The downside of making cars more like PCs: BSODs and fixing bugs

Performance enhancement, bug fix, usability fix. Call it what you like, Ford’s recent updates to MyFord Touch show what happens when your car dashboard has some attributes of a PC, tablet, or iPod: The fast-moving technology can be upgraded, and because of its complexity probably will need to be. Hundreds of thousands of Ford and Lincoln owners with MyFord and MyLincoln Touch are receiving USB keys to improve stability and simplify the LCD display interface with more consistent commands, less wordy choices, and bigger fonts. That’s not entirely bad. At least the center stack can be upgraded, and without making a trip to the dealer (you stick the USB key in the car’s USB jack and MyFord Touch automatically upgrades). It’s what retailing calls convenient self-service.

MyFord Touch is a touchscreen interface that replaces physical buttons and knobs. It’s an add-on to Ford Sync, which since 2008 put Bluetooth, a USB jack, and voice control interface into Fords and Lincolns. Ford says 56% of buyers were swayed by Sync and MyFord Touch (swayed in favor of the car, Ford means). What looked so easy to use in the showroom of the company with the Blue Oval logo turned out to be a bit tougher on the highway.

Where PCs suffer the blue screen of death, some Fords developed the Blue Oval of death: Occasionally, some Sync systems locked up and had to restart — the dashboard, not the car. There were other usability issues. In testing cars with Ford Sync and then MyFord Touch and MyLincoln Touch since 2008, I’ve found voice input is imperfect and words get confused (“destination” becomes “FM station”). On the 2010 with MyLincoln Touch, it was quickly clear that the LCD display quadrant buttons representing the four key functions — phone, navigation, audio, climate control — were too small unless the vehicle was parked and you had near-perfect eyesight. Ford-Lincoln execs blew off that concern by saying the fonts met industry guidelines.

As part of Lincoln’s take on the premium car experience, it adopted cool-looking volume and fan sliders just below the LCD display. Precision is near impossible when you’re driving on a bumpy road. Undeterred by the Lincoln experience, Cadillac has big plans for an entirely capacitive touch center stack with, the Cadillac User Experience.

Ford sings a humbler tune now on Sync and MyFord Touch in the wake of mixed customer feedback and mixed reviews from Consumer Reports, the most influential car review magazine. In the 2012 Consumer Reports report, Ford dropped from No. 5 to No. 10 overall among car brands (Subaru was No. 1.) “The automaker’s [Ford's] road-test score improved by two points over last year’s, but subpar reliability of some new vehicles, due largely to the troublesome MyFord Touch infotainment system and Power-Shift automatic transmission, hurt its report-card grade,” the magazine said.

Ford announced changes to Sync and MyFord Touch technology last fall that would be rolled out on an 8GB USB key, the one being delivered now. Last fall Ford called it a “performance update,” which was good for a few laughs. Now, if you read the current Ford press release, it talks about “continuously improving the user experience [via] regular updates and upgrades as the technology evolves,” thus proving the “flexibility of the underlying Sync software platform.”

MyFordTouch (new)

MyFord Touch (old)

Look at some of the subtle differences: A tab in the top middle of the LCD display now shows only the time of day; before it also crammed in the outside temperature and a menu button (they’ve been moved). The new phone tab (top photo, upper left) tells you the name of the phone and signal strength, period. The old phone also indicated battery life (although with two USB ports on the car, why isn’t the phone plugged in and charging?) and it shows Bluetooth is connected (although if it wasn’t, Doug’s Phone wouldn’t be connected). Similarly, the new navigation tab just shows how far to the next turn and which way to turn. Note that AM and FM are separate buttons and (it helps to have good eyesight) little red dots indicate there are multiple sets of FM presets. With more Fords equipped with dual 4-inch LCD displays flanking the speedometer, one of them probably has all the nav info in front of the driver if he or she doesn’t already have the navigation screen up. There’s also a simplified info-at-a-glance screen (top of story) that has all the info if you’re not in map view. All of these suggest the old navigation button suffered from TMI syndrome (too much information).

What “evolving technology” is the customer getting when he or she plugs in the 8GB USB key or takes the car in to the dealer for the upgrade? The most visible change is simpler graphics, larger and bolder fonts, fewer words on screens, and more consistency across screens, as noted above. Ford says the touchscreen responds faster to finger taps. The “already popular” voice recognition does a better job recognizing words. Ford says it worked to enhance phone compatibility, improve navigation maps, make destination entry easier, and added and enhanced support for tablet computers and Audible audiobooks.

About 300,000 Ford and Lincoln owners get the upgrade. They get a USB key and, if the car has SD Card navigation, a new SD Card as well. The update takes an hour, Ford says.

If there’s a common thread across the past decade of PC-to-car crossover technology, it’s that automakers overestimate the desire of drivers to take on new technology. Cars adopted CD drives in the 1990s but that wasn’t much different from sliding a cassette into the dash.

When BMW moved the functions of more than a dozen center stack switches into the iDrive controller in 2002, drivers found the learning curve to be too stiff, and rebelled. Over the past decade BMW reduced the iDrive menu from eight choices (representing 8 points of the compass) to four, then surrounded the controller with buttons to summon the most common tools, essentially the same ones as Ford calls on with its four quadrant touch points. Once you learn to use iDrive, it may be quicker and more elegant than fumbling for switches, but the learning curve runs weeks to months to never.

There another equal broad and compelling theme: Simpler interfaces win out. Google’s home page lives by less-is-more. Smartphone mobile apps are engineered for small screens. Little by little, automakers are coming around to simpler interfaces, including Ford and Lincoln. Whether they’ll be simple enough to please the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is something else again. NHTSA, smitten with how nicely Apple Siri seems to work, may clamp down on car displays such as MyFord Touch and push automakers to adopt voice control.

The downside of making cars more like PCs: BSODs and fixing bugs