The article must be misleading. Android would never have the latency or reliability to run things like traction control and fuel management. The engineers at auto companies are well aware of this, but perhaps the author of the article is not.
Contrary to popular belief most managers in industry are not 100% clueless. No manager in a car company would be so incompetent that they would off-load time critical functions to a phone. My money would be on incompetence of the writer long before I'd suspect the people on the other side of the interview.
I've been through a couple of those myself, it is always very interesting to see how your words come out once they've been interpreted by someone who is essentially clueless but well-meaning and trying to understand something that goes above their normal day-to-day level of complexity. And that's the good case, the one where they don't have an agenda to push.
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Well, you do know that the newspaper isn't written by a single person, but by a large team, so I guess the hope is that the journalists who wrote articles about far-off Palestine were more competent than the journalist trying to write an article about physics.
