Imagine for a second that the world is one big Saturn commercial and all cars are just cardboard boxes on wheels. A quartet of silver rings on the grille is no more significant than a single blue oval. All driver's seats, engines, and chassis are created equal. Now imagine your refrigerator box could be outfitted with any multimedia interface currently available in any vehicle. Which would you choose?
We sat our iPods and Bluetooth phones down for a little chit-chat and asked them what system charged their batteries more than any other, and they agreed that Audi's MMI (Multi Media Interface) with its new music interface option is currently one of the best ways to integrate external toys right into the car, and that Ford's Microsoft-developed Sync system is MMI's fiercest competitor. We'll ask you to overlook the $44,000 price gap between our two featured cars, the 2008 Ford Focus and the 2008 Audi A6 Avant, and concentrate only on their media interfaces instead. Remember: cardboard boxes.
If comparisons were won on hype alone, Sync would have this one in the bag. Everyone wants to jump in the Focus, press the button, and scream "Play Duran Duran!" to the poor lady on the loudspeaker. "Dude, we don't have any Duran Duran on our iPods," we explain to an overly excited friend. That means nothing to him. He screams it again, expecting D.J. Bill Gates to stream "Hungry Like the Wolf" into the dashboard from some omnipotent Microsoft satellite in outer space. (He'd probably find a way to fry our Apple mp3 player while he was at it.) Our lack of '80s-greaties aside, Sync is about as easy to use as the TV commercials suggest.
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