I recently had the chance to drive a 2010 Ford Taurus SEL. I have driven a lot of Ford Tauruses in my life as rental cars. This was also a rental but far different than the bland cars of the past. Although there is a lot to talk about the car, the most impressive part of the Taurus was Sync by Microsoft. I must say it is the best implementation of high technology that I have every seen in a car. The experience was so cool I want to have a Ford product just to have access to Sync. The amount of miles I put on the car was slightly over 2000 so I had time to really get familiar with Sync.
The rental car was bereft of manuals. It took me about 15 minutes to figure the system out, but once I found the magic buttons it was a piece of cake. The first item of business was hooking up my iPhone. I was skeptical of hooking up the iPhone because I was hooking it up to a Microsoft system. There is a USB port in the armrest compartment that I plugged into and then I docked the iPhone. This is when I was introduced to Samantha. Samantha is the designation of the voice that Sync uses to communicate with the driver. She is a very nice lady. She asked me if I would like to link up my contacts in the iPhone. I said yes just to be funny and there was a tone and the display on the radio console indicated that is has accessed the contacts on the phone. That little feat was cool on two levels. One, it knew it was an iPhone and how to download the contacts. Second, I said yes and the car executed my command. Next, it asked if I wanted to sync up the playlist on the system. Yes was my command. That was the last question for the setup. I was able to put my iPhone in the armrest and only took it out to look at the GPS.
Voice recognition has always been a technology that is difficult to implement. Systems get a wrong name or execute a wrong command. And unless you are in a room or car by yourself you can look a tad foolish talking to a device that may or may not respond back the way you wish. The Sync however was very accurate. I did not have to talk deliberately, just normally. I used it to make phone calls, hang up, select playlist, and switch between the iPhone and the Sirus radio. Oh yeah, if you know the Sirus station name, like The 80s at 8, all you have to do is say the station name and it switched. The upshot to the accurate voice recognition in the car is that you don’t have to take your eyes off the road to play with the radio.
There are some other Sync goodies. You only need the USB dock cable. The radio displays the caller id and can say the name on the caller id. The turn-by-turn directions are cool as well. Double cool was the traffic feature, which then uses the turn-by-turn to guide you away from problems on the road. And you can get weather by just naming a city and it tells you the weather. I am not a big shot on the stock market, but you can get stock reports as well.
There are a couple of features that I needed an account online to access. Because it was a rental I didn’t get to take advantage of them. One was vehicle health, which the car sends a report out to the internet and the report is sent back to the car to be read aloud. Another is setting up specific locations for the turn-by-turn navigation, like setting up home.
2008 Ford Mustang Bullitt in Dark Highland Green
Never before have I thought about buying a car for the technology inside. But Sync has at least given me a reason to strongly consider a Ford (possibly a special edition Bullitt Mustang). I am also not a Microsoft fanboy but they do have their hits. This is a well-executed bit of technology. It is easy to use, in an accessible package (Ford products), and sticks to functions that you will use regularly. There will be a second report coming if I get a Ford in the near future.
