[SimHacker]

From my experience working at TomTom, which uses touch screen as well as voice commands and feedback, and has purchased automotive oriented companies and integrated their products and employees into their own, I've learned that the automotive industry moves at a glacial pace compared to the computer industry.

There are both good and bad reasons for this. But the important point is that automotive interfaces are designed to be built into cars at the factory, and used for many years without requiring any updates. Even if updates are possible, most people don't get them. So it's a completely different mindset and approach and time scale than people from the Silicon Valley dot-com startup industry have.

Another factor is that the devices built into cars have a very long design and production lead time, and by the time the car comes out, the built in hardware and software is already quite obsolete compared to the smartphone the driver probably owns.

Factoring the problem out of the car to run in a smartphone or tablet itself also has its own frustrating problems, because when you're designing an automotive computer system, you can't predict what kind of technology and standards will be available or popular by the time it ships.

It's a very difficult problem space, and the stakes are extremely high, not just financially, but also because cars are weapons of mass destruction that kill more people and destroy more property than all terrorists combined could possibly dream of.

[jstandard]

"Factoring the problem out of the car to run in a smartphone or tablet itself also has its own frustrating problems, because when you're designing an automotive computer system, you can't predict what kind of technology and standards will be available or popular by the time it ships."

Would you mind to elaborate on this statement?

To me it seems like moving control over some functions within the car, for example music or calling, might make more sense to do on the phone specifically because of the phone's fast upgrade cycle and tie-ins to one's personal information cloud.

[SimHacker]

They prefer to invent their own protocols and busses for the different systems of the car to communicate with each other, that aren't compatible with phones or even protocols like http.

For example, TomTom had a big emotional investment in some 1990's-style proprietary remote procedure call protocol that one of the automotive companies they bought had developed. It had its own interface definition language and rpc stub compiler, which seemed revolutionary in 1988 when some clever student came up with the same idea to make it easier to write C wrappers for SunRPC protocols so you didn't have to write them by hand.

More rational heads were pushing to just use modern off-the-shelf technologies like http/rest/json/etc, but the jobs of some people in some department depended on them being perceived as having been doing productive work on their own proprietary message bus for the past three years or so, and that was what they delivered, so that was what they were damn well going to use.

Smartphones are a huge threat to companies that make their own little boxes that are hard to convince people who have smartphones to buy, so they weren't exactly enthusiastic about embracing and supporting smartphones and tablets.

When a company that operates at glacial automotive development speeds has been working on their own proprietary solution to a problem that modern technology has made trivial to solve in a standard way, they're often reluctant to throw out the proprietary solution they've developed, and just use standard off-the-shelf protocols that would enable third party developers to plug into their systems and make their expensive products superfluous.

You may think it's a great idea for your car to simply be running a web server on a TCP/IP network that you can just connect to with bluetooth or wifi, but that's a terrifying concept to companies that are trying to lock you into systems they developed years or decades ago...

Even after they finally bit the bullet and decided to use WebKit in the TomTom device to implement the user interface, they still insisted on plugging their silly RPC protocol into the web browser via an old school NSAPI plug-in adaptor to talk to their fancy proprietary protocol library, instead of just talking http between everything. They wouldn't listen to reason, or technological arguments, because the political arguments had already been made and the decisions had been set in stone that they were going to use their proprietary technology for a long time. And no way were they ever going to offer third party developers access to their silly RPC protocol, which they were clinging to because they actually perceived open standards as a threat, not a blessing. People's jobs depended on it!

They knew and gave lip service to the idea that they had to think "out of the box" to survive against the onslaught of google and cheap android phones, but hell if they were going to go through that particular door, like trying to force a cat out a window it refuses to go through.

You may recall how TomTom for WinCE used to have an SDK that let you hook into the TomTom Navigator app in a few unsatisfying ways -- it was extremely sub-optimal: you would write files out into a directory and stick your thumb up your ass until the app noticed the file, read it, did something, and wrote another file with a reply, that you had to keep polling for. Instead of developing that into a real API for integrating with TomTom Navigator, they just kind of took it out back and suffocated it with a pillow -- a step in the wrong direction if you ask me! It would have been so straightforward to simply expose an http service, but that dog won't hunt in a company like that.

[jstandard]

I'd heard of the TomTom SDK, but never even explored the option for quite a few of the concerns you managed to affirm from first hand experience.

I very much agree on your point about platform lock-in worries associated with automotive OEMs. Though Google via the Open Auto Alliance is making headway to push forward a more standard platform, it seems likely that OEMs will still wage territorial wars to lock app devs out of the data garden. The OEM caution is not without merit, they're the most likely legal target if someone drives into a wall because of poor usability from some buggy 3rd party Music app on their platform.

Given all of these potential in-car platform issues, how do you feel about creating an interface on the smartphone that makes accessing apps safer?