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Cringely, Cars, and Networks
Boiled Frog writes: "Cringely's latest article talks about Telematics, the art of putting computers in cars. However, the more interesting part is near the end where he talks about mesh networks where every car would have a router in it. I could see this extending digital cell service and mobile network connectivity far into rural areas."
Cringely builds his argument for a widespread, car-based wireless network on the premise that the storage required by cars frequently disconnected from a network is an insurmountable problem, given the inability of Hard Disks Drives to survive in the hostile environment of a car. He believes that this problem will not be resolved by HDDs designed to better cope with that environment because the HDD companies can only afford to invest in research that will pay off within a year whereas the car companies plan four years ahead.
IMHO, it's a bit short-sighted to focus exclusively on HDDs; Flash memory makers are currently making great strides in producing chips that, in capacity, compete with miniture HDDs. Their primary financial motivation for this is the perceived huge market for personal MP3 players. I read one article a few months back that predicted a real head-to-head battle between Flash memory and IBM's tiny HDDs.
If we're going to be seeing Flash memory with several GBs capacity, I don't see why they shouldn't be used within cars.
Also, I don't see why the 4 year planning cycle for a new car should be such a problem; that time covers the design process for the car as a whole, no telematics system would be so intrusive as to require being part of that process from Day One. Indeed, it should be something that can be integrated within existing designs.
I'm wary of questioning Cringely's ideas because he does seem to have good sources on this but the direction he's taken that info doesn't seem to have been thought through properly.
Also, it's hard to accept his technical credibility when the software he uses for his site's forum is so damn tacky.
"Besides which, cars aren't always going to be damaging to the environment. Eventually they'll be electric."
Apparently you haven't considered the fact that the electricity has to come from *somewhere*.
There are claims that humanity's electricity consumption exceeds our ability to use only minimal-impact and renewable sources of energy. Solar systems are hugely inefficent, and there is only so much wind and hydro power that can be effectively tapped.
So, things might come full circle and your electric car would actually be powered by a dirty coal plant. Some of the first experimental cars were directly coal fired.