DREAM MACHINES
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"Technology will be able to accommodate what human beings and their checkbooks will accommodate," says Cole. "When you buy the car, you'll get a choice of something like 75 different configurations." If that seems a little overwhelming, let's try one very
simple driver's-side choice. Do you want to spend your drive time barking out orders to a trusty computer friend or chatting with a real human being? The question represents two very different approaches being put forward right now: one in the Clarion Au
toPC and Ford Visteon voice-recognition technologies; the other in push-button customer service, such as GM's OnStar. Which one you prefer may make all the difference to the fledgling auto Internet industry. If you opt for the AutoPC, you control a whole
array of cool functions-from the "climate" within the car to the destinations outside it, not to mention e-mail retrieval-with short, satisfying commands. Better yet, you get to give your computer a name to recognize itself by. "Jeeves," you might say, "t
emperature 72*, volume high, and find me a place to eat." Your first two orders are taken care of instantly; your third takes a little while before a disembodied monotone voice responds with a list of locations and directions. With OnStar, on the other ha
nd, you do nothing more complex than press a button next to the light switch that sends packets of information about your car's status and location to a customer rep. The two of you follow up with a regular human conversation about getting there from here
, getting food or fuel help. Tough choice-but could it be that women drivers will be more comfortable with a real rapport, while male egos will be less bruised by the AutoPC? "For some guys," says Rob Enderle, vice president of the Giga Information Group,
"asking a computer for directions is certainly less intimidating than asking a real person."
In any case, both technologies are in their infancy. OnStar sends and receives packets at a painfully slow 9,600 baud right now, which means that by the time the customer rep gets your location, you're another mile or so down the road. Voice recognition,
meanwhile, still gets it wrong at least 5% of the time. (At a recent auto-show demo, a Ford with the Visteon system mistakenly interpreted "mobile office" as "child locks off.") Even Microsoft, which wrote the AutoPC software, notes that the stereo-size b
ox has limited appeal at the moment. "Having a computer in the car is not the first thing people think of," says Phil Holden, a manager at Microsoft's information-appliance division. "Clearly, this is a product that appeals to the high-end audience, the i
nformation conscious." But fewer than a million AutoPC units are expected to fly off store shelves over the next year, which is hardly a great deal of market penetration.
Still, if the AutoPC can handle all its current responsibilities on a meager 16 MB of combined RAM and ROM (reading e-mail comes with an add-on to be released later this year), it's doing well for a first-generation processor. Think of it as the Apple II
of in-car computing; then imagine what might happen when it transmogrifies into a Macintosh. "There's no reason why it couldn't receive information from the engine and then take action," suggests Holden. Says Enderle: "The end result isn't so much giving
you information; it's making choices for you." If all this sounds as if you are about to be sidelined in the act of driving your car, well, you are. As HAL might have put it, human error is responsible for just about every auto accident; auto accidents ar
e the No. 1 reason for congestion; and congestion leads to $100 billion in lost productivity every year, according to the Intelligent Transportation Society. It just doesn't make sense to allow humans as much responsibility at the wheel on our ever more c
rowded future highways as they have now.
If GPS navigation systems such as NavTech become standard (and market watchers Dataquest expects 10 million units to be sold by the year 2000), experts believe they will ask you where you want to go and tell the car how to get there. Throw in cruise contr
ol and obstacle detection -- a form of low-altitude radar or laser device that may one day be linked directly to the brakes -- and your duties come down to steering and selecting the music. Then again, after a hard day at the office, who's going to mind t
hat? The fact that 79% of 1998 models came with cruise control as an option suggests that most of us like to let the machine take the strain now and again. Why not go all the way?
