S3's mission:

Relaunched as a digital media company, S3 is committed to creating products and partnerships that help build the digital home. Combining strong financial assets with an extensive technology portfolio, that includes the Rio family of digital audio players and the HomeFree series of home networking solutions, S3 is uniquely positioned to capitalize on high growth opportunities in the rapidly converging Internet and consumer device markets.

This seems to be a contradiction to the empeg-car, which was aimed at a small group of people. As the empeg-people are now working for s3, they will probably be spending most of their time fulfilling that basic mission; that is, designing technology which is commercially attractive(cheap) and is in reach of as much people as possible.
Another viable option is that empeg is going to be the niche product-name for the s3 high-end stuff, which I don't think personally. If it is, it probably isn't the crew designing new gadgets and stuff.
Don't take this personal guys, I wish you all the best of luck with this venture, but you will soon discover the nature of working for big corporations.
Think of the following :
- long after-hours meetings with so-called technically enclined managers, who think they have the vision of future
- Set up an iso-compliant quality system. This involves chewing out large piles of documentation of all procedures and actions ever taken to dissolve any problems.
- Work according deadlines; If the tuner-module isn't delivered in the time that was originally set, some big-time lawyer will see change to setup some large lawsuit sewing the pants off of s3(and you feeling guilty)

these are just some of the things that are going to happen, I do not think there will be much time left on giving the empeg-people the things they asked for:
- open API to the player
- Voice recognition
- Tuner module
- fast support.
- ...

Please reply if I'm totally off with this one...I

Frank van Gestel