I'm not a lawyer but sat in many of the internal meetings. From what I understand, anyone who signs up to work with Ford Motor also signs a legal agreement saying you take on legal responsibility for your actions....

As an example, Ford is also a big Linux shop but they do not use any old Linux distro. They have partnered with Novell (SUSE Linux) who indemnifies them from all open source code found in the SUSE distribution.

When I was on Ford SYNC, no Google code ran on the module. The feature they are talking about is called Send To Sync and it's a web service where the SYNC module can receive a map planned on Google Maps. The mapping software in Ford SYNC is simply given the data output in the form of lat/long info.