Touch, Speak, Tap - Taking 5 Connected Cars for a Spin - NYTimes.com SCREEN GEM The CUE telematics system in the Cadillac XTS has a capacitive touch screen. IN the past, when an automaker wanted to distinguish itself, it simply had to show up its competitors: Ford had to beat Chevy, BMW had to outdo Mercedes, Morgan had to... Actually, Morgan never had to do all that much. But today's car buyer demands more than just the most horsepower and the best lateral acceleration figures - they now expect their cars to have the capabilities of their smartphones and tablets. Electric windows and Twilight Sentinel no longer impress. But automakers have a problem - the companies that make those smartphones and tablets are faster and nimbler, making significant updates almost every year. A car model may be in dealerships five years or more. If tech is Ferrari, the auto industry is Peterbilt. So automakers have to offer a panoply of services and gadgets, commonly called telematics, that ideally keep pace with Silicon Valley. And they have to do this in a way that, one hopes, doesn't create potentially deadly distractions in a moving vehicle. To gauge the competing schools of thought on in-car technology right now, I spent time with five cars from automakers in the forefront of telematics. Here are my impressions: MyFord Touch: Lots of Choices Ford has gotten a lot of attention for its push to become a leader in telematics systems, and not all that attention has been positive. Ford's most advanced system for integrating in-car functions is MyFord Touch (or, in Lincolns, MyLincoln Touch), which was redesigned after it initially received a lukewarm reception. The primary interface in a MyFord Touch-equipped vehicle - I tested a 2012 Focus for this article - is a touch screen high in the center of the instrument panel. There are secondary controls on the dashboard and steering wheel, and spoken commands offer a third way to interact with the system. That touch screen has been updated recently with a 2.0 release of the MyFord Touch OS. The goal was to address some complaints with the first generation, including a busy screen layout, slow response times and general reliability problems. The new OS still divides the home screen into quadrants - phone, music, navigation and climate controls - but does clean things up some, with fewer, larger virtual buttons. So that means there are three - four, if you include voice - ways of interacting with many features. To switch radio stations, for example, you can use the steering-wheel controls, touch the display, press a switch on the radio controls beneath the display or just speak, "Play channel 80"s on 8." It's a lot of ways to do the same thing. I will say this much - of those four ways, the touch screen seems to play the weak sister. Because it's a smooth, flat pane of plastic, there's no tactile response to anything you do. And because you can't feel anything, you are obligated to look to see if what you pressed was the right thing. And when you are looking at the display you are not looking at the road. I found myself using the steering-wheel controls the most, followed by the additional physical controls on the dash and then actually using voice commands. The touch screen was my last resort. I say "actually" in regards to voice, because voice commands have long been featured in cars, but few people ever use them. You cannot really blame drivers, given that most voice-control systems have been comically bad. Ford's effort, which is related to its Sync system, created in collaboration with Microsoft, is considerably better than most. It figures out what you're asking without making you go through a maze of menu and submenu commands. You can be listening to the radio and say "call home," for example, without having to first say "phone," "call contact," "home," "line 1" and "yes." Ford claims to have worked out the bugs on its latest operating system, but it would appear there's still some work to do. Once when I was driving, the touch screen became unresponsive for about 30 seconds. During that time I attempted to repeat my input, each time with more stabbing force from my index finger. When the display finally unfroze, it worked its way through my repeated inputs at lightning speed, resulting in me overshooting what I had tried to do in the first place.