Apple To Unveil Its 'iOS In the Car' Project Next Week

An anonymous reader tips news that Apple's efforts to bring iOS to cars will be shown at the Geneva Motor Show next week. 'Drivers will be able to use Apple Maps as in-car navigation, as well as listen to music and watch films. Calls can be made through the system, which will tie into the Siri voice recognition platform so that messages can be read to the driver who can respond by dictating a reply.' Apple's partners in the automotive industry will be Volvo, Ferrari, and Mercedes Benz to start. Apple first said they were working on this system at last year's WWDC.

Re:"Apple Maps as in-car navigation"

[fiziko]

Most Apple Maps issues were a side effect of an early launch. They thought they'd have another year with Google Maps, and development was incomplete, but they opted for poor navigation rather than no navigation. I find it about as effective as Google Maps for my region these days. They've had the time to make it the product they always wanted it to be.

Ha ha Ford just signed up with Blackberry

[EmperorOfCanada]

Ford goes from Microsoft's sync (which most people call MS Stink) and signs up with the zombie corpse of a phone company blackberry. I wonder which genius company (who's shares are about to get another boost) will team up with Apple? Tesla maybe? Fiat? Ford having Blackberry will probably cause exactly 3 customers to pick ford. But Apple will attract hoards of people not only can they put an apple in their pocket but they can get into the pocket of an apple.

Glad someone is finally getting in on this one

[GodfatherofSoul]

Every in-car nav system I've looked at has terrible reviews; even the dealership told me not to sweat going for the GPS option in my new car. I've got this big fancy LCD and a fancy audio system and a cell phone, but no one to tie them together.

Glad my car uses Google instead

[AaronW]

I'm glad my car uses a combination of Google and Garmin for the GPS. On the main screen (Tesla Model S) it shows a satellite view of the map, with pinch-zoom and rotation support via the touch screen whereas next to the speedometer it shows a more traditional 3-D GPS view which I understand is supplied by Garmin (I could be wrong though). For voice recognition it uses Google's service. The next major update due out soon improves the time estimates in real-time using the live traffic information that is overlayed over the Google map. The main screen map caches data along the route (except satellite data) for when the 3G signal is lost and the other display relies entirely on in-car maps.

My car also runs Linux for the main screen using the Qt toolkit for the UI. The only complaints I have heard are that the radio doesn't handle the proprietary Apple audio files but it handles MP3, Ogg and Flac just fine (with my USB drive formatted EXT4). Now if only Waze were integrated.

This needs to be standardized

[Solandri]

At some point, automakers settled on a standard stereo plug for their cars, meaning you could install any aftermarket stereo into any car. The same thing needs to happen to car nav and entertainment systems. A standard plug should allow access to the car's GPS antenna, radio antennas, power, speakers, climate control, rear back-up camera, etc. Then you can plug in whatever you want to control these functions, be it an iPad, an Android tablet, a Garmin tablet, or some new doohickey which hasn't been invented yet. For bonus points they can have the car transmit various sensor readings through the plug, allowing the device to display things like fuel consumption, engine maintenance logs, hybrid battery charge state, etc.