Chicago — Ford Motor and Toyota Motor have formed a consortium with four medium-size vehicle makers to speed up the development of automotive industry standards for in-vehicle apps, a step towards preventing Apple and Google from controlling how drivers connect smartphones to their cars and trucks. Ford and Toyota said Mazda Motor, PSA, Fuji Heavy Industries and Suzuki Motor had joined their SmartDeviceLink Consortium. The nonprofit group’s goal was to promote more choice in how smartphones were connected to in-vehicle technologies such as dashboard displays and voice recognition, and in other programming, Ford and Toyota said in a statement on Wednesday. Toyota has resisted offering Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto in its vehicles, citing concern that doing so would diminish safety and security. Ford offers them on all its 2017 models but still wants an open-source software platform that all app developers can use as an alternative to those of Google and Apple. Toyota agre...
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