You are totally off IMHO; as a group we are obviously under the management of the Rio group's VP of engineering, who is a thoroughly good bloke & a hacker type (building a light aircraft in his garage...!) - but we get to "own" some projects, ie the management for these projects stays here.

We get to draw on the other divisions - great hardware designers both in Germany and the US, PCB design, component sourcing, etc, which makes us a lot more productive (read: we don't spend several days just finding and ordering components to build prototypes with).

Addressing your points:

- Open API. This is just as likely to happen as it was before - ie, it depends on how much time we have free. If a compelling reason arises (eg: nav system, whatever) then it's more likely to happen.
- VR. We feel this is essential for an in-car product, and have no plans to shelve it.
- Tuner module. S3's sourcing has already found us a small number of modules - more than we could get ourselves. We're working on getting these out to the first people who are due them (ie, mk1->mk2 upgraders).
- Fast support. Whatever happened, support is likely to change; as we get bigger, with or without S3, the chances of getting people replying out of hours (etc) decrease. Nowadays, it's unusual for people to be working after 9pm - a couple of years ago we just used to work until about 3 or 4am and then sleep until midday... then again, me & mike (mostly mike ;) ) are in working to try and eradicate some USB problems users have had and it's past 9.30pm. As the empeg-car is a complex product, I would expect we'll be carrying on with the tech support for a while yet.

Hugo