[telecom] The Wired Car

Jan 25, 2012 4 Replies
[telecom]  The Wired Car open original image

The Wired Car



On Point with Tom Ashbrook January 12, 2012



Detroit wants to turn your car into a rolling internet connection. We'll look at cars as the web on wheels.



You may think your car has enough bells and whistles. Detroit and the rest of the auto-making world do not. The Detroit Auto Show this week is brimming with roll-outs and announcements and hints of a super high tech future for cars.



Cars that are one with the Internet and GPS and your home computer and the e-cosmos in the cloud. Cars that watch the road, watch you, watch your Facebook page, your heart rate, your smart phone. Cars that watch each other, like a flock of birds.



This hour, On Point: Ready or not, cars that are the "web on wheels," and more.


-Tom Ashbrook



Guests



Michelle Krebs, senior analyst at Edmunds.com.



Hiawatha Bray, tech reporter and columnist for the Boston Globe.



Doug Newcomb, senior editor of the Technology section at Edmunds.com.



Jim Buczkowski, director of Research and Advanced Engineering at Ford Motor Company.


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Podcast:
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***** Moderator's Note *****

My car doesn't have "enough bells and whistles": it has too many! Like almost everyone else in the world, I drive a rubber-tired, gasoline-powered vehicle that is functionally identical to a Model T Ford, and that's just plain wrong.



I don't need an "interconnected" car: I need a vehicle that gets sixty MPG, and that leaves off bells and whistles in favor of basic reliability, economy, and maintainability.



Bill Horne Moderator



Per Monty Solomon:

... Cars with dashboards that you watch instead of driving....

Sounds like it's gonna get even worse than it is now.

Laugh but I've had the opportunity to drive a 2011 Ford Focus. That one has more electronic gadgetry than I've seen on most cars.

Here's a short little video I shot of one:

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See the pretty glass? And the buttons everywhere? I like that I can control the radio from the steering wheel, that is nice. But if you're going to go glass do the whole dash, not just a little window.

..........

(Possible future conversation in a garage near you):

"There's your problem sir, you have an IPv4 Engine and an IPv6 Steering Wheel that just downloaded the latest security update and made it incompatible, that's why it won't go - you need a hardware upgrade because they don't support that old CPU any more....."

-- Regards, David.

David Clayton Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Knowledge is a measure of how many answers you have, intelligence is a measure of how many questions you have.

Definitely. Tesla is leading the pack with its new distracted-driver deathmobiles as this article and picture essay illustrate:

The Almanac is the local paper where Tesla is headquartered in California:

Click for all 4 pictures at the above URL, especially the one of the Stanford U. executive director for the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford playing games (or something) from the driver's seat using a console LCD larger than my home office's LCD for my computers.

The photo essay here reveals more distracted driving scenarios:

My take on the above? Absolute insanity given cellphone-using drivers have already been shown to be more hazardous on the roads than drunk drivers.

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