Microsoft has a long-standing history of pushing boundaries in the automobile sector and that includes its close connection with Ford. The company has built and refined it"s Sync in-car infotainment center and has helped with many other aspects of automotive design over the years.
If you were wondering how Microsoft sees the future of the automobile evolving with the needs of the consumer, take a look at the video above. The video which includes Tanner Foust, the host of the US Top Gear TV show and Pranish Kumar, who heads up the Windows Embedded Automotive team that is focused on developing the future of Microsoft’s automotive technologies. The video talks about how the group sees the intelligent car evolving over the next few years and how these implementations can improve our vehicles.
The group foresees that computers in the car will begin to focus more broadly on all aspects of the vehicle, instead of only infotainment and a few basic stats about the vehicle. The focus will turn towards creating more efficient cars by providing the driver with everything from tips to help improve fuel economy to over-the-air updates to fine tune the engine.
Automotive manufactures are constantly tuning and tweaking engine settings within the cars computer system and being able to provide these updates on the fly, as opposed to when you visit the dealership, could help manufactures improve fleet performance across the board instead of only with new models that hit the show-room floor.
We will be curious to see how long it takes for these features to arrive but knowing that Microsoft already has a close relationship with manufactures, our guess is that we won"t have to wait all that long.
Source: Microsoft