Kitt out your car

Posted at: Wednesday 27th October 2004 by Alex Watson

From 'Knight Rider' to 'Back to the Future', our generation has often dreamed about talking cars packed with electronic gadgetry, which is why Alex Watson went for a drive with Steve Goodman, who has built an in-car-PC

Steve Goodman's car is an 800MHz Ford Focus with 256MB of RAM and a 20GB hard disk. It's driven by a dashboard-mounted touch-screen, comes with satellite navigation, and can provide current traffic and speed camera information. It also has a library of digital music and movies, a wireless LAN connection, integration with Steve's Bluetooth phone, and he plans to add external video cameras and satellite tracking in case of theft too.

It's also a fully functioning 1.8 litre engine hatchback that Steve drives to work down the M6 every day.

While Steve's Focus might sound like it's bristling with technology and has an interior dripping with wires, it's surprisingly plain at first sight. Having grown up with the sparkling looks of Doc Brown's time-travelling DeLorean and Michael Knight's crime-foiling KITT, you expect to sit in the cabin and be surrounded by banks of blinking lights, flip switches and flux-capacitors. However, only the 7in TFT sitting innocuously next to its steering wheel indicates that the car is anything other than normal.

As we pull out and start driving through central London's labyrinthine streets, the navigation system starts reading directions out in a robotic voice, but it's nowhere near as chatty or sarcastic as KITT. MP3s play in the background and the map updates our progress on the screen; car computing feels obvious and even ordinary. However, this normality is a testament both to Steve's neat installation and the advances in car computing over the past couple of years. Thanks to increasingly available hardware and dedicated programmers writing the applications that link it together, in-car computing is leaving its homebrewed, jury-rigged origins behind very quickly. But while the big car manufacturers are trying to keep pace with the growing appetite for high-tech cars, at the moment it's the enthusiasts who really define the possibilities.

WHY WOULD YOU PUT A COMPUTER IN A CAR?
If you think about where most people spend their time sitting down, it's clear that a lot of persuasion is needed to keep people in one place, whether it's in the form of a drink in the pub or a TV in the lounge. Remaining immobile without something to occupy or distract us is not an experience we endure willingly, and car journeys - especially long, boring trips up the motorway - can be incredibly tedious. It's only natural that we should want as much in-car entertainment as possible, and a mobile library of digital music and video is one of the most obvious reasons for installing an in-car computer system.

This is why many car manufacturers, such as BMW and Ford, have begun offering more computerised and complex in-car entertainment systems, and after-market car stereo manufacturers are also releasing more computer-friendly products. These include Pioneer's DEH-P9600MP CD system, which offers MP3 and WMA playback, and Kenwood's Music Keg, which has a hard drive in a cartridge for digital audio storage. However, compared with a fully-fledged PC, these stereos are about as advanced and expressive as semaphore. There's no chance of adding OGG Vorbis, lossless CODEC playback, or DVD and gaming abilities. Nor is it possible to exceed the storage limits of a single CD, and the customisation options are limited too.