Is Ford’s MyTouch Causing A Drop In Overall Quality?

More than a couple of decades ago, the only way you could call your friend while you were driving was to holler out the window as you drove past his house. Your car couldn’t tell you where it was at any particular moment, let alone tell you how to get to your destination. If you asked your car to play a favorite song – and expected an answer – your passenger would have asked you to pull over to the curb so they could get out.

We drove our cars so we could get to where we were going. We didn’t need a voice from beyond the dash giving us a guided tour, we didn’t need the car to park itself, and we most certainly didn’t talk to it unless it wouldn’t start and we were rightfully mad at it.

Auto commercials on TV are now showing us how we can call friends and family, ask directions, and even find information at the mere asking for it. Ford’s MyTouch shows us how smart our cars are, with all their communications package, finding music, etc. While this may be all neato and swell, it seems to be hurting Ford in the long run because of consumer complaints. But what do these communication problems have to do with driving the car?

Two years ago, Ford was at number five on JD Powers’ Initial Quality Study (IQS), but many say that the “MyFordTouch” complaints are to blame for dropping Ford to number 23 in 2011. This year, Ford drops again to number 27. Most of us are used to seeing Ford towards the top of the list, but now it’s falling closer to the bottom because of a failure to communicate.

It’s bad enough that the IQS shows them dropping, but what confuses some of us is that we used to rank our cars on whether they would run or not. Now it seems we have to rank our cars on whether they can communicate with us properly.

It just seems wrong that we’ve become more concerned with how much technology we can shove behind the dash than if we can get to where we’re going. But it could be worse, the lowest vehicle rating is a the Smart car. Oh, the irony.