CTIA: Pimp my infotainment system, courtesy of Cadillac

SAN DIEGO--General Motors is launching the Cadillac of in-vehicle infotainment systems in—what else?—the Cadillac.

Cadillac vice president Don Butler unveiled at CTIA Enterprise & Applications today the GM division’s new luxury connected car platform, Cue, which incorporates many of the same options available through in-vehicle platforms such as Ford’s Sync (CP: Ford details the connected car), but pimped out to a level of sophistication and style commensurate with the Cadillac brand.

The user interface is designed with the same app iconography common in smartphones, intended to make drivers immediately comfortable with its operation. But Butler said Cadillac isn’t trying merely to replicate the smartphone and tablet inside the vehicle but create a user interface specifically for the unique situation of driving. Butler said that Cadillac was very conscious of the problem of drivers being distracted from the road by the interface, so it designed the system to keep the driver’s attention focused on the road as much as possible.

The sophisticated interface bridges the dashboard console and instrument displays, allowing drivers to move applications like vehicle nav directions or music programs from the center console to directly within the drivers line of sight. The console touch screen is not only large and bright, but has multiple levels of haptic-feedback capabilities allowing a driver to navigate through the system by touch alone. The console grays out certain functions are enhances other icons depending on whether the vehicle is in motion or specific applications are in use, reducing the clutter on the screen and making critical functions easier to spot.

But the biggest hands-free feature is the sophisticated voice recognition technology supplied by Nuance Communications. While voice recognition is becoming common in newer vehicles, most systems use a basic form of recognition requiring drivers to repeat specific commands. Cadillac is using the full capabilities of Nuance’s natural language processing software, which allows the driver to effectively have a one-way conservation with the vehicle. Text-to-speech technology is also part of the package, allowing the car to read SMS messages to the driver.

While Cue will synchronize will smartphones, tablets, digital music players and other devices through Bluetooth and USB, it’s unclear whether it will go beyond mere file sharing to making a firm handshake with the mobile device. Like Ford’s Sync, Cue will support third-party applications like Pandora and Stitcher, and its Linux-based operating system and triple ARM 11 core leave the door open for much more powerful applications than supported by Sync.

But Ford’s less brawny design was intentional. It intends for customers own smartphones to be the brains behind many of Sync’s capabilities. Applications used in Sync are intended to be extensions of the apps running in customers’ smartphones, giving partner developers like Pandora the ability to tap into Sync’s voice recognition APIs. Ford’s logic is simple: customers trade out their smartphones once every two years but the keep their cars far longer. Given the frantic pace of innovation in mobile, embedded connected car technologies soon become obsolete.

Cadillac is taking the opposite approach. While Cue can communicate and share information with smartphones and tablets, the applications themselves are purpose-built for its platform rather than on the customer’s device. Cadillac is future-proofing Cue to a certain extent by embedding very powerful hardware into the platform and updating the OS for free over the life of the vehicle.

It’s also unclear whether Cadillac plans to use the connectivity of the smartphone to deliver the car’s Internet connection or will rely on its own embedded radios and carrier contracts. Going the latter route would require the driver to maintain a separate mobile data contract for the vehicle, a considerable cost, but one probably not too unreasonable if you can afford to buy a Cadillac.

Cure will debut in 2012 in three Cadillac models: the XTS, SRX and ATS.