Look Out Ford: Lawyers Gearing Up For Unreleased In-Car Twitter Capability
Ford only just announced Twitter integration for future vehicles at the Consumer Electronics Show last month, and it’s still not available on any Ford vehicles yet. Eventually though, Ford says that you’ll be able to receive and send tweets from your car using the hands-free SYNC system, a development that apparently has lawyers already counting the money they’ll make suing Ford’s pants off. The Law Offices of Barry Levinson already has a presser warning that:
Ford’s development of technology to facilitate driver computer use runs counter to the national trend, which sees authorities cracking down on distracted driving… Ford defends its Twitter technology, claiming to be making existing driver behaviors safer. But Ford’s assertion may not hold up to scrutiny. The 2006 driver distraction study found that talking and listening to conversation via cell phone was as likely to cause a crash as dialing a cell phone; if this seemingly apt analogy for the distinction between typing on a computer and talking into one holds up, it would undermine Ford’s justification for installing Twitter technology in cars.
Though this is clearly a bit of premature (press) release, it shows that Ford is wading into some dangerous water, and the sharks are circling. Besides, who the hell needs to tweet while driving?
More by Edward Niedermeyer
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No need to get excited over vaporware (specifically the feature of sending tweets) that hasn't been officially announced because the current R&D product isn't sufficiently robust for release. Clearly, trial lawyers--and journalists--have bigger fish to fry.
Telegraph (and actually to Ponchoman too) This type of thing is ridiculously easy to program. This not having been released has nothing to do with the code not being ready. In fact, development on this feature probably took a team of two or three people all of a week at most to complete. When the APIs are all there to begin with, the voice recognition, the bluetooth communications, twitter, etc, adding a new ways to access it is stupidly easy. Setting something like this up takes about as much programming muscle as using drag and drop software to create a fan app for your band on the iPhone. Materials science to make lighter, stronger, affordable materials to build vehicles that are safe and fuel efficient is much tougher, and curing diseases, well, doing that is several thousand degrees away from what we are talking about here. Ford is adding these capabilities because they are great tipping point features. When someone looks at a Camry vs a Fusion and sees both are reliable, both are fuel efficient, both have nice interiors and are stylish, something like Sync can tip the scales in the Fusions favor, especially in conquest sales where a current Camry owner might not have a reason to try out something new if it weren't for the ability to do something they couldn't before. When you combine the potential new sales with how easy and inexpensive it is to add these features since the framework is already in place, it's a no brainer.
I'm lying in bed reading the book Traffic, and take a computer break and come across this article. Twittering while you're driving is one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard of. Just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be. This idea is about as stupid as it gets. We have way too many distractions already. When you drive, drive and do nothing else. You're moving 4,000 pounds down the road at 60 mph in the middle of traffic and Ford engineers think you should be able to Twitter? Let's get our priorities straight.
Hey, no problem. Just make sure that you have to get a "Twitter Endorsement" on your license, with the requisite training and testing. Yeah, right.