- Ford and its research partners are working on futuristic mobile apps, including one that can provide "selected personal contacts with an automatic location update during (a) driver's travels."
- The mobile app would monitor a vehicle's location and speed, determine if a driver is running late for a meeting and then send an e-mail or text message notification to other attendees without any input from the driver.
- The app could also automatically notify "the driver's family following a safe arrival after a road trip," said Ford.
MUMBAI, India — Ford and its research partners are working on futuristic mobile apps, including one that can provide "selected personal contacts with an automatic location update during (a) driver's travels."
The mobile app would monitor a vehicle's location and speed to determine if a driver is running late for a meeting and then send an e-mail or text message notification to other attendees without any input from the driver.
The app could also automatically notify "the driver's family following a safe arrival after a road trip," said Ford.
Ford demonstrated the app, which was created by HCL Technologies, during the NASSCOM India Leadership Summit here on Thursday. No word yet on any production plans for such an app or what it would cost.
The demonstration provided a tantalizing glimpse into the automaker's OpenXC research project, which it describes as an open-source hardware and software platform developed by Ford Research and Innovation and New York City-based Bug Labs.
Ford said in a statement that OpenXC is designed to "unleash the power of local developers to determine niche market-specific applications that take advantage of mobile connectivity."
The automaker said it is now shipping beta test kits of OpenXC to developers and universities around the world to speed in-car app development.
"OpenXC allows us to investigate what developers can do when we present the car in the same way as they see a smartphone software platform," said Venkatesh Prasad, senior technical leader for Ford Research.
Ford said developers working with OpenXC will be able to create apps "across a wide spectrum of categories, from those dealing with personal information and entertainment to those who are contributing to a better world — such as directly addressing congestion and the needs of road safety, healthcare and education."
Inside Line says: "Call me when you get there" may soon become an obsolete request — at least for Ford owners.
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tjfromphilly says:
09:09 PM, 02/16/2012
This is great, but didn't a bunch of other products come up with this several years ago? My wife turns on Google Latitude when she's driving all over the place for work (in a Ford) so I know whether I'm on my own for dinner or not. "Shipping beta test kits of OpenXC to developers and universities"? That's kind of where the rest of the tech world was in, oh, I don't know, 2004? When did they start putting GPS chips in all of the cell phones?
Why are in-car apps always so far behind everything else?
For years all of the factory nav systems have been way behind what you can get with Garmin or Tom Tom or even free stuff like Waze on an iPhone, yet automakers feel they can slap into the dash a dim low resolution display with a lousy resistive touchscreen, slow processor, mediocre voice recognition and outdated maps and then charge $1500 or $2000 for it, plus who knows what for the map updates every year.
On the audio front, cassette players and CD drives hung on way longer in automobiles than they did at home. MP3 players were becoming irrelevant by the time most automakers started making simple AUX input jacks standard, and now in-dash music hard drive storage is gaining wider acceptance right about the time Android and iOS are moving to cloud storage and streaming.
Open suggestion to automakers: Outsource your tech development. Just pay HTC or whoever to design an android interface. Or just give me a nice, flat spot with a 12v power source and an auxiliary audio input in the middle of the dash where I can duct tape an iPad. It'll do 10x what your best stuff does and it will cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars less. You don't need to reinvent a crappy version of something that already exists.