Gear Shift
When Gadgets Go on the Road, the Car and the Family Might Not Keep Up

location based services

When I was a youngster, I wondered why the glove compartment in our family car was called the glove compartment. Not once did I see a glove in it.
Today's kids may wonder why the cigarette lighter socket in the car is called the cigarette lighter socket, as it now functions primarily as a socket for electronic gadgets. For some of us, a single socket is no longer sufficient, as I discovered on a recent family road trip to and from the beach at Emerald Isle, N.C. I needed a six-foot extension cord with a four-socket adapter, so many gadgets did we carry in our car.

Nearly all major vehicle manufacturers today offer integrated telematics -- combining telecommunications and entertainment electronics -- for their cars and trucks. Those systems tend to be sold as optional equipment on mainstream vehicles, such as mid-size family sedans. But more of them are...

There was the Nuvi navigator and digital entertainment system mounted by suction cup on my windshield. There were two iPods, accompanied by a device that charges the iPod and emits an FM signal simultaneously so you can hear the iPod on the car radio.
Wedged into an unoccupied pop-open drawer on my dash was a satellite radio offering more than 200 channels. My Razr cellphone sat in a cup holder along with a Bluetooth earpiece. My Starcom PDA, a pocket-size laptop with a slide-out keyboard, was tucked into the map compartment on the driver's side. In the back were a laptop, a DVD player, my daughter's cellphone, two digital still cameras and a digital camcorder.

The modern techmobile is revolutionizing driving and the nuclear family, about which more later.
It's also making a mess of my car, which, like others driven by early adopters (meaning those of us obsessed with new gadgets), now resembles my desk in its unsightly tangle of cords. It's not my fault. The problem is innovation lag.

In the case of the automobile, it occurs because the design of the basic car is unable to keep pace with the innovation of peripheral gadgets. Just after most new cars were factory-fitted with tape players, for example, CDs got popular, requiring drivers to attach portable CD players to cassette adapters. Not long after the car manufacturers installed CD players in dashboards, MP3 players, such as the iPod, came on the scene, requiring yet another round of awkward retrofitting.

I thought my car, a 2003 Mercedes, was pretty modern with all its factory-fitted gadgets.
The best one is a Tele Aid telematics system, a satellite-linked SOS/traffic information/concierge service (like the better-known OnStar) that knows where your car is at all times and can find you a motel or a restaurant and make the reservations. On Tele Aid, you can get a human being. I'm not used to that anymore. It's a shock to discover a living being, particularly one who sounds like Truman Capote, saying: "Good Morning. Is this Fred Barbash, and are you at the intersection of Interstate 95 and Route 58 in North Carolina? How can I help you?"

I prefer the voice-activated menu on Tele Aid. Say "traffic," and you get a traffic report. Say "radius traffic," and you get a traffic report for a five-mile radius around your car, assuming you are somewhere that's monitored. For some reason, I always feel I must shout, the way my grandfather shouted when making a long-distance call.
"RADIUS TRAFFIC!" I shout.
"OKAY," says Tele Aid.