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Are Automakers Overloading In-Car Features?

Automotive News -- Automakers are so obsessed with imitating smartphones and other gadgets that they have loaded vehicles with a bewildering array of infotainment features and apps that many customers never use.

That was the conclusion of panelists discussing the "In-Car Experience -- What Does the Consumer Really Want?" last week here at the SAE World Congress.

The industry must do better with its infotainment and communications controls and displays, they said.

"Vehicles on the road today are overladen with tools," said David Lyon, a former General Motors designer who left the company in 2012 to form his own consultancy, Pocketsquare. "Most systems today are trying to look like the Apple iPhone. It doesn't work."

The panelists agreed that most motorists don't need the myriad choices that carmakers offer, and that those choices are not only confusing, they can be dangerously distracting.

Customers typically listen to a few radio stations and call just a few people. Carmakers need "features intervention," Lyon said.

Rather than imitate smartphones, carmakers could look to their history for examples of how to get it right. He showed a picture of a 1964 Ford Mustang radio. The knob on the right is for volume, the one on the left for tuning, with the buttons across the center for radio presets.

"Volume requires a knob," he said.

Lyon suggested a simple central touch screen with just a few options customized to the motorist.

Too often, complexity creeps into systems. He showed a slide of the first generation of BMW's oft-criticized iDrive system. In 2002, when the system was launched, there was a single controller knob on the console with no surrounding buttons. Over the years, BMW kept adding buttons until the current version, which he described as a "button farm."

David Taylor, director of connected services at Panasonic Automotive Systems Co. of America, said there is "an explosion" in consumer services and expectations. Automakers' challenge is to meet those expectations consistently around the globe without spending a fortune. That requires being prudent and building a budget to design what is needed and leave out what is not, he said.

"We need to get away from worthless features in a car," he said.

Read the rest of the story HERE.

Automakers to Announce Pact to Install Auto-Braking Systems by 2022

WASHINGTON, March 16 (Reuters) - Major automakers will announce Thursday they have agreed to install automatic emergency braking systems in nearly all U.S. vehicles by September 2022, three sources briefed on the plans said.

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced in September a deal in principle with 10 automakers to eventually add the technology to prevent thousands of crashes a year. The final agreement includes additional automakers and will be unveiled at a press conference in McLean, Va., at a press conference.

The final agreement includes automakers representing more than 99 percent of U.S. light vehicle sales. Among those joining the deal are Toyota Motor Corp, General Motors Co , Ford Motor Co., Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV , Honda Motor Co and Volkswagen AG .

Automatic emergency braking includes systems designed to prevent crashes in which drivers do not apply the brakes or fail to apply enough braking power to avoid a collision.

Under the agreement, automakers will get slightly longer to add the technology to some vehicles with technical challenges, including some cars with manual transmissions.

NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind told Reuters in an interview last week that a voluntary agreement that could get the safety technology in vehicles before a legally binding rule was preferable. "We're very excited about this," Rosekind said, declining to confirm details.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a group that helped reach the voluntary agreement with automakers, has said as many as 20 percent of crashes could be prevented by the technology.

"Do the math. That's 5 million crashes every year -- 20 percent reduction means 1 million less. Those are big numbers," Rosekind said in September.

Read the rest HERE.

Automakers To Congress: Stay Away From The ‘Internet of Cars’

The Hill -- Major vehicle manufacturers are telling Congress to keep its distance as the industry evolves to take advantage of the “Internet of cars.”

Representatives of Toyota, Tesla and GM are scheduled to testify before a House Oversight subcommittee on Wednesday, when they will tout the safety and comfort benefits of increasingly connected cars in prepared testimony.

Their plea for limited government intervention comes after the recall of 1.4 million Chrysler vehicles earlier this year when researchers found a flaw that allowed them to remotely hack into the vehicles.

“Regulation at a time of rapid innovation runs the risk of limiting the realization of the full extent of safety advances,” Tesla’s head of business development Diarmuid O’Connell will say when testifying Wednesday.

Increased regulation should be avoided unless “absolutely necessary,” he will say.

O’Connell said the Chrysler vulnerability could have been avoided if manufacturers ensured that their vehicles were not directly connected across the Internet. He also said connected cars must isolate their mechanical systems, such as braking, and make sure to use encryption technology to protect privacy of information transferred to and from vehicles.

“Tesla is seeing increased vehicle security interest and scrutiny from academic and industry security researchers,” he said. “Tesla encourages and applauds this assistance — to the extent of even providing financial rewards for the best research.”

Read the rest here: http://thehill.com/policy/technology/260584-industry-warns-congress-about-increased-regulation-of-internet-of-cars

Bill Ford: Carmakers Must Collaborate With Tech Companies Like Apple

Telegraph -- Bill Ford, executive chairman of the Ford Motor Company, has said he wants to transform from a carmaker into a mobility services company.

“You have autonomous driving, connected cars, new ways of accessing ownership like Zipcar, Uber or Lyft, you have data collection. We are looking at all of it,” he told the audience at Europe’s largest technology event, the Dublin Web Summit.

“It’s the company that can stitch all that together to make people’s lives easier [that] will emerge as a winner. It will require partnerships with big technology companies and also with startups.”

Speaking about whether Ford may partner with the likes of Apple and Google to make driverless technology, Mr Ford said, “You never know. I do think partnerships will be important.

“In my great grandfather’s time, when he founded Ford, there was a single vertical, where they did everything,” he said. “But one company shouldn’t know it all or do it all. That’s going to change.”

Read the rest here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11973273/Bill-Ford-carmakers-must-collaborate-with-tech-companies-like-Apple.html

Coming From Automakers: Voice Control That Understands You Better

1- 16-2017, The New York Times -- Every once in a while, just for laughs, Kevin Smith-Fagan tries to call a friend of his, Priscilla, using the voice-recognition system in his 2013 Chevrolet Volt.

“I’ve tried it so many times and it never gets it right,” said Mr. Smith-Fagan, an executive at a public television station in Sacramento. “It always thinks I’m saying ‘Chris,’ and I have like five people named Chris in my phone book, so it’s always interesting to see who’s getting the call.”

Voice control systems have been in cars for more than a decade, and great strides have been made in the technology’s ability to understand human speech. But many people still find these systems too unreliable, or annoying, to use for more than the most simple tasks, like “Call Mom.”

That isn’t stopping auto and tech companies from trying to give drivers the ability to do even more things by talking to their cars — while keeping their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel. The efforts have some added urgency now, as states pass stricter laws aimed at curbing distracted driving. Under a California law that went into effect Jan. 1, holding or operating a phone while driving is now prohibited.

This week at the International CES, the giant electronics conference in Las Vegas, Ford Motor announced that owners of its cars would soon be able to use Amazon’s Alexa voice-activated assistant in their vehicles. Drivers will be able to ask for a weather report, stream music from Amazon Music or add appointments to their calendars. They will also be able to use Alexa from home to start or unlock their cars remotely.

But the automaker also envisions drivers using Alexa to help with other tasks — like shopping on Amazon. Stuck in traffic? You can take care of Valentine’s Day by saying, “Alexa, order flowers on Amazon.”

Other companies are moving in the same direction. Apple’s Siri can be used to control iPhone functions in cars, and Apple’s CarPlay software allows drivers to dictate text messages while driving, as well as program destinations into Apple Maps and have the route plotted on the car’s display. Google’s Android Auto can do the same.

In the last year, carmakers like BMW, Mercedes-Benz and General Motors have also introduced improved voice-recognition systems that can understand normal spoken words for many tasks. Older systems required drivers to learn specific commands.

With newer models, owners can program in a destination just by saying the address, as if speaking to another person. In older cars, the state, city and street had to be given separately, one at a time — and if you were lucky, each was correctly understood.

While more advanced systems like Alexa will make it easier for drivers to use voice commands, there are still hurdles. The biggest is just changing habits, and persuading people to try talking to their cars.

On the day before Thanksgiving, Frank Krieber bought a 2016 Dodge Challenger, granite gray, with a 5.7-liter Hemi V-8 engine, and the latest version of the Uconnect infotainment system. A few days later, when he set off on a road trip to Florida from his home in Michigan, he synced his phone to the car, but didn’t bother to use the voice-recognition capabilities to enter destinations or handle other tasks.

“I probably should use it, but it’s just easier to put in an address manually, so I haven’t really played around with it,” said Mr. Krieber, a sales executive for a computer company. “My experience so far has been, when you tell it to do something, it doesn’t do what you want.”

Older cars used voice-recognition systems that were built into the car and had limited computing power and memory. Now that more and more cars have wireless connections, the voice-recognition processing can be done via the internet in distant computers and servers, what the tech industry calls the cloud.

That is an advantage that Ford sees in using Alexa, said Don Butler, Ford’s executive director for connected vehicle and services. “If you have the voice recognition done outside the car, people will see a much greater ability to interpret normal, everyday speech,” he said.

With Alexa, a user will need to download an Alexa app to a phone and carry the phone in the car, creating the connection with the cloud.

Read the rest of the story HERE.

Google Attracts Top U.S. Automakers With Self-Driving Technology

Bloomberg -- Google’s self-driving car technology is attracting top U.S. automakers, as Ford, Fiat Chrysler and General Motors talk with the company while laying the groundwork for a future with autonomous cars.

Ford Motor Co. and Google are discussing working together, including in a joint venture to build cars using Google’s technology, said a person familiar with the talks who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private.

That follows comments in October from Mark Reuss, product development chief for General Motors Co., that the automaker was “very interested” in exploring ways its manufacturing skills could complement Google’s system. Sergio Marchionne, chief executive officer of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, has said repeatedly the past few months that his company wants to work on autonomous driving with technology companies such as Apple Inc. and Google.

“We are entering the era of the technology and software-defined vehicle,” said Thilo Koslowski, a vice president in the automotive practice at Gartner Inc. “You’re just seeing the auto industry recognize the importance of that.”

Automakers are getting close to Google as they consider using the search giant’s technology to add brains to their vehicles, instead of building their own rival systems. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship, Koslowski said.

“Some Silicon Valley companies would like to do everything themselves, but it’s really the car companies that understand the automobile,” he said. “On the same side, a lot of technology companies have expertise on their side, which is interesting to the automotive companies.”

Read the rest of the story here: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-22/google-attracts-top-u-s-automakers-with-self-driving-technology

Nokia Sells Mapping Service to Automakers

CNET -- Nokia has finally unloaded its mapping service.

The Finnish telecommunications giant said on Monday that it had agreed to sell its Here maps business to European automakers Audi, BMW and Daimler, who have agreed to pay a total of 2.8 billion euros ($3.1 billion, £2 billion, AU$4.2 billion).

The fact that the three major manufacturers have teamed up to buy Here shows how important mapping data is to the future of the car industry as new vehicles become more connected. The technology gives them a viable alternative to mapping services offered by Google and Apple. The deal also allows them to move past simple satellite-navigation-style directions and toward the next generation of navigation: cars that can collect data to share real-time updates on traffic, parking and other variables with other vehicles. Down the line, those highly accurate, up-to-date maps will be crucial for self-driving cars to know where they're going.

The 150-year-old Finnish company Nokia is best-known for making phones, especially in Europe. But since selling off its phone business to Microsoft last year, it has been reduced to its three less well-known divisions: Nokia Networks, making networking equipment; Nokia Technologies, researching and developing new technology; and Here. Nokia recently bulked up its telecom equipment business with the acquisition of rival Alcatel-Lucent.

Here is available to the public in the form of maps apps on Android, iOS and Windows Phone, but the majority of its business comes from licensing mapping data to other companies, particularly in the automotive industry. There were 17 million vehicles produced with navigation systems in 2014, according to research firm IHS. Those cars will all need a steady flow of map data.

Here is developing technology that will pull data from cars, phones and the furniture of the road to the cloud and deliver real-time and predictive mapping services. The business is also expected to play an important role in the development of self-driving cars.

Read the rest of the story here:
http://www.cnet.com/news/nokia-sells-here-maps-business-to-carmaker-consortium-of-audi-bmw-and-daimler/

Are Automakers Overloading In-Car Features?

Automakers to Announce Pact to Install Auto-Braking Systems by 2022

Automakers To Congress: Stay Away From The ‘Internet of Cars’

Bill Ford: Carmakers Must Collaborate With Tech Companies Like Apple

Coming From Automakers: Voice Control That Understands You Better

Google Attracts Top U.S. Automakers With Self-Driving Technology

Nokia Sells Mapping Service to Automakers

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