Ford Motor Co. has named Doug VanDagens, 50, to head a new 40-person team that tests and develops connected-vehicle technologies as Sync and Sirius satellite radio, according to Automotive News. The company said in a statement that the team will "build on partnerships the company has established with world-class technology service providers to ensure customers have seamless access to best-in-world data and information services - affordably."

Mark Fields, Ford's president of the Americas, said in the article that those services have proven very popular with consumers. "We sell about as many vehicles with Sync as without," Fields said. For his part, VanDagens said that keeping up with all the new devices hitting the market is probably his biggest task. "We've got interactivity tests going on with all the coming devices," he said in the report. Among his goals is a protocol similar to Bluetooth, but for video, so that navigation info and other services can be beamed to the car instead of having to load them onto each vehicle.