Digital highway

For some people, driving is an escape from the urgency and bustle of everyday life. The cabin becomes a retreat in which to just listen to music and watch the road slip by.

Others like to stay connected. The thought of being cut off from their electronic lifelines fills them with dread.

So familiar functions such as USB, iPod, iPhone and MP3 player integration and even dashboards that take SIM cards have been joined by office functions, with email access, calendars and new media such as Facebook, Twitter and podcasts.

BMW’s ConnectedDrive is leading the way here. It can detect if the driver is running late for a meeting by checking the calendar on the smartphone and the time and destination entered into the navigation system.

The car can then compose and send an email telling the other people due to attend the meeting that the driver will be late.

Text-based content, such as emails, calendar entries or tweets are read out via the text-to-speech function and the driver can dictate a response without looking away from the road.

Versions of this last feature are also being developed in America by Ford, General Motors and Toyota.

Touch screens are almost becoming standard but Audi, which doesn’t use this feature, instead has a touch pad that recognises hand writing to activate the navigation system.

Cars are also entertainment centres. With the advent of digital broadcasting, expect more models to offer TV but digital radio has been more problematic.

Digital radios using the DAB+ standard that Australia, but few other countries, has adopted, is only just being offered as high-priced options by two companies, BMW and Audi.

The in-dash screens, too, are changing fast. BMW has a split screen so you can have two functions running at the same time, but the top of this particular digital Christmas tree is the parallax spilt screen offered by Jaguar-Range Rover. With this system, the passenger can watch a movie using wireless headphones while the driver can follow the navigation map – both on the same screen at the same time.

These things are all available now, but in a few years expect controls based on gestures, 3D projections and for cars to be able to communicate with each other and with roadside infrastructure.

BRW

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