

Ford Goes WiFi With Mobile Hotspots For SYNC Vehicles - bishvili
http://www.motorauthority.com/blog/1040535_ford-goes-wifi-with-mobile-hotspots-for-sync-vehicles

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jbrun
Very cool, this reminds me of the TED talk by ZipCar founder who wants cars to
become wi-fi spots, creating an ad-hoc national network.

[http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/robin_chase_on_zipcar_and...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/robin_chase_on_zipcar_and_her_next_big_idea.html)

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electromagnetic
I wonder how much money a car manufacturer could bring in by turning their
entire vehicle output as wi-fi spots for a mesh network. I know there are tel-
co's in my area that want customers but cannot buy-out the fibre network from
competitors. As they're already cellular providers a wi-fi mesh network with
3G internet could enable them access to an entire city.

It could be simple to establish, simply offer everyone with a warranty free
in-vehicle wi-fi when they bring it in for anything. With every warrantied
vehicle required to return for an oil change within 3-6 months, you can turn
tens of thousands of cars into a wi-fi mesh. This could turn dense-urban areas
into mesh networks very rapidly, with a maximum of 6 months till a dense
network is developed.

Heck add a processor, ram and a SSD to the wi-fi device and you could sell
your car network's processing power for use as a supercomputer for data
crunching purposes. The potential is massive and could provide major
innovation and income opportunities that vehicle manufacturers have never
thought of.

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mey
I always figured there was an interesting opportunity for mesh networks on
cars going down the highway. From car to car communication, transporting large
data chunks down the highway (stored on car for several mile between mesh
endpoints), or even emergency broadcasts.

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arohner
>The worst part? We'll have to wait until the introduction of Ford's second-
gen SYNC system sometime next year.

No, the worst part is the fact that you need to buy _a new car_ to get a clean
solution to wireless.

I recently bought a car with built-in bluetooth and satellite nav; it's my
first car with any serious user-computer interaction. I bought the car used,
built in '06. What I realized is that what I really want is for the satellite
nav screen to be a secondary output for my iphone. I don't want their nav, I
want to just run google maps. I don't want to sync my phone contacts list into
the car's phone contacts. AFAIK, there is no way to send an address from my
iphone to the nav system, and the nav UI is terrible.

When new cars cost two orders of magnitude more than new phones, there really
needs to be a better interface. There's no justification to buying a car
because it has an ipod dock or whatever the next big thing is. The computer
screen in the car should be an open API for the iphone to plug into, and the
iphone should have an open API for controlling external monitors and input
devices (once the hardware supports it). For me, this is the solution to pg's
"iphone as a development platform".

Of course, the car manufacturers will have none of it. There's a reason car
computer technology is 5-10 years behind consumer electronics.

