Wired ride

There are no flying cars here in yesterday’s future, but drivers this decade are in for a wired ride as new technologies revolutionize the driving experience.

Today’s driver can opt to buy or upgrade a vehicle with intelligent tools that make car travel safer, more informed, and even more productive and fun for both the driver and passengers. My trip into this strange new world started as I drove eastbound in heavy traffic on Toronto’s Highway 401 in terrible snowy weather.

A soft chime came from the dashboard. The car’s computer reported “low fuel warning”. Ignore this alert at your peril: you could be left stranded in the middle of fast traffic.

On this evening, I had technology on my side and several new features built into the 2001 Cadillac DeVille would give me the confidence to complete the trip safely and with peace of mind.

I pushed the OnStar button on the rear-view mirror. OnStar is a cellular-phone-based system that puts the driver in touch with a live operator who provides services similar to a concierge at a hotel.

The operator can give the driver directions. They can book tickets to events and make reservations at restaurants. They can help assist the driver with vehicle problems. For example, if the car breaks down, they can remotely request data from the car and help diagnose problems. In the event of an accident, they determine if airbags have deployed and will dispatch emergency assistance if necessary. In the case of a breakdown, they can also guide a roadside assistance response vehicle to the car’s location. OnStar operators can also, on request, unlock a car remotely. “This is OnStar, how can I help you, Mr. TechnologyTips,” said the voice on the car’s speakers. (“TechnologyTips” is a moniker that I use for one of the columns I write. Unlike the OnStar TV commercials, which address the caped crusader simply as “Batman,” OnStar couldn’t address me without the “Mr.”) “Hi,” I said. “I have a bit of a problem. I am running very low on gas.” “You’re in a white 2001 Cadillac DeVille heading eastbound on Highway 401 in Whitby?” came the voice.

The operator was now tracking me on a map on his screen somewhere in Michigan, thanks to a built-in Global Positioning System, which uses satellites to determine a car’s geographical position.

The operator offered directions to a nearby gas station. That was an option, but it occurred to me that the car’s computer had all kinds of driver assisting diagnostics. One of the scrolling displays showed an entry that said “88 km range”.

It looked like an estimate of the distance I could travel on the remaining gas in the tank. “That’s correct,” said the operator. “You have approximately 80 km to be safe before you run out of gas.”

It was an estimate based on the speed I was at, but now with less than 20 km to go, it was more than enough.

I asked the operator if he could call ahead to tell the person I was meeting that I would be late. Instead, he patched me into her voice mail. As a general rule, OnStar advisors do not patch subscribers through to third parties, but a GM spokesperson said it’s done in special circumstances.

Personal calling, however, is now available in Canada, and the gear to make it happen has been installed on vehicles since 2001 models. It is already available to subscribers in parts of the U.S. As of 2002, OnStar was available on 33 GM models that included some Acura and Lexus cars. (2006 update: GM says that, by 2007, it will install OnStar in all new GM vehicles.)

ATX Technologies, an Irving, Texas-based company, provides a similar service. Each car company markets the ATX service using their own brands. For example, Ford calls its system RESCU, while Mercedes Benz’s service is called TeleAid. In Jaguar vehicles, it is called Assist. These services are not free to drivers. Subscribers must pay annual fees, ranging in 2002 from about $300 to $600 (by 2006, it was $200-$400 US).
These telematics systems are first-generation and often imperfect. On one occasion, when I asked OnStar for directions to a restaurant in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga the operator couldn’t find it in her database. She suggested two similarly named restaurants in the area. Then she found a third in Niagara Falls, which was an hour’s drive away. The operator asked: “Is that close to where you are?”

GM acknowledges the need for operators that are more familiar with Canadian roads. There is a dedicated OnStar operation for French Quebec, and GM says an English Canadian office is being considered.

When asked for directions to an on-ramp, another operator said she couldn’t find Highway 401, a major highway in Toronto, on her map. In another query, the operator said the address in Mississauga I had requested was in an unnavigable area, even though the road had been there for years.

GM recognizes the shortcomings and says that often they have to work with out-of-date maps, but it promises that databases are improving daily. In the next year or so, new services will be integrated to reduce the participation of a live advisor.

The driver will be able to talk directly to a computer, which will marry live traffic information with navigation so that a driver requesting a route will be alerted to and guided around bottlenecks in traffic.

Voice-driven applications will also bring information access services such as stock quotes, weather, and news into the car.

Telematic computers make these features possible. Motorola is one of the companies building the gear. They’ve developed a system called iRadio. It’s an evolving technology, so elements of the system – such as e-mail, news, sports, and weather – have started appearing on 2002 model year vehicles.

Telematics’ real utility became apparent when a robust wireless data connection comes to vehicles. Car owners had to wait until 2003 or 2004 for that because network operators had to upgrade their networks to handle the heavy-duty data traffic. For the driver who couldn’t wait for advanced telematics, computer-based navigation systems used CD-ROMs as a source of map data.

VDO Dayton, for example, provides a series of GPS-enabled systems that include a small dash-mounted monitor and a remote control. Either a stationary driver or a passenger – when the car is moving – operates these.

Maps are loaded in to the system via a CD-ROM drive.

I tested a system on the BMW 740IA and it is certainly impressive. The driver inputs an address via a scroll-and-click button that accesses street names either via a menu or one letter at a time. Once the destination is entered, the system speaks directions on the way. It’s not foolproof. At one point, it recommended an illegal left turn, but it did adjust the route when I failed to make the turn. In another instance, a major cross street was missing from the database. Still, the system comes highly recommended if you can afford the price tag. Various models are available in the $3,000 to $4,000 range. BMW offers the navigation system as an option on most of their cars. It is standard on the BMW 750 and Z8. A number of luxury car brands, such as Acura, Mercedes Benz, Jaguar, and Lexus, offer similar navigation systems on their cars. Alpine and Pioneer also offer these systems to the aftermarket. Of course, car gadgets are not only about getting from A to B. They are also about the experience on the way.

One of the major trends the car audio equipment makers are embracing is the ability for car stereos to play MP3 digital music files.

“The first generation car audio devices integrating MP3 technology are MP3 CD players,” said Shawn Conahan, vice-president and head of MP3 Mobile at MP3.com.

This kind of device simply reads traditional CDs and CDs created on a computer with MP3 files on them.

“These devices will satisfy the market for a long time because the form factor is familiar,” said Conahan. “A user can fit over 10 hours of music on a single CD, the physical media itself is cheap and there is no significant increase in cost for the device.”

Visteon, which makes gear for Ford vehicles, is shipping a product called the Visteon MACH MP3 Music System that was initially available via the company’s website. Aiwa and Kenwood also make in-car MP3 players. Aiwa’s CDC-MP3 costs about $450, and Kenwood’s Z919 sells for $1050.

There’s also the “hard-drive in the trunk” approach. Visteon came up with an MP3 Jukebox device. It is able to read a card that can carry up to a 1,000 songs. A home computer helps you get the music files onto the card.

The major bump in the road in MP3 players is getting the technology from the Internet or computer into the vehicle.

A company called Gocho Networks has a solution. It has a system that connects a car to the home computer network using WiFi, the new consumer-friendly name for a standard called 802.11b that moves data wirelessly at up to 11 megabits per second. Software on a PC is used to tag MP3 files. These are automatically migrated wirelessly to an 80- to 100-gigabyte hard drive in the car’s trunk. If you live in a high-rise, you can remove the hard drive and bring it into your apartment so it is in range of the wireless network.

In the car, the hard drive is connected to the car stereo. You can use a handheld computer, such as a Palm or Pocket PC, to control the device, allowing a driver to set play lists, rate songs and preferences, and buy MP3 files that they may not already own. These yet-to-be purchased songs will be downloaded if a driver has indicated that they were interested in a particular genre of music.

The hardware is expected to cost about $900 and would be installed by a car stereo technician.

Besides adapting to a new trend in music technology, MP3 makes drivers safer on the road. “They are not switching CDs in and out of the player,” said Neal Zipser, marketing manager for Detroit-based Visteon After-market Operations, “because instead of having 15 CDs in that car that contain (a total of) 100 songs, now you have one disk with 100 songs,” he said. New gadgets aren’t just affecting the driver. In-car entertainment gear is changing the passenger experience as well. Video equipment that plays movies and video games have come to the backseat.

Ford, for example, is shipping the $1,765 AudioVision Family Entertainment System as an option on the Windstar.

It includes a 6.5″ diagonal ceiling-mounted LCD monitor, similar to those that pop down from the overhead bins in jetliners. That’s hooked into a removable VCP – or video cassette player – that sits between the driver and forward passenger seat. It takes standard VHS tapes and is wired through the vehicle’s speaker system.

Systems in Canada come equipped with a Sony Playstation video game portapack and five games. The feature has yet to be adopted in the U.S.

One Sunday evening, I sat in a 2001 Windstar Sport and watched Toy Story 2 on the system. Forget drive-in theaters — the Windstar is a drive-away theatre. It’s a great way to escape a house full of people, although the neighbours will wonder why you’ve been exiled to the mini-van.

If you’re thinking that Hollywood squeal and roar in the back seat isn’t an appealing audioscape to drive to, you’ll be pleased to know that headphone jacks can be used with the system while your CDs play on the front car speakers.

“It’s so that parents don’t have to listen to Barney while they drive,” quipped Dean Stoneley, a Windstar brand manager at Ford.

One other nice feature: The passengers have access an audio volume on their console, but they can’t make it any louder than the threshold set by the driver. The system is also available as an option on the 2001 Ford Expedition, the 2001 Ford F150 SuperCrew.

Companies like Alpine and Pioneer offer similar in-car entertainment systems, both VHS and DVD units that can be installed after a vehicle has been purchased. Pioneer has a package that includes a screen and video source for about $1000.

In the future, Bluetooth wireless technology will allow fast short-range connections to download data, foregoing the need for CDs and DVDs.

Bluetooth, a technology appearing on cellular phones and computers, is designed to eliminate wires between devices. “It could act as an information pump,” said David Loose of IBM’s Auto Network Solutions Group. “So your car would download a movie as you pump your gas.”

For the mobile businessperson, it makes sense to bring a handheld device containing business data into the car.

MobileAria, a start-up owned by Delphi Automotive Systems and Palm Inc., aims to enable the driver to pair their handheld with a cellular phone on the road. In a hands-on-the-wheel, eyes-on-the-road environment, it’s not practical to get that information from a Palm in a traditional tap-and-write, stylus-driven manner.

The company offers a system that plugs a handheld computer and cellular phone into a dashboard-mounted command module called a mobile productivity center (or MPC). The system lets the driver get data from the handheld using their voice.

When the system talks back to the driver, it wirelessly transmits audio to the car radio on an unused FM frequency.

The technology gives a driver access to their personal information on the Palm as well as data on the Internet via a cellular data link. That data includes e-mail, stock quotes, news, and weather. Down the road, the features might also include wireless shopping, GPS-based navigation, stock trading, and streaming audio and video.

MobileAria services used are charged on the cell phone owner’s bill. The system was be Palm-based initially, but models that work with Pocket PCs and Symbian-based devices are now available, too.

In an informal survey of longtime drivers, most were pleased with improvements that technology has made in safety. They applauded innovations, such as airbags and anti-lock brakes, which are now standard on most vehicles.

But there are some exciting new devices showing up on higher-end cars and mini-vans this year that takes safety into a whole new realm.

Take the 2001 Cadillac DeVille, for example. It has a night vision system that uses an infrared camera to display the road ahead. The system, which comes on automatically at dusk, generates a virtual image over the end of hood of the car. When focused on the road, a driver can see it in the lower part of their peripheral vision. The $3,100 option is designed as a reference tool and is particularly effective in very dark driving environments.

It’s not too useful on a well-lit highway, but on side streets lined with snow banks, it becomes particularly efficient. The warm road appears white while the cold snow appears as ominous black outlines.

Rear collision avoidance systems are also being shipped on vehicles. They use sensors mounted on the rear bumper that can detect the proximity of an obstacle. On the 2001 Ford Windstar, DeVille, and BMW 740IA, the system emits audible beeps that get louder and more frequent as the rear bumper approaches the obstacle.

The 740IA also has sensors on the front bumper, while the Cadillac augments its system with a series of ceiling-mounted lights that come on and flash, as the car closes on the obstacle. New safety technologies won’t protect drivers from being distracted by all these new gadgets. Automakers are keenly aware of this and say they’re studying the issue.

Ford, for example, has opened a new high-tech multi-million dollar driving simulator laboratory, called VIRTTEX (VIRtual Test Track Experiment) to study driver workload and distraction issues related to new in-vehicle electronic devices.

The lab’s first study focused on the demands in-vehicle tasks place on a driver. The results of the study were made public, the company said, in hopes of achieving a scientific basis for driver-machine interface standards on which the car industry can agree.