[a2tech]

I can guarantee you that they are doing exhaustive usability testing. I've had friends that worked in Ford's design and usability group. EVERYTHING is extensively demo'ed and discussed to death. My friends in the design group complained that the actual engineers would take their designs and fight them constantly on every change and that what WAS a nice interface was junk by the time it went into the vehicle.

I suspect that the engineers fighting them is really just a case of the hardware team and the software team not understanding the world the other lives in. The hardware team is working with a slow as molasses processor that is the only thing thats been approved for the ridiculously rugged life that a car CPU lives and the software people don't understand that just because a webkit rendering engine is completely fluid on their 6 month old Precision workstation it won't be on a 500mhz in dash processor.