Inside Ford's New Silicon Valley Lab

An anonymous reader writes Engadget takes a look at Ford's new Research and Innovation Center located in Palo Alto. The company hopes to use the new facility to speed the development of projects such as autonomous cars and better natural voice recognition. From the article: "This isn't Ford's first dance with the Valley — it actually started its courtship several years ago when it opened its inaugural Silicon Valley office in 2012. The new center, however, is a much bigger effort, with someone new at the helm. That person is Dragos Maciuca, a former Apple engineer with significant experience in consumer electronics, semiconductors, aerospace and automotive tech. Ford also hopes to build a team of 125 professionals under Maciuca, which would make the company one of the largest dedicated automotive research teams in the Valley."

Comments

Good example of bad use of touch screens

[OzPeter]

The last video in TFA is about the Ford's HMI testbed, which is used to try out different cockpit configurations. During that video they show the driver selecting something on the touch screen panel in the center console. During this event you can clearly see the driver take his eyes off the road in order to watch what his fingers are doing.

Re:They need help

[mlts]

I've had decent luck with it overall. At the time I bought my vehicle, one could choose a SYNC navigation system with or without touch screen. I chose the one without. So far, it has worked without issue, alongside quite a number of iOS and Android devices, and the voice system is "meh", but it does work.

Just because it has worked so well on a day to day basis, I'd buy it again. It isn't perfect, but with modern tech where things get obsoleted in a year or two, what is?

Re:Lets hope they can do better than MyTouch

[WindBourne]

Ford has quit Microsoft (thank god) and switched to QNX, which is a decent realtime system.