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Tricked-Out Cars Trickling Down
Good sends us to an IBTimes article on the expanding trend for more options for electronic gadgetry — telematics — in cars. Manufacturers are including more high-tech options in more models, including low-end models, as component prices drop and as the car makers attempt to sell to a demographic that has grown up surrounded by personal electronics. According to a telematics analyst, Bluetooth hands-free modules for cell phones will be available on more than a third of car models sold in the US in 2007, and auxiliary jacks for iPods in nearly half. From the article: "One of the industry's more advanced systems will be Ford's Sync, which connects digital music players to the car's voice-control communications system and reads aloud cell-phone text messages and has 20 preset text-message responses... The flash memory-based system, controlled through voice commands and buttons on the steering wheel, is based on a Microsoft Corp. operating system for cars."
Back in the early 1970s my first car had large knobs and levers designed to be easily operated by someone wearing thick winter gloves without taking their eyes off the road. By comparison, many of the electronic gadgets in modern cars seem to require taking my eyes off of the road, at least briefly, while thinking about some complicated task. All the unnecessary complexity can also be a problem when I occasionally fly somewhere and have to rent a car. There is now too much of a learning curve for all the fancy electronic gadgets to make renting a car an enjoyable experience. At home I happily drive an old early 1990's full sized pickup which does not have power locks, power windows or automatic anything. I don't even mind using keys and almost always easily get the key in the keyhole in the first fraction of a second. For me, an old fashioned key is just as fast as a remote controlled door lock.
I am not totally anti-electronics, I have built several of my own computers and installed both Windows and Linux on them. I also have a general class ham radio license. When backpacking or hiking, I occasionally even navigate to remote places with a GPS unit and a topo map. I just do not want to have all the unnecessary complexity in my truck or car. For me simpler is better.
I also get a strange satisfaction in the fact that overly gadget dependant GPS using people who visit me soon discover that their GPS units are wrong about where I live. They punch in my address and are either told that there is no such place or they are sent to a spot in the middle of an intersection about 1,000 feet or so south of where I actually live. By now you have probably guessed that I am a 50+ years old person who is not part of the generation who likes that kind of stuff.