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Auto blog

Google poised to release Apple CarPlay rival this month

Apple and Google. They're the Michigan and Ohio State of the tech world. They're New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, Real Madrid and Barcelona, or whatever sports-based rivalry you want to cook up. Bottom line, if one company expands into a segment, it's only a matter of time before the other follows suit. And now, that rivalry is about to carry over to your car's dashboard.
Unnamed sources are reporting to Automotive News that Google will unveil its very own challenger to Apple's new CarPlay in-car operating system later this month at the Mountain View, CA company's annual developer conference. The system, allegedly called Google Auto Link, will be the first product to come from the Open Automotive Alliance, a partnership between Google, General Motors, Hyundai, Audi, Honda and hardware manufacturer NVIDIA.
The official announcement is expected to be made on either June 25 or 26, at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. Expect to hear a lot more about Google Auto Link then.

Honda, Hyundai and Kia get best word-of-mouth recommendations in US

Forget advertising, incentives and, yes, even our excellently crafted vehicle reviews, sometimes the best way for automakers to sell cars is still good ol' fashioned word of mouth. In an attempt to measure this "word of mouth" power, The Boston Consulting Group, a management consulting firm, has created a new study called the Brand Advocacy Index (BAI). The index takes a look at how various industries perform from person to person. Those industries include automotive, smartphones, grocery, mobile telecommunications and banking.
The study polled more than 32,000 individuals across Europe and in the US to come up with the top 55 brands in these various industries. On the automotive side of things, the top brands in the US were Honda, Hyundai and Kia, all tied at 63 percent. On a global scale, Volkswagen and Toyota scored the highest with a 65-percent BAI rating (both in France). The average BAI for auto industry players tallied 50 percent.
As for companies in other industries, Apple's iPhone was the index's top-rated smartphone, Trader Joe's was the highest recommended grocery store, Virgin was sat atop the mobile telecom industry and USAA was the top retail bank. Scroll down for the full press release on the new study.

Honda shows us 'The Challenging Spirit of Honda'... in Japanese

Just as Porsche has done with its lengthy Le Mans gear-up, Honda is is laying the table for its Formula One return more than a year before we'll actually see it on track. We've heard what it's 2015 engine will sound like, reminisced with the 1988 McLaren Honda MP4/4 and the 1964 Honda RA271 and spoken to the company's CEO about what F1 involvement could do for its production car engines.
The automaker has now released a video called The Challenging Spirit of Honda that traces the development of its in-house F1 program and the jump from motorcycles to the first RA270 F1 chassis in 1962, to the RA272 chassis that won the 1965 Grand Prix. The only catch: the video is in Japanese. However, you can read about the winning car in English, and the video ends with another sound check of the 2015 power unit. That is a universal language, and you'll find it being spoken below.