On Thursday 07 August 2003 09:30, abower@thebowery.co.uk wrote:
Can you imagine driving a car down the motorway in the future to have the OS decide to crash, which then deploys the airbags, disables the brakes and steering while turning the stereo up to full volume and playing a cheesy hits of the 80s station while you await the fire brigade to cut you out of the resultant mess!
Have you experienced the new high end BMW's, your future scenario is here today (nearly) The new 7 series is running Microsoft, and they are having problems.
Fortunately, nothing essential to the cars safety is controlled by Microsoft. But bugs like the stereo getting stuck on one volume or one channel, and the heating setting itself to full are happening....the big problem IMO is that these ARE STILL safety issues as if the Stereo goes to full the driver becomes distracted while they try and correct it.
There are some videos here of "i-drive" (the MS Windows CE based system that the BMW runs) doing some of it's crashes, unfortunately they are in Windows media format so I haven't looked at them yet.