THIS is why I won't buy new Ford garbage...


This Ford Exec is a moron and the technology is dangerous in the wrong hands. Glad they can't track my 55, oh wait, they want to try.

 

I heartily agree that this Ford guy is a complete idiot but what do you expect from a sales and marketing guy who probably doesn't know a hub cap from a radiator cap. I wonder if he is still employed at Ford after those stupid comments.

But the guy reporting this is on the video is an even bigger idiot. He has no idea what is happening. I was Chrysler's technical rep for several years to VIIC which is a consortium of all the automakers (foreign and domestic) sold here in the U.S. and the Federal and State governments. This technology has been with us for many years. GM's OnStar system was one of the first. The department that I ran did telediagnostics on test vehicles driven by real people in the real world in order to discover any quality bugs before we went into full production. At VIIC we, the OEMs, were united and adamant that peoples privacy absolutely had to be respected. GM already had policies about this where before any data could be obtained by any government agency they had to go before a judge and obtain a warrant. They had several instances where guys showed up and flashed a badge thinking that they could intimidate GM employees into giving them what they wanted. They were quickly escorted off GMs property by GM security personnel.

On the other hand there were several instances where kidnappings and other major felonies cases were solved by using this technology. On a lesser note I was driving a car equipped with one of our telediagnostics devices when I was hit by a woman turning right from the left lane in the intersection. The woman claimed she was not at fault but I fired up my laptop and proved to the cop that I was in the correct lane and that the accident could not have occurred the way she claimed. She got the ticket.

This technology is here and will be further developed over the coming years. Nobody wants government intrusion but the technology does have the capability of saving thousands of lives every year. One of VIIC's projects is to develop stoplights that can send out a signal to your car if someone is going to run the light and put you and your passengers in severe danger. The real challenge is to implement these good things without impacting our rights to privacy.