Ford Motor Co. will unveil next month a hands-free Bluetooth wireless system and in-vehicle operating system developed by Microsoft as an option for its entire Ford brand lineup. The system will integrate some of the features of a personal computer into a car’s cockpit, according to sources familiar with the auto maker’s plans.
Ford US Cars to Get Bluetooth, Microsoft Operating System
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76 Comments
2006-12-31 8:45 am
2006-12-31 11:05 am
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2006-12-31 1:29 pm
It may be the time to make the obvious joke on historical Ford/Microsoft analogy, but I’ll restrain myself for this time
Now that’s will power!
Do you actually have an analogy?
– “You have 10 days left to activate your car”
– Ford Security Bulletin: a special formed .MP3 file result in stack overflow and could elevate rights so a hacker blablabla…
– “You have 10 days left to activate your car”
Ten days later… you cannot start your car unless you activate it, please contact Ford for further assistance.
Ford Security Bulletin: a special formed .MP3 file result in stack overflow and could elevate rights so a hacker blablabla…
LOL, your steering wheel is compromised…
sorry don’t want ms in my car
prefer to buy a car who use linux embedded system
You miss the point:) – MS OS is going to be too expensive for use with commodity-PC, forming soon 80% of its price.
So MSFT is searching for some items in which OS price isn’t so noticeable, like new cars.
(While Vista Premium (or what it was?) costs already like older sort of used car)
company car try to reduce their cost
they sell so many cars if they can save a few buck by car, at the end the total saved is very important
Yeah, whoo boy, that $99 for Windows XP Pro that I bought at Dell with my new laptop is gonna break the bank… I don’t know how I can afford to buy groceries, let alone a computer with outrageous prices like that… /SARCASM
certainly not 99$ for Vista. Discounting upgrades (you have to start somewhere) the minimum is $233. And what do you get? Instant search?
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/software/start-saving-vista-prices-l…
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/editions/default.msp…
No, that’s bull. You’re quoting retail, not the actual street prices that actual people pay.
I’ll crash my own car, thank you.
“I’ll crash my own car, thank you.”
But the new MICROS~1 “IntelliCar” (TM) does it for you – instantly and by itself! Click on “Start”, then “Engine”, doubleclick on the fuel icon, then select “How much?” and click on the +/- buttons until the correct fuel is shown, then click on “My Car” again, a menu “Route to…” will appear and you scroll down to the place you want to drive to. Then, click OK and restart your car to get the setting activated. Phone the MICROS~1 “Gates to Everywhere” (TM) activation service and tell them your car number, registration code and engine model, you’ll immediately receive your activation code. Click it into your steering wheel. Remember to drive as Administrator or you’ll be stopped automagically at every traffic light, even if it’s green. Then, call for support because nothing happens – except the doors open and the engine falls out of the car. That’s innovation, dude!
Sorry, couldn’t resist. 🙂
Someone making a joke about Microsoft and employing actual wit to do it? Have we crossed over into Bizarro-OSNews?!?
to help ford’s current “image” problem…
Toyota is laughing all the way to the bank.
The “reliability” of Microsoft in a car? ROFL! The blue-screen-of-death will soon *really* deserve its name. And nobody will be laughing…
No thank you. And thanks, I already know that none of my future cars will be a Ford.
No worries, somebody will port linux to this car and then we can have all cool opensource stuff running 🙂
heck yeah!!! When I can run apache from my ford 500 then the world will be perfect!!
Don’t you think apache will run better on a Mustang?
Are those things still around?
It’s April Fool’s day right? It has to be…I can just imagine it…
you go to insert a audio cd that you burnt – a mixture of tracks from different cds that you legally own and the audio player spits it out saying that there’s a DRM issue…
you go to start the car up but it won’t start as the internal o/s has f–ked up and has some error…
you can’t open the doors because it won’t recognise your fingerprints…
Fuel consumption goes out of the window because of the operating system being bloated…
It won’t be the blue screen of death, but the red sceen of death when the internal operating system forces the car to stuff and up and crash, killing the occupant(s) and having their blood splatter all over the windscreen…
you fill the tank up with petrol but the gauge just doesn’t recognise that it’s full and the car won’t start because of it…
stacked cd overflows…
oh boy, this is going to be fun. This is really going to be fun.
The roads of America will never be safe again!!!
Dave
@melkor
Could be worse.
You go to insert an audio cd and you have to break out the instruction manual just to get the drive to play your stuff.
Refueling the car is annoying because the drivers is required to use a gaz station that is in line with the philosophy of the car designer’s cult.
The roads of America will be safe. That’s because the drivers is still outside reading pages of hacks to start the car.
And the #1: If the driver complains that dealing with the car is too complicated, the car designers usually reply with “use Apt-get geez.”
what most people are probly un aware of if that the microsoft embeded OS in cars is not even remotly close to the ones in there desktop systems. windows ce is actualy rather stable and solid. though i am kind of suprised they didnt go with QNX…..
I don’t want a PC in my car, really, I don’t. I want my car to:
1.) Start.
2.) Drive.
3.) Stop.
4.) Steer with high accuracy.
5.) Break as rarely as possible.
I fail to see how adding more proprietary electronics running PC software is going to make my car more reliable, not to mention how it would lower the cost to me…
I wonder if Microsoft will get sued when people realize that hands free phones aren’t much safer than holding the cellular phone and decide to sue the people who sold them… I actually hope they don’t, but I’m curious to see if they will.
Car’s are about transportation. PC’s are about information.
5.) Break as rarely as possible.
Heh, I read that as “brake as rarely as possible.” Although being from Massachusetts, that kind of is the way we drive around here.
“I wonder if Microsoft will get sued when people realize that hands free phones aren’t much safer than holding the cellular phone and decide to sue the people who sold them… I actually hope they don’t, but I’m curious to see if they will. “
You’re making an interesting point here.
Scientifical examinations have lead to the result that it’s not the manipulations done on a mobile / cellular phone that occupies the driver’s attention, it’s rather the distraction of attention towards the phone call itself – off the road and the traffic. The same can be said for manipulations on a car computer, router etc., these manipulations are not neccessarily to be done with the hand, also with the mouth (voice control).
In the US, rather than e. g. in Germany, you can sue everyone for the dumbest reasons: A woman sues a famous fastfood restaurant because she burned her lips on the hot coffee; a man sues a brewery because he got drunk fron the beer consumed and then produced a traffic accident; a woman sues a famous fastfood restaurant because she got a fish impoisonment by some FishDings (and the famous fastfood restaurant replied and proofed that their FishDingens actually do not contain any fish parts)… continuum ad libitum.
Maybe, if a problem related to the MICROS~1 “IntelliCar” (TM) occurs – and if it’s only a problem because the user was to stupid to handle the system – someone will sue MICROS~1 (or Ford): “They had to tell me that my car does things I don’t know about! It’s dangerous!” 🙂 Will the golden (applied) rule “99% of the problems sit on the driver’s chair” fit here?
BTW, in Germany the use of a hands free adapter for cellular phones is obligated by law. If you use your hands to phone and get caught by the police, you have to pay 40 Euro and get 1 point in Flensburg (federal central registration authority for traffic violations). This law hasn’t change anything in fact. (In Germany, cellular phone are called “Handy”, nice, isn’t it? :-]).
“You can have any Opertaing System you want –
as long as it’s Windows.”
By the way, BMW had a multitude of problems with Microsoft software.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zdbln/is_200301/ai_ziff35…
“The iDrive is powered in part by the stripped down version of Microsoft’s operating system for personal computers known as Windows CE.”
Let’s hope it’s improved since then… Otherwise, think of the lines in the service department at the Ford dealerships for “Patch Tuesday”!
Edited 2006-12-29 22:00
There’s nothing in that article which identifies MS software as source of problems. So, your use of a “multitude of problems” is ideological bunk.
My original quote:
“The iDrive is powered in part by the stripped down version of Microsoft’s operating system for personal computers known as Windows CE.”
Last I heard, Windows CE was still a Microsoft product.
Later in the article,
“Out of 24 problems cited by Conley in December, his dealer was able to find and fix only three of them, despite help from U.S. headquarters in New Jersey.”
Sounds like a multitude of (unresolved) problems to me.
I’ve noticed a trend on this site where Microsoft zealots just can’t stand it when someone points out well-documented facts about Microsoft applications and/or operating systems.
It’s unfortunate that some folks can’t hold an intelligent discussion without resorting to name-calling, insults, ad-hominem attacks, etc.
Last I heard, Windows CE was still a Microsoft product.
Read the quote again: “The iDrive is powered in part …”
Get it? Windows CE isn’t the only software involved here.
Sounds like a multitude of (unresolved) problems to me.
The article doesn’t say whether software was involved in the failures. You simply jumped to that conclusion because you want it to be true.
I’ve noticed a trend on this site where Microsoft zealots …
First, I’m not a zealot. I use most popular operating systems, and I don’t care for ideology with regard to technology, one way or another.
…just can’t stand it when someone points out well-documented facts about Microsoft applications and/or operating systems…
You haven’t pointed out a single “well-documented fact”. You’re trying to sell innuendo as fact. As I pointed out, the article doesn’t identify the Microsoft software as the source of the problem. Sadly, you and other ass-clowns don’t seem to realize that the iDrive system is comprised of hundreds of integrated components from multiple manufacturers. It’s an integrators nightmare, and simply calling out the Microsoft software as the single point of failure is zealotry at its worst.
randy, your story is four years old.
Formula 1 seems satisfied with MS’s automotive offerings, as Microsoft will be supplying Formula 1’s ECUs starting in 2008:
http://www.speedtv.com/articles/auto/formulaone/27956/
“Bridgestone, Microsoft Get Exclusive F1 Contracts
Written by: RACER staffParis, France – 7/5/2006
Bridgestone and Microsoft have been granted exclusive contracts to be the sole suppliers, of tires and ECUs respectively, of Formula 1 beginning in 2008.
The announcement was made following this Wednesday’s meeting of the FIA World Motor Sport Council in Paris.
The move to a single tire supplier and standardized ECUs (Electronic Control Units, responsible for a car’s engine management) is part of the FIA’s radical cost-saving package announced earlier this year for introduction in ’08. Both Bridgestone and Microsoft will supply F1 through 2010.”
And BMW is a major Forumla 1 player, and apparently BMW had no problem with the F1/MS contract. So I don’t know that BMW blames Microsoft for the problems you cite in that four year old article.
Edited 2006-12-30 05:26
Aside from the previous commentors pointing out that nowhere is it mentioned in your article that MS software is to blame, all the folks I know w/ iDrive hate it because it’s poorly designed and unintuitive and would probably give me a blank stare if I mentioned anything about an OS running it.
95% of the folks who will end up getting one of these Fords will never even know about the plethora of computers under the hood.
Ok, so now all our car analogies are going to get that much more confusing.
I hope they’re not planning on putting this new computer system in charge of any of the vital car components- I still remember that problem with the battleship that ran management software on Windows NT.
Yeah, cars do use computers nowadays but as part of specialized dedicated circuits. I’d hate to see a do-anything piece of software in charge of something as important as a four-ton metal monstrosity powered by internal explosions. There’s a reason Windows’ EULA says not to use the software in mission-critical systems.
Oh, to Doc Pain: In the case of the woman who sued McDonalds because her hot coffee was hot, the issue apparently was that the drive-thru attendant accidentally dropped the thing of boiling hot coffee in her lap, and this after the particular restaraunt had been warned several times not to serve scalding coffee.
Stupid? Oh, there’s plenty of stupid litigation in the USA. (The burgaler who successfully sued a family for damages when he tripped over… something, don’t remember, in their house at night when breaking in; and hurt himself) But the well-cited McDonald’s one might not be.
They’re not. Read the article. It’s integrated with the nav system. It doesn’t have anything to do with operating the vehicle.
Neither linux nor windows (or any other PC operating system) will ever be used to control the car electronics The ECU firmware contains only car manufacturer’s proprietary software. A friend of mine has actually disassembled and analyzed the firmware of (probably) some BMW. The code must be bug-free and run for years without any downtime.
“Oh, to Doc Pain: In the case of the woman who sued McDonalds because her hot coffee was hot, the issue apparently was that the drive-thru attendant accidentally dropped the thing of boiling hot coffee in her lap, and this after the particular restaraunt had been warned several times not to serve scalding coffee.”
Ah, thank you for clarifying. In this case, the case surely wasn’t that stupid. Maybe the woman can get a nice laptop and have the same experience once again. 🙂
“Stupid? Oh, there’s plenty of stupid litigation in the USA. (The burgaler who successfully sued a family for damages when he tripped over… something, don’t remember, in their house at night when breaking in; and hurt himself) “
You never never could win such a case in Germany. 🙂
Seriously, the crashing jokes are getting really, really stale. Ford isn’t going to use Windows XP. It’s going to use Windows CE Embedded, one of the most widely used embedded OSes.
Windows CE Embedded has no relation whatsoever to Microsoft’s desktop operating systems. It’s highly modularized, it’s realtime, and its licensees can make kernel changes without Microsoft’s permission…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_CE_5.0
Educate yourselves.
Exactly….. remember the Dreamcast ?
Hmmmm Dreamcast !
“””
Seriously, the crashing jokes are getting really, really stale.
“””
OK. How about “Fix Or Repair Daily”? It’s an oldie, but a goodie. 😉
…or use QNX and avoid MS altogether.
oh lovely… This will end up causing MORE wrecks. And I’m not referring to it using a MS OS. But the fact that peoples attentions will be distracted playing with their dashboard. More so than normal. People are already morons when it comes to the road.
Will it blend?
I refuse to do business with anyone who does business with MS. Doesnt ford know they are getting a legacy OS? Ford is hopping on the Titanic on its way down. Microsoft is a dying company with a dying product line-up. For best results use Linux.
Did you ever think why your comment score is -1.03 ouch…osnews needs an ignore user feature
I could really care less. Im stating opinion and fact, Cant help it that some people dislike it, either way I really dont care.
Every thing was fine until my HUD reverted to Aero Glass Black…
So does this mean Ford vehicles are destined at becoming even more unreliable?
Imagine, windows locking up whilst in the middle of a critical car process.
Thanks but no, thanks.
haha… you mean the car windows.
Yeah only if FreeBSD was that good. On my machine, the damn shyt locks up all the time. Imagine your car accelerator getting locked up at 100mph…hehe
One thing i really find useful in this is hands-free cellphone. If i can take voice calls by saying “attend” instead of hitting some keys on my cell phone, well thats great.
If my radio volume automatically is lowered when a new call is coming, even great.
Around 2 months back, my wife suggested that why don’t we implement a system so that you don’t have to use those sucky handsfree with cellphone and you can simply talk similar to speaker phone but without touching your cellphone and i was like damn its a good idea.
She was actually making a business plan for it but oh well Microsoft beats us here.
I don’t like the idea of a full computer in my car, but wireless cellphone (specially voice activated) looks very good to me and one that should help reduce accidents.
I don’t like the idea of a full computer in my car, but wireless cellphone (specially voice activated) looks very good to me and one that should help reduce accidents.
I hate to say it, but I have a Ford Focus that I brought 1 year ago that has exactly Voice Commands. You can dial any number, save numbers to memory (and recall ’em by name), control the car temperature, operate the RAdio/CD, and a couple of more things, all voice activated.
It’s not 100% reliable (as it won’t recognize some things if you have a lot of “noise” (i.e. your’re driving ‘fast’). But under normal circumstances, for a 1.0 version, it’s “ok”. It uses my phone via BlueTooth for the phone things and calls. You even get Caller ID on the Radio Panel.
However, I’ve seen two of these things stop working magically. You just activate the “voice” command (you have a small button near the radio volume up/down) and nothing happens. It’s Ford, it su**s
I’d rather not have Windows, BSD or Linux powering a car. For things like the radio and what not, fine. But for critical car things, give me a real-time solid OS, not a general purpose one.
I think that’s the name of the brand that’s been around. Pimp My Ride has been putting those things in cars for a bunch of years now. This is nothing new, except for Microsoft trying to capitalize on the ailing american car industry.
Chrysler is offering MyGig, which is another in-car pseudo-PC, I believe. I was looking at the Nitro and it comes as an option.
Personally, I’d rather drop the cash on leather seats and a good stereo than waste money on a modified MCE box stuffed under the dash. Gimme a laptop plugged into the cigarette lighter any day.
I think wireless hands free cellphone is a useful features. Think about it again:
1. You are listening to radio but you want to take the incoming calls on your cell
2. When the call comes, the radio volume goes low and you hear the cell phone ring
3. You say “Attend” and the built-in mic in your car gets activated and the radio turns off etc
To me that is pretty useful. To MS haters—up yours:)
And no i will not use Linux in my car because i trust CE more than any Linux version out there.
MS is even trying to get their OS’s in 2000$+ televisions now. Who the hell wants to run Windows on a crazy expensive 42″ first of all, keeping in mind that MS has a history of ignoring backward compatability with media center edition upgrades..
I cant remember any more was it when Win98 was latest MS os or XP but there where some statistics that if cars crash as often as Windows then we wouldn’t have a problem with overgrowing population on earth
“I tried to brake in time, but the UAC dialog kept asking me if I was really sure I wanted to brake…sounded like suspicious activity so I clicked no.”
Sorry to keep the horrible jokes going…
I think Microsoft can deliver a stable and good working operating system for Ford cars. But i also think that they are facing serious troubles like virusses and spam. I can imagine that if you drive your car to your work in 2035 and you pass a store the car will pick up its commercial or special offer and displays it on your car lcd and/or hud screen. How long before hackers are able to take over your car or send trojans and virusses to your car? Scarry..
This is the real problem in time with Microsoft products, not the stability. Window XP is very stable already and Vista is prob. even more stable.
ps. I rather see that Ford or other car companies would use embedded Linux, QNX or WindRiver software. They have proven themselves in various projects and are so much more secure.
Edited 2006-12-30 09:44
“But i also think that they are facing serious troubles like virusses and spam. […] How long before hackers are able to take over your car or send trojans and virusses to your car? Scarry..”
Oh, it’s much easier than you might think – for some cars and some purposes. Remember radio controlled locking mechanisms? Simply stand near such a car, send at approx. 470 MHz (70 centimeters ISM band) and the mechanism won’t work. You just need a 70cm LPD hand held transceiver that hardly costs anything. And radio controlled garage gates… had some fun with my old fashioned RFT UFS772c (modified police radio from the former GDR peoples’ police) mobile transceiver; worked the local repeater and some garages on my way opened! 🙂
Car engineers really think about how they could protect the car driver / car owner from complex attacks (e. g. modifying the car’s OS via bluetooth), but what about the simple ones?
At least they are color coordinated. You can have your blue screen of death on your blue oval.
I wonder…if you don’t register your car in thirty days, will the car lock you out?
If you try to play a non-DRMed music file, will it tell you that file type is not supported?
Will all Fords become incompatible with I-pods?
If you sell your Ford, will the new owner have to buy their own license from MS?
Where do they place the EULA, on the sun visor?
Do you get a factory recall for each service pack?
Will Toyota/Honda/Nissan start spamming your car?
McAfee and Norton can start making car alarms so you can get “total protection” from one vendor.
If you get tired of your car’s looks, can you change the theme?
OK, enough nonsense.
At a recent computer exposition, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: “If General Motors had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.”
In response to Bill’s comments, GM issued a press release stating: “If General Motors had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason, you would simply accept this.
Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive — but would run on only five percent of the roads.
The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “General Protection Fault” warning light.
The airbag system would ask “Are you sure?” before deploying.
Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off.
Sorry heard this a few years ago and was reminded of it. Couldn’t resist 🙂
I could care less whether it was Microsoft, Linux, or FreeBSD that Ford has partnered with. Maybe I am old school, but I believe that there is absolutely nothing in a car that needs an operating system. Now I’m a guy that rushes out to compile the latest Seamonkey build from CVS, but there’s a huge difference between my computing needs and automotive needs. When I think of an automobile, I think of something that should be durable, reliable, and with routine maintenence, should work perfectly for years. Does anybody remember the Ford inline six? It has to be the most durable engine ever made, tons of torque, seven main bearings, would go 350,000 mi before a rebuild was due, and then it would keep going without oil. Now, automobiles are designed as expendable items, to be replaced every time a part fails. Who needs HDTV, bluetooth, and surround sound in a _car_? Shouldn’t you be focusing on the road? You can take it to the bank that the integration of home-entertainment and computers is a cop out response to flimsy mechanical parts in new vehicles. This is only the latest development in the auto makers’ strategy to make the automobile a cheaply built, disposable product.
but I believe that there is absolutely nothing in a car that needs an operating system
The ECUs for engines, gears, ABS, ESP, power windows, lights, flashlights, etc do.
The ECUs for engines, gears, ABS, ESP, power windows, lights, flashlights, etc do.
Pardon, my sentence should have read, there is nothing a car needs that requires an operating system. This is a subjective topic, as everything that you listed is firmware.
Oh sorry, it’s quite new to me that OSEK/VDX disqualifies as an operating system.
I hope they get Rockbox running on it.
Please no. Example: cab driver taking us from CDG airport into downtown Paris. Chinese/Korean/Japanese (sorry I didn’t ask) guy, and obviously not French. Types in the address we gave him into his palm with gps and some tracking software (don’t use them, so can’t really tell which was it) which was running on win ce. The damn thing crashed on him twice on the road into the city, on which occasions the guy began yelling and cursing – I can only guess from the gestures and the tone, he was using his mother tongue -, pushing it, switching it on and off, pulling the cable in and out, at which point the thing began running again. During the blackouts we were just going straight ahead, missing some exits we probably should’ve used. We were silently smiling, still, it wasn’t funny, since he was messing around with our money.
Now, this is far away from an embedded different mswindows version running in a car, still, I don’t want a damn car to have blackouts and freezes.
If they must (you know what “must” means) use it, then use it for polling and showing stuff, and never to control anything. Whatsoever.
Sorry we don’t have a solution to your problem you’ll have to reinstall your car have a nice day *click*
I have a Ford now – and had a couple of others in the past. All have had problems with switch and control systems – Fords are just flaky when it comes to the working of their dash boards!! S0 nothing is new with Ford!
Some of you are probably already using Windows embedded-based platforms in your cars and don’t even know it:
Since 1995, Microsoft’s Automotive Business Unit has worked collaboratively with the auto industry to deliver technology designed for advanced in-car information, navigation and entertainment systems.
…
Microsoft technology is on the road today in 61 pre-installed and aftermarket devices from 18 world-class automakers and suppliers, including BMW, Citroën, Clarion Co. Ltd., DaimlerChrysler, Fiat, Honda, Hyundai, Mitsubishi, NexTech, Subaru, Toyota and Volvo. More information about Windows Mobile for Automotive and Microsoft’s Automotive Business Unit can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsautomotive
Inside Microsoft Automotive
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=15096
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=15306
Microsoft technology is on the road today in 61 pre-installed and aftermarket devices from 18 world-class automakers and suppliers, including BMW, Citroën, Clarion Co. Ltd., DaimlerChrysler, Fiat, Honda, Hyundai, Mitsubishi, NexTech, Subaru, Toyota and Volvo. More information about Windows Mobile for Automotive and Microsoft’s Automotive Business Unit can be found at