Ford solves the urge to ping

Ford SYNC will first be available in Ireland on the B-Max towards the end of 2012

Admit it, we’ve all been there – your phone pings while you’re driving and you’re just itching to pick it up to check the text message.

In fact, 48 per cent of drivers across Europe have confessed to giving in to this urge.

Now Ford aims to put an end to end to this highly dangerous driver behaviour with the introduction later this year of its SYNC in-car connectivity system.

To be debuted in the all new B-Max, the system can read aloud incoming messages through a text-to-speech feature and allow you to verbally instruct your phone to reply to the text.

You can then select a response from a predetermined list, which include: ‘I love you’, ‘Send directions’ and ‘See u in 10min’.

The text-to-speech feature on SYNC is powered by Microsoft and retrieves messages through simple voice command from Bluetooth-connected compatible smartphones.

The SYNC system will also allow you to verbally select a response to a text

The technology will be compatible with an increasing range of smartphones and the Message Access Profile standard (MAP) for Bluetooth is already being used by Blackberry.

Ford’s chief functional engineer Christof Kellerwessel said: ‘Smartphones have so quickly become an essential part of many people’s day that it’s hard to imagine life without them. However, text messages can be a distraction for drivers, so the benefit of a system that can read messages aloud from compatible smartphones is obvious.’

More than four million Ford vehicles in the US already feature SYNC and Ford anticipates 3.5 million new vehicles in Europe will be equipped with SYNC by 2015.

The new technology will first be available in Ireland on the B-Max, which is due to launch here towards the end of the year. It will also be rolled out in the Kuga and the Focus.