This video is going to be a little different to my normal ones. I usually need to do lots of research to get the story straight. But not this one – this was basically a brain dump! If you don’t know, I once, many moons ago, worked for Microsoft in the Automotive Business Unit or ABU, in fact this is an ABU t-shirt. I started working on the Auto PC – the car stereo you see behind me there – and although I missed ABU’s crowning glory, the Ford SYNC system, I was back in the team to witness first-hand the chaos of the infamous MyFord Touch project. Not much is out there about some of the background to what happened, and I’ve always wanted to tell the real story, what Ford’s PR department didn’t want you to hear.

If you wanted to have the latest cutting-edge technology in your car in 2007 you wouldn’t buy a BMW 7 series or a Mercedes S-Class. You’d own a 2008 Ford Focus with SYNC. It was the crowning achievement of Microsoft’s Automotive team; a device that plays music from media players and supports hands-free phone calls. It was revolutionary at the time and was included in over 1 million vehicles. But it almost never happened. It was the last roll of the dice from a team that had spent years in the wilderness trying to break into the car market.

In 1990 Vauxhall was on top of the world. Ford’s serious misstep with the Sierra in the early 1980s, meant Vauxhall’s well put together Cavalier had cleaned up. The third generation Cavalier had continued those inroads in the late 80s, along with the excellent Astra and Nova that completed their mass car lineup. So, surely the next generation car, the Vectra, would do just as well? I’m sure you can tell from the build-up, that that didn’t happen, but why?