German Car Zone

I am impressed with the Audi technology and congratulate them for continuing to lead the way in this area. Pretty pictures and music do not make good drivers but a good data base of information with accurate audio directions help a good driver reach his destination. Then he can look at the pictures. Some "under 25" may not understand that....

However, there are some on this forum "not under 25" but are even "over 75" who understand what you are talking about. I was installing Nvidia video board probably before you were born...:-)

I just saw these are not your words but from Audi via WCF... so my points are directed to Audi and the author of that piece and not you...:-)

Interview: Audi of America GM of Product Planning Filip Brabec Explains Audi's New 3G MMI


I’m a few minutes early for my meeting at the bar of the hotel in the center of Valencia Spain that Audi has commandeered for its launch of the new Q5. No matter, Filip Brabec is already there and already waiting. As I’ve come to know him, that’s the nature of Brabec. His very appearance is always stylish and consistent – never-wrinkled shirt, tailored suit, the Breitling Navitimer… this might be his casual day - after all, he’s in a courtyard bar in a hotel in sunny Valencia.

It’s this eye-for-detail approach to everything from cufflink to wheel and option package choices on the latest Audi offerings that Filip does with equal aplomb which probably explains his quick rise in the ranks of Audi of America. Czech-born, Brabec began his career at Audi’s American outpost, spending a year and a half in Ingolstadt where he worked heavily on the current A8 and Q7 – tailoring them for the American market and working closely with Audi AG executives like Martin Winterkorn and Michael Dick.

In a recent reshuffling of the hierarchy since Audi of America’s recent move to Herndon, Brabec has taken over the reigns as the General Manager of Product Planning - now reporting to Audi’s Marketing boss Scott Keogh.

This is a role Brabec seems born for, and he’s eager to get started with a signature of his own. We’d love to hit him on a whole range of subjects, but today we’re here to focus on just one: the new third generation Multimedia Interface (3G MMI).

Brabec promises more time in the future, even to field questions submitted by our readers. There’s more on that at the forum link below. For now, Filip’s going on the record and in-depth on just what Audi is planning in regards to infotainment.




Fourtitude: Will you walk us through the basic changes between the second generation to the third generation of MMI?

Filip Brabec: The biggest revolution probably happened in the navigation portion of the system - the fact that you now have a hard drive. It is a 40 GB hard drive, part of which is used for the navigation data. The navigation data is also much more extended so we have many more points of interest. We also have better categorizations of the points of interest than we had before so now you can look for coffee shops separate from restaurants.

4T: Now that it is hard drive based. Is that something that can be updated?

Brabec: Yes. We are definitely going to have an update possibility. It is likely to result through a dealer. We don’t believe that it is ready for a consumer-type of update but it is definitely okay for a dealer update. So that is also part of the advantage of having a hard drive.

The second major change is the screen itself and the graphics delivered. We are the first ones to use an automotive grade NVIDIA chip for graphics processing which makes it a lot faster. We use this for the graphics quality and the processing speed of the zoom-in and zoom-out functionality so you have a true 3-D topographic map of the whole US and the buildings in the cities where available.

The 3D map also works together with the traffic because you do not want to keep flipping back and forth if you have traffic. The traffic manifests itself in two ways. One is a green, yellow or red display along all major highways. You will have a warning of slow moving traffic, fast moving traffic type of thing, similar to what you see on traffic.com.

Then you have incident information, meaning you have display of the incidents on the map. You also have them displayed along your route. They are differentiated whether they are on your route or not and you also have an "info button". Now your "info button" is a "traffic button". When you push it, it will display the incidents. The system differentiates between incidents that are along the route and the ones that are not. Then you can scroll through the incidents and click on any of them, to get more detail. This traffic data is fed through Sirius.

The third big change then comes in the voice recognition ability, which is vastly improved. You can enter destination now via voice recognition, you start by entering the country or city and go from there. You can now also search POI’s via voice rec. On top of that, the driver can now navigate to a stored name from phone book, such as George Achorn – so you can “navigate to George Achorn”. You no longer have to specially store such voice tag, you just do it.




Fourtitude: If you are going to give a voice command, is there any trigger phrase that you must say for it to recognize that you are going to give a voice command?

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