Autoblog

How's this - you pay a nearly ten percent premium to get a factory navigation system in your new whatever, and when it's replacement time, that very same nav system will cost you again, whacking 1% off the car's resale price. It makes perfect sense if you try to use some of the integrated nav setups in one- or two-year old used cars out there. Not only did they cost a fortune, they're not always terribly user friendly, and honestly, how often do most drivers need a nav system? Some at Autoblog love them in our review vehicles, but going the same route every day makes it virtually impossible to get lost. For people who travel a lot to areas they've never scouted, there's value in nav, but when you can get an aftermarket unit for far less, integrated nav starts to take on a pallid appearance.

Automakers are starting to get hip to this fact. Hyundai, while they're offering integrated nav on the Veracruz, sees no problem selling Garmin aftermarket units right off the showroom floor. The portables are a fast growing segment as consumers realize the value of third-party, portable nav systems. Portable navs are less expensive, offer features that cost a lot more on factory systems, and are upgraded far more regularly. For $1,000, you can get a system that offers real time traffic and weather data, works with bluetooth phones, and can be even more functional with the addition of optional software cards.

Not only are the aftermarket units cheaper, they're portable, so you can use them in whatever car you please. Of course, luxury buyers being who they are, there's a certain need to show off that a factory navigation system fulills, but puffery is costly. The quick path to obsolescence that all in-car electronics take means that very in short order, you've got an expensive, unfriendly, limited hunk of LCD-interfaced crap in your dash.

[Source USAToday via Kicking Tires]

There are many gestures we make while driving that are completely wasted. We flick off the guy who cuts us off and nothing happens (unless he stops to get out of his car and express his point of view with fisticuffs). In the future, we may be gesturing up a storm inside our cars instead of pushing buttons on the dash with our fingertips. Carl Pickering of the Jaguar and Land Rover Technical Research Center wrote a recent article that details how many OEMs, Tier-1 suppliers and aftermarket companies are hard at work on gesture recognition technologies that would allow us to control our vehicle systems with a flick of the wrist or a flip of the bird. While most systems are employing camera-based systems that use image recognition software, Pickering and his team weren't satisfied with that technology's inability to adapt to various lighting conditions and backgrounds and working in real time. Instead, he and his team are working on a sensor-based system that uses low-frequency electric fields through which a driver would pass his hand. Still other companies are trying infrared LEDs, holographic projections with air curtains, and even more exotic technologies to forever alter the way we crank up our stereos. One thing's for certain, according to Pickering, which is that non-contact gesture recognition systems are on their way, and he thinks they'll be widespread by the year 2020.

[Source: Auto Industry via Wired]