Ford car wants to get personal with its driver

BILL TAYLOR FOR THE TORONTO STAR

You can tailor everything to what you want, not what the company thinks you should have, says Ford about its MyFord Touch system - your add-ons, your entertainment devices, your sounds and your colours.

Bill Taylor

SPECIAL TO THE STAR

High-tech is all very well, but there's something reassuring about a simple, analogue speedometer.

You step on the gas and the needle moves around the numbers until you reach the point where you're about to be arrested if you don't calm down.

No muss, no fuss.

It almost comes as a relief that there's just such a dial front-and- centre on the touch-sensitive dashboards of the Lincoln MKX and Ford Edge AWD that Jason Johnson is demonstrating as the latest and greatest in automotive "driver connect" technology.

But the speedo is only a nod in the direction of tradition. If other manufacturers are pushing the technological envelope, Ford appears to be breaking through.

The company bills MyFord Touch as "technophile savvy, yet technophobe friendly." And Johnson, a Dearborn, Mich.-based user-interface design engineer, insists that using it is intuitive.

Two-way-street intuitive, at that. As you're learning about the car, the car's learning about you ...

We're moving into an age where our personal vehicle is more than simple transportation. It's becoming our friend and companion. It wants to interact with us, to build a special relationship.

This may seem upsetting to anyone who remembers the bad old days of low-to-medium tech – the flaccid embrace of the automatic, self-fastening seatbelt and the prissy voice that told you you hadn't closed the door properly, had neglected to shift gear and were about to break the speed limit.

For that matter, you may still hate the voice of your GPS as it punctuates its directions with "recalculating."

No sweat. These days you simply change it until it's something/someone you can live with.

That, says Johnson, is one of the keys to MyFord Touch. You tailor everything to what you want, not what the company thinks you should have.

Your add-ons, your entertainment devices, your sounds and your colours.

If you're tired of having a band of green light around the rim of your cup holders, try blue for a change. Too bright? Bring it down a little.

When your significant other wants the car, all he/she has to do is a one-touch change to his/her settings. The car is all things to all people.

And if you should change cars, then simply save your settings on a USB storage device, such as a memory stick, and transfer them to the new vehicle. Whether you think of it as a clone or reincarnation, you'll be instantly at home.

What Ford calls an "in-vehicle connectivity experience" replaces most of the traditional gauges and knobs with voice commands and LCD screens, much of the controls and information are activated by two five-way button pads on the steering wheel.

"You never need to let go of the wheel," Johnson says. "Everyone uses their thumbs these days for texting, for their BlackBerry, for ..."

Video games? He grimaces. "I wouldn't want to say that."

You can change the screens to show everything from fuel consumption to climate control to a virtual tachometer. You can plug in your MP3 player, your computer. To make the car warmer, you stroke your finger across a screen.

Or you can simply say, "Make it warmer."

Johnson says the new system can learn to recognize 10,000 commands. That's 10,000 different ways of saying far fewer things.

"For instance, you don't have to say, `Phone: Call my wife.' Simply, `Call my wife.' There are multiple ways to ask everything. You don't have to hit on the right combination of words.

"Before, with in-car navigation, updating map data had to be done from a DVD. It took hours to load. Now you just take the old SD card out of the media hub and slip in the new one. As easy as that."

The system will play videos, but only when the transmission is in "park" and upload photos so you can have your own custom screen wallpaper.

Bluetooth? Certainly but that's becoming old hat. Ford has added WiFi.

Plug your laptop into one of the two USB ports and the car becomes a mobile hotspot.

"We're not building in technology," says Johnson. "We're adapting it to your own technology. Everything is customizable.

"I hate to say we've thought of everything because someone will immediately say, `What about ...?' But I can't think of anything we haven't thought of."

You have to think he must drive something pretty spectacular himself.

"A 2003 Mazda," he says with a grin. "No Bluetooth, just a CD player and AM-FM radio. Sometimes it's so frustrating. But it helps me appreciate what we're doing. And it helps me unplug myself."

Johnson's wife, Aisha, drives a Ford Taurus X with every available bell and whistle.

Her reactions make a valuable research tool.

"She appreciates technology but she's not a techno-wizard," he says. "She's the No. 1 person I observe."

MyFord Touch doesn't yet come with a crystal ball but Johnson can take an educated guess about where we'll be 10 years from now.

"Voice recognition will be a lot more natural, almost conversational," he says.

"We'll be seeing more and better heads-up displays. There have been problems so far with glare from sunlight and with it being cost-prohibitive. Also, you can't have it obstruct your view of the road. But it'll come.

"And there'll be developments in avatars – sort of a personal concierge you can call up.

"We spend so much time in our cars, it's getting to the point where the car will assume a personality. It will know you and react to you. It will learn from you," Johnson says.

Perhaps even learn to keep its mouth shut when you're getting close to the speed limit or have forgotten yet again to phone your mom?

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