. It responds "No bluetooth device is available right now, I will try to connect one." Then it sits in silence. It eventually does connect, usually after a second or two, but never calls. I have to send the command again.
3) I tell it to call someone. It sits in silence for a while. My current record is about 5 minutes, and then it decides it's going to call. That's kind of awkward sometimes.
4) My time is wrong. I tried to correct my time. It goes back to 12:00 after doing so. Now the clock advances very slowly (like, 1 minute for every few hours.) Still don't know what's going on.
5) I switch to bluetooth audio, it says it is on bluetooth audio, my phone is playing audio to somewhere, but no sound comes out. I remove the pairing, then pair my phone again, and it works.
6) Occasionally, it will never understand what I say until I use the steering wheel buttons to cancel my command and start over.
7) Sometimes the physical buttons don't work and it will stop responding while my music is playing. Then suddenly it will catch up and all the times I hit forward or back on the track suddenly occur.
That's been my experience. I was told my clock can be fixed by having the dealership reinstall the OS. That would take about 6 hrs they say, which I can't really be without my work vehicle for that long so I've just lived with it. They've told me the other issues are fairly common and that they can't help me with it. Oh well. It is a nice idea and things will eventually improve with these sorts of things I'm sure.
Ditto. I don't want a car media interface. I want dedicated physical buttons & knobs for the climate, radio volume & input selection.
And a place on the dash to mount my own phone/tablet with a nearby USB plug.
I have never seen an electronic car interface that was any good at all, and that includes every navigation system I've ever seen. My phone has better navigation (Waze rocks), better audio, and a better interface than anything a can manufacturer could ever try to copy.
I only upgrade my car every 10+ years - an even then it might not be a new car. Hey Detroit - stop trying. Give up. Let Apple/Android/[new startup] give me the tech I want. If you want to get fancy, give the phone a read-only API to the car's status.
"I'm sorry Dave, I've BSOD'd... my mind... I can feel it going... I... I'm afraid I... qw30@#$%*(@#$... You seem to be trying to drive a car... How can I help?"
QNX may not be everywhere, but it was a mature product when Linux was just a kernel and people were grafting Minix functionality into the user space.
It does sound like an advertising pitch, but this is accurate about QNX. The OS isn't cheap, but it does offer realtime functionality. It also is designed to be quite stable to where a bug or a hang can cause tremendous disasters, be it software with X-ray machine or figuring out what position to move a set of control rods in a reactor. QNX has excellent internal security, and a decent development kit.
In embedded development, I'd probably use Linux for most items (because it has a wide variety of tools available), however if it is any way connected to something that can kill or seriously injure, like a component on a car's CANbus, I'd go QNX because it is going on 30 years and a very mature product. Realtime OS functionality isn't needed everywhere, but when it is needed, nothing else will do.
As for Ford's use, is it better than SYNC? This is more of an opinion question than anything else. I have had good luck with SYNC across a number of devices (Android and iOS), but others have had horror stories. Time will tell if end users prefer the QNX based audio head over previous ones.
No, and No.
I don't care what stereo you put in the car. The fact of the matter is, cars last 10 to 20 years. Stereo/entertainment technology lasts less than 5. There was likely a 5yr development cycle for the car so the stereos going to be out of date before it even hits the lot. For example, my 2009 ford escape has the "MS Sync!" system and it had your typical black and white LCD numerical display similar to a 1980s calculator.
So, at some point, I'm going to want to ditch your crappy stereo and install something modern. At that point I'll pull the plug on your stereo and what will happen to my car? In fords (and most modern cars) it kills the entire dash!!! I pulled the stereo out of that 2009 escape and the entire dash died. I doubt it was even drivable. I had to order a computer, to plug into the ford plug to do what the old stereo had been doing on the bus system, just to install a standard Dinn stereo. It cost me $200 just for the stupid translation computer!
I do not want this nonsense. Fault in the radio in my car should not disable the friggen car. That's just stupid. Unfortunately, I keep seeing cars headed down this path, and there's absolutely no reason for it. There's an industry wide DINN standard they could follow. Even with Double and Quadruple DINN specs for huge touch screens, etc... industry standard plugs so you could swap stereos in and out. There's absolutely nothing stopping them from making car electronics as simple to replace as batteries in your TV remote. But they WANT the radio to be out of date so idiots will come into to buy a new car just to get a new radio. GAHHHH!!!
Also if this article is to be believed, Microsoft's system was slow and unintuitive. It appears that MS in all their wisdom used hidden corner touches for functions (like they do in Metro/Modern).
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I don't, and in fact I see this as good news. I was afraid blackberry buying QNX would effectively mean the end of a good OS. Apparently this isn't quite so.
From what I've seen of it (I have a QNX 4 cd lying around, played with it for a while) it's pretty good software. Except for the proprietaryness and lack of source, better than linux by quite a large margin. Its lack of uptake I attribute to its pricetag, which used to be a bit much, eyewateringly so. Maybe that has changed, too.
I have a million dollar idea - if it doesn't' exist already. A radio head-unit upgrade to a real dream car system: physical knobs & buttons, and a USB & headphone input jack. That's it. Maybe even with no LCD display at all - just a power on/off LED.
Man, I'd buy one of those, and I bet a lot of other folks would too....
As a real Sync user (from 2012), my experience has been that its problems have more to do with user interface than "stability". Even if QNX improves on the latter, it does nothing for the former. The main problems are:
- The user interface for navigating features isn't very intuitive
- It relies too much on a voice recognition system that doesn't really work well. Either make that work well (a hard problem) or don't rely on it so much (an easy problem).
Oh, and regarding the problem playing from a USB stick mentioned above, the basic trick is that you have to format your USB with FAT32. Well, obviously.
Um, no. Blackberry bought QNX to upgrade up their phone OS after QNX had a history of being a solid, reliable realtime OS. I think they were just way too late to answer Apple/Android and that their first efforts to do so were really buggy which drove away any last loyal customers.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You're an idiot, aren't you?
I remember back in 1995/1996 or so ... a 1.44MB floppy with a bootable image of QNX. It booted onto pretty much any machine we could find, identified all of the devices, found the ethernet, and had a web browser.
It was faster and more robust than Windows 95 was by a bloody long shot.
Blackberry bought QNX because it has had a reputation as being pretty bomb proof for a long time.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Have you been car shopping lately? Find a car that meets all of your non-electric criteria that still has physical buttons.
Actually, yes, I have. The Volvo V70 is pretty nice and has physical buttons (along with a touchscreen for lesser-used stuff), so does the Mazda 3, even a Dodge Charger rental I drove a few years ago was like that, having a touchscreen for lesser-used stuff and physical buttons for the commonly-used stuff. It's a good balance; the touchscreen gives you the ability to have a lot of functionality for when you need it, but putting all the commonly-used stuff on physical buttons avoids the UI nightmare of having to fiddle with a touchscreen while driving just to turn the fan speed down.
Or, better yet, Auto Industry, come up with a "standard" that we can "upgrade" our systems quickly and easily. Nothing worse than driving a ten year old car with outdated technology, because Auto companies want some sort of lock in for their "customers". (quotes added because I know the auto industry is incapable of getting their heads out of their asses long enough care about their customers).
1) Your customers are the first people that buy a car, not everyone that ever owns that car afterwards. Most cars have multiple owners and pissing on them with proprietary components for the sake of proprietary lock in is stupid. First company that comes up with and uses a Standard will have a cult following.
2) You are saying, via lock in, that you really don't care what your ten year old branded car's technology is. Nothing like saying "You have a tape player, that is what you have, that is what you get, you can't upgrade" to everyone that owns you branded vehicle simply because you all couldn't figure out how to build a deck slot for car radios.
3) I have a number of very easy ideas on how to provide upgradable technology slots that would simply make your branded vehicles much more enticing 5 years down the road. You do expect your cars to last that long and represent your brand that long ... right?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
a friend hasn't figured out how to pair her phone to her focus yet, so i'd say sync's unintuitive...
this is good news 4 ford...i may now consider buying one;-)
My old Ford had Sync and it it was slow, froze occasionally and would reboot (for maintenance) every couple hundred hours of operation. Connecting a phone to it wasn't difficult, but it's auto-sync of music was frustrating - you had to wait for several minutes before the system could play. It always felt like it was in continual beta mode. The first versions were so bad Ford sent everyone a free USB dongle to upgrade it rather than just make it available to download like other updates.
What are you listening to on XM that is 'nothing but ads'? I have been listening to XM for over a decade in both cars and at home (mostly rock/jazz/classical) and I have yet to hear an ad.
Microsoft actually had very little to do with the MyTouch system which was the second generation Sync system. Microsoft helped make the original Sync system which for 2007 was actually quite reasonable. For the second generation released in 2010 that was the one that Ford essentially had to rewrite internally to fix, that was done by BSquare -- admittedly that company was made of former Microsoft people and ran on Microsoft's Auto Platform.
The point is however blaming Microsoft for the interface they didn't have anything to do with is like blaming kernel maintainers for Gnome doing something stupid in their interface.
QNX is a great choice of an OS for a fairly fixed ecosystem of hardware where reliability is paramount, but just because the OS is good doesn't mean the interface will be.
You're joking, right?
I'm sorry, but as cool of an idea it is, it's completely laughable.
They view these things as differentiating features and competitive advantages. They also make huge amounts of money on the upgrades and the bells and whistles.
Not gonna happen, as much as we'd like to see it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Given that the stock price went from $2 in 2009 to $15 today, they were thinking they were smarter than you. Apparently they were right.
What I find puzzling is that (unless somebody needs to be fired yesterday, and hard) the 'Ford Sync' component isn't really something that a good realtime OS would be an obvious choice for. It's the infotainment/navigation/non-essential cabin control widget; and had better not be scribbling all over the ECU over CAN.
That doesn't make QNX wrong, you can put a GUI on top of it just fine; but it makes it a lot less obvious why MS got the boot. WinCE is kind of old and nasty; but the NT kernel is respectable enough, and all reports are that (thanks to the fact that your phone is now more powerful than the workstations it ran on in 1993) it actually delivers fairly peppy performance on the distinctly midrange hardware that most WP8 devices ship with.
Apparently MS and Ford had some sort of togetherness problem, and one or both of them screwed up such that the resulting product isn't good enough; but I'm guessing that the problem wasn't "We need a better real time OS". This 'Ford Sync' is a consumer electronics UI problem.
The focus I rented with sync was horrible.
To use ad2p audio, I had to connect the phone, and would get a message "to play music through Bluetooth, go to audio settings". There we're two audio settings headings, one two levels deep, the other three levels deep, and I could never remember which one to go to, or what the path to it was.
It would forget this setting every time I restarted the car.
The setting forgetting, the two menu items with same name, and the message telling me where to go leaving out the path to get there are all thing's I would consider terrible ui design.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I have a 2013 Ford Fusion with Sync and MyFord Touch. I've honestly not found much issue with it, but that doesn't mean I haven't found any issues. I actually like Sync over what GM and Nissan have for UI but the touchscreen is, admittedly, crap.
The only feature I have but can't use is the speak-to-text feature; I assume that's a Windows Phone only feature. I also don't like how the vehicle reports in maintenance checks. Instead of using my phone's internet capability it makes a phonecall instead.
Other then that, I have no problem with it.
There is a standard, it's called DIN. Unfortunately, people want these silly swooping dashes and feel like a rectangular radio slot just won't do. Fortunately, you can usually buy a new piece of dash that provides a DIN shaped hole. Pull the old radio out, put the dash piece on, and you're ready to pop in a DIN sized radio.
It's still the standard and it's almost all you can buy in aftermarket radios. Occasionally a company will make an aftermarket radio that isn't DIN for a specific car, but it's rare.
The only non-standard thing are the connections on the back of the radio. Why nobody has come up with a proper standard there, I don't know. Fortunately, for almost every car out there, you can just connect up an adapter and you're mostly good to go after some soldering/crimping wires at home.
I have to agree that XM is full of ads. Almost every station has an announcer talking after every second song announcing something or other. It may not be full fledged ads as in traditional radio but I wish that they would just shut up and play music. Someone promoting something is an ad for me.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
Funny, I wouldn't have given Ford the credit for recognizing the wisdom of such a move. Kudos to them. Wish my IPTV provider would ditch the Cisco/Windows set tops for something based on QNX, as they're seriously horrible. Part of what's smart about this move by Ford is that it avoids their cars being associated with the frequent complaint of how bad MS stuff can be, whether correct or not. There's no such conversation among other than geeks about QNX. It has numerous supporters and very few detractors for any reason other than it's not free. The only downside I see (aside from there being used cars out there with Windows) is that others—GM, Fiat/Chrysler, Toyota, Nissan—are likely to hesitate to move to QNX. There's still quite a bit of NIH syndrome.
The confusion stems from thinking of QNX as the radio (infotainment system) instead of the vehicle control system. Past generations of automobiles separated the two but on modern cars they are integrated. QNX is used to control the entire electronic system including all the sensors on the engine and transmission, the cruise control, the intrusion detection system, as well as the cabin A/C. They all work in concert. That is why Android auto and CarPlay both run atop of QNX. Something Apple and Google downplay. QNX is sold a la cart. OEM's can purchase just the kernel or a whole host of off the shelf plugins that provide a very robust drop in ecosystem. Ford's MySync system runs atop Windows CE (Windows Embedded Compact) and the complaints from customers was it was just too slow. After years of trying to get the responsiveness they wanted they have finally admitted Windows Embedded Compact just isn't the ideal platform for their cars.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I've heard from people who work with QNX that it has plenty of bugs.
Well that settles it then! QNX is total crap.
That's why over 50% of the cars rolling off the assembly line today come with it installed.
I prefer the philosophy of right tool for the job. And QNX for now is the best choice for auto makers. I use Linux where it makes sense and when AGL matures it might become the best tool for the job. But don't expect auto makers to jump on it if they can't control it.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Yes, QNX has been around for a long time.
\What most people don't get is what a realtime OS is, and why it matters. Other multitasking OSes are generally "best-effort" OSes, but in a realtime OS, the whole scheduling system is based on giving guarantees, making sure that things happen within a certain time frame or a certain order.
The overhead is huge, which is why you don't se RT on any normal desktops or servers, but in something like a car, airplane or hospital device, you would rather know that 100% of the requests get served in 100 ms, than having an average time of 10 ms, but a worst case time of 1000+ ms.
If you know the worst case, you can program your systems to operate within them.
Linux does have a RT version, in part supported by Ingo Molnar and Theodore Ts'o, but it does not see heavy use. In part, this has been because for a realtime OS to be successful, all the parts have to play ball, not just some. And in part it is because a realtime OS is quite a bit slower on average, and most regular users would rather have improved average speeds than improved worst-case.
But for a car? Give me a realtime OS any day. I don't want traction control to cut in a tenth of a second too late because the kernel was busy doing garbage collection, time synchronization, and handling an urgent warning that the oil temperature was too high.
I've heard from people who work with QNX that it has plenty of bugs. It may be secure, but it's actually not that stable. It makes sense that QNX is overhyped and not near as good as some claim. Being proprietary and small, they simply do not have the resources to polish it and keep it polished
I've worked on QNX. It was the most polished embedded system I've worked with. Also, your post sounds a lot like a troll.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I've heard from people who work with * that it has plenty of bugs.
Generalized that for you.
Now the ultimate insult. Ford acknowledges that their system was... poor. They announce a much-better version (they hope).
And it is NOT AVAILABLE to those of us who have put up with the one they had.
Come on. QNX runs on nearly anything. Are they seriously unable to upgrade the existing hardware? Really?
If enough owners told Ford that their next car would be a GM unless they got Microsoft the hell out of their consoles, Ford might do something. Especially if it made the news.
It might need something as simple as a youtube rant going viral. Stinks I know, but that's how things work these days.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
LOL, I'm not disagreeing with you.
But, seriously, companies are now expected to keep growing quarterly, or they're seen as stagnating by the stock market.
In order to keep executive compensation at all time highs, they need to implement the full set of MBA approved gibberish, so that the analysts tout how awesome their stock is.
The stock market doesn't reward a car company which makes good cars year over year and has a steady revenue stream. It rewards a car company which has figured out how to monetize its customers and have a growing revenue stream.
Business is no longer operated on solid fundamentals and steady performance. It's operated on perception, and how the next quarter or two will look, and trying to maintain quarter-over-quarter growth which is unsustainable.
As far as I'm concerned, the stock market has been stuck as an unsustainable Ponzi scheme since at least the beginning of the .com era. Nowadays, it seems like most companies are thinking stupid in the long-term in order to maximize the short term -- because that's the current compensation cycle.
Because when R&D and the like gets cut to improve profits now, it might take you a few years to realize just how badly you've shot yourself in the foot.
And the way companies are ran these days, it might be a different executive team, so you need to get your stack before you get your giant severance package.
I'm betting most employees of large corporations find themselves thinking "is our company really being ran by short sighted idiots who don't understand our core business?". And in quite a few cases, the answer is probably "yes, yes it is".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Not really, the actual requirement is that nothing can block a real time process, which I believe the linux real time patches do in fact achieve quite reliably.
And there is where "play ball" comes in.
For example, xfs is, as far as I can tell, the only file system for Linux that supports realtime, and even that took about a decade to be ported from SGI to Linux. If you need to have your commit done within a certain time span, it doesn't help much if the OS can't fulfill that because it has to do a callout to a device that isn't rt capable.
Similar for IO devices - Serial and Firewire can play ball, but USB cannot. Most HDDs with a fixed rotational speed can, and while SSDs theoretically can, in practice they do not (an infrequent shuffling of blocks and re-initializing a sector can take a second or more, so even though the average speed is immensely faster than a HDD, most of them are unusable for rt unless placed behind a battery backed disk controller.)
Yeah, I would like to see more effort going in to LinuxRT. For now, I think QNX is probably the best bet, but I hope LinuxRT would gain more traction. What we do not need is even more non-predictable behavior (pulseaudio, anyone?), but consistency. Let Moore's law and good programming take care of speed, not tweaks that increases the average speed at the cost of even less predictable worst case.
buttons are expensive and can't be reconfigured on the fly.
Someone better tell BMW that, then.
Mine has a row of buttons 1-6 that can be reassigned to whatever is on the screen by holding it in for a couple of seconds. So for me, 1 means "Take me home" and 3 means "NIght view on/off". Handy, and especially so because they're physical buttons, right next to my fingertips on the gear shift.
Operating a touch screen, on the other hand, requires you actually looking and stretching. Not good.
QNX had, if not has, been the basis of Cisco's iOS long before Blackberry bought it. Like the GP, I thought that Blackberry's acquisition would make QNX live and die by that phone, but luckily, it hasn't happened. It's been around for a while, like the GP says, and probably due to its microkernel, is remarkably stable. With the automotive sector adapting it, looks like not only will it live, but it will save Blackberry with it, even if the latter goes nowhere w/ its phones
AC, for obvious reasons.
I'm a former contractor for the last iteration of Sync. The reason why it felt like it was always in beta is because it always WAS in beta.
That's why when you go in for a tune up or an oil change they take a USB drive and flash new firmware into your car. It's a Microsoft product. OF COURSE it's going to be patches forever. Hell, it's worse than that even. It's Microsoft CE 6 Automotive pack running Adobe flash for the UI. Betcha you didn't know that! The whole design is - to my way of thinking - completely bonkers. I worked support for a bunch of web guys designing the UI. They couldn't read C/C++ and had to have me read it for them. "I need a function that returns the current time adjusted by time zone." And I'd have to go plowing through the source and nearly nonexistent documentation to find it for someone.
You'll note that if you take your Toyota in for an oil change they just change the oil, not give you the latest patches to their unfinished infotainment device in your dashboard every time. You can buy map updates if you like because the DVD doesn't know about new construction (obviously) but that's about it for Toyota. Know why? Because the thing is actually finished. That's how it's done.
Good lord, you should have seen the results from the focus team when we showed them a pre-delivery beta. It had about a 10% approval rating. People HATED it. Nothing worked.
Sync wasn't finished on the delivery date, it's not finished now, it's never gonna be finished.
You are very correct re. the difference between a RT operating system and not RT. That has nothing to do with Sync specifically or infotainment in general.
Sync does not have any control over engine management, traction control or any other safety critical system (and neither does any other infotainment system). Not sure about Sync, but typically you cannot even update safety critical systems from the infotainment system. An infotainment system may have read-only access to report "interesting" data, but that's all.
There is no need for your infotainment system beyond responding to the UI and performing the tasks you need, just like your phone, etc.