Nobody, it seems, wants to just gaze at the open road anymore.
The humble motorcar has recently morphed into a digital nerve center with all manner of electronic gadgetry for navigation, communication and entertainment.
Go into electronics stores and you’re besieged with car-tech options: satellite-navigation gear, iPod-friendly audio systems, wireless cell-phone setups, back-seat DVD and video-gaming gear, satellite radio – even satellite TV.
If you have money to burn, electronics experts will even create customized car-tech systems for each of your cars.
Holy Mobile Digital Hub, Batman! What’s going on here?
“Anything that people do at home (with technology), they want to do in the car,” said Megan Pollock, a Consumer Electronics Association spokeswoman. And, she said, it’s not just younger males trying to impress their pals. It’s businesspeople and even moms.
Family affair
Tech-savvy motorists are increasingly focused on practical concerns instead of booming bass, Pollock said. They want satellite navigation for finding their way around, hands-free cell-phone systems for safer driving and back-seat video for keeping the kids quiet.
Tom Lininger, installation manager at Ultimate Electronics in Roseville, Minn., has been in the thick of car-tech trends since 1982. Lately, he said, these include laptop-computer stations for back-seat use (handy for those who work while on the go) and video cameras that throw imagery on dashboard displays (great for moms needing to watch the kids).
Lininger has worked on some pretty wacky projects. One guy wanted an Xbox video-game console installed in his Audi. The console wouldn’t fit as is, so Lininger took it apart. Its hard drive and electronic guts went under a seat, its disc drive was installed where the ashtray usually goes, and dual displays were built into the dash and center console. The Xbox was intended as an entertainment hub, too, for the driver’s digital tunes and DVD movies, he said. “He was trying to out-cool his friends.”
David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, has studied auto-gadget trends and thinks he knows what is causing such a tech push. Motorists “are trying to compensate for being bored,” he said.
The hugely popular iPod has become a car-tech favorite in recent years as hardware purveyors of all kinds have scrambled to make the iconic device part of the motoring experience.
Video is big, too. Parents have kept kids entertained for a while now with back-seat video displays hooked to DVD players or gaming consoles. Now satellite TV is an option courtesy of such companies as RaySat and KVH Industries, which have developed small receivers that pull in programming even when vehicles are barreling down the freeway.
Safety first
Car-gadget overload increasingly raises safety concerns.
In tests Strayer and others have run, drivers over 21 aren’t dangerously distracted by radios, audio books or chats with passengers. Talking on a cell phone, however, makes a driver four times as likely to crash. Text messaging is “really bad,” Strayer said, and navigation systems that require drivers to look away also are dangerous.
Sifting through the data gives Swanson reason to be hopeful. It seems that every generation, beginning with the one that used AM radios, has been fingered as most likely to suffer death by distraction. Yet the percentage of accidents caused by distracted drivers remains relatively unchanged over the decades.
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