Take those hands off the wheel: The future of cars

Jay Loney is a car guy. He’s also a tech guy – a principal program manager with Microsoft’s Automotive team. This week he joined Todd Bishop and the owner of a 21-year-old Honda, John Cook, on KIRO Radio’s GeekWire to talk about the future of automobiles.

(Hint: They’ll review restaurants, they’ll display things on your windshield, and they’ll drive themselves.)

Sure, if Cook were to drive his beloved car onto a car lot and pick up a Ford, Fiat or Hyundai, he’d probably get a car with underlying Microsoft technology. That’s what Loney is working is on. New cars come with bells and whistles like hands-free dialing, improved navigation, standard radios, and satellite radios like Sirus or XM.

While attaching your smart phone to one of these cars is often how you connect to the Internet, the next generation of cars will have its own IP connection.

That world wide web connection means the wealth of opportunity from any streaming media, of course – Spotify, YouTube, KIRO Radio, Netflix, and the like. But Loney said that metadata that you can get from Bing will also be important. Don’t know where to eat? As you drive past a restaurant in your future new car, it will review the restaurant for you – either from recommendations in your social networks, or the latest online reviews.

Of course, safety will be an issue. Just because you can stream Taylor Swift’s “22” video doesn’t mean you should watch while you’re driving. Bishop points out that those sorts of features are disabled when the car is in motion. But he also calls the oft-audio dependent technology, “hinky.”

“The speech interface of the car is actually key to the interface,” said Loney. Much of what you’ll want to get from the Internet in your car will need to be read to you – so they’re working on getting that “hinkiness” worked out.

Even the thought of navigational window displays has Cook clinging to his ancient Honda, but Loney seemed confident they would get the new displays right. According to Loney it should work if the car can “project clearly, easily and simply when you turn on the road.”

And are we ready for a driver-less car, like the one the guys at Google have developed? It may take some time to get used to it, but Loney reminded the guys that the majority of the time you’re in an airplane, it lands itself.

“Should we put our trust in technology? I think eventually. This is a reality. I don’t know how soon it is. But I think eventually, it’s a reality.”

Listen to this episode of the GeekWire podcast here.