Okay, the grudge match is on.
Cadillac is sick of Ford and Lincoln getting all the headlines for Sync and MyFord Touch.
So now they've got an answer, cue, the Cadillac user experience.
That refers to a couple of screens in this car.
The most interesting one is here in the center stack and I'm happy to report, it no longer pulls that toaster thing like Cadillac used to do 'cause there was no point in it going up and down.
Now it's baked right here and this is very cool stuff.
You've got a lot of things
happening.
They are borrowed from smartphone and PC technology.
Along the bottom here, for example, you can pin those to use Windows 7 language to have any kind of a shortcut to almost any function in the head unit.
It could be a radio station on one button or shortcut to a nav function on the next and HVAC control on the next.
Up here on the top, this is very much like your smartphone.
You can drag and drop your home screen icons there and decide "I don't wanna have navigation there.
I wanna edit that" or "I wanna change Pandora out and make it some other thing,
a shortcut to my contacts." Notice you've got a Pandora app here which you won't be able to put just any old app echoed up on this screen.
Cadillac is gonna curate these and approve them into the system.
Notice that as I move my hand back and forth, I'm getting proximity sensing.
Take your hand away, you get a simplified screen.
Put your hand back up there and things you need in the moment as it realizes you're about to go for a command become visible.
That's a nice way to keep things clean until you need it, and that allows them to de-content a lot of the buttons
down here below the LCD.
You've got relatively few by today's standards of what are physical buttons but even these are capacitive touch as is this screen.
Over here in front of the driver is an all-LCD instrument panel as well.
This is something we only saw before on I believe Jag and Land Rover, about 12 inches kind of a rectangular shape and it's got 4 modes as well from very simple to high content to give you all manner of information about the vehicle and the media settings, and it also leverages or helps
the center stack so not everything has to be wedged into here.
You can have this thing helped out with media, helped out with navigation, distribute the information interface across 2 screens.
We've also got haptic feedback in this guy.
Let's say I wanna go to the audio settings and I'm gonna go to my audio menu and I start to run my finger across these choices.
I can keep my eyes somewhat on the road because I'm getting a little bump, bump, bump, bump thing.
Haptic feedback really gained controller technology in there.
And a little more of the electromechanical side, check this out.
If I go down here and put my finger underneath
this lid, it pops open because we're looking at a mechless system here.
No optical drive.
That's so 2010.
Instead, you pick up a little sneaky bin right here.
There is the USB drive back there as well for loading up your iPod or your ThumbDrive.
And again, all of this is capacitive touch.
Now this is not prototype stuff.
This is near production.
Basically, I'm in a demo unit here but this is coming out on the new Cadillac XTS, which is their new 5-Series/E-Class competitor.
