Toyota Teams With Ford To Stop Apple, Google From Dominating Dashboards - The Car Connection
Of all the infotainment systems on the market today, arguably the most despised are Ford's MyFord Touch and Sync. Ford has been at the forefront of the infotainment crowd, spending countless hours and dollars perfecting MyFordTouch and Sync, and being first is never easy. That said, it's pretty clear that Ford released both before they were ready for primetime. In fact, consumers hate them so much, they've sued Ford for damages. In 2013, Ford may have finally understood the depth of its infotainment problems, and it did something unexpected: the automaker open-sourced a portion of its Sync software called AppLink, which facilitates the use of smartphone apps on dashboards. In doing so, it encouraged developers and other automakers to take the open-source version of AppLink (dubbed , tweak it, and perfect it. . Today, Toyota said that it will begin looking at possible applications for SDL in future models. On the one hand, it would be easy to dismiss Ford, Toyota, and SDL for being very late to the party. Ford's release of SDL seemed like a last-ditch effort to preserve a bit of dignity as tech juggernauts Apple and Google announced plans to take on dashboards. It was the equivalent of Ford saying, "We tried, but we couldn't do anything with it. Maybe someone else can McGuyver this code into something useful before the folks in Cupertino and Mountain View steamroll over us. ". The fact that Toyota is... Source: www.thecarconnection.com
