Electric dreams at the London Motor Show

According to Christopher Macgowan, big cheese at the UK Society of Motor Manufacturers & Traders and the bloke who’ll get it in the neck if the upcoming London Motor Show is a flop, there will be two big reasons for electric city car fans to attend the event. Apparently two new zero-emission runabouts will be brought forth blinking into the light at the show. (That's zero emissions if you can ignore the filthy power plants that generate the juice). Anyway, we already have the bad and the ugly, let’s hope one of the pair of sparky newcomers is good.

VW Eos is a real scream

Who would buy a Volkswagen Eos? There you are, barrelling along the boulevard, wind in the hair, sun shining, feeling pretty good about yourself, and then you glance down at the satnav screen and AAAAAAARRRGH!!! Who put Edvard Munch’s The Scream slap in the middle of the dash?
What was VW thinking when it chose to make manically depressed eyes out of its air-vents, a nose from the hazard-lights button, and a gaping maw from the multimedia screen? Or is it all some German joke that Auto IT doesn’t get?

When will satnav show you where you are?

According to Isaac Levanon, top dog at 3D imaging firm 3DVU, in-car satellite navigation will soon include realistic renderings of the buildings and other landmarks that line roads.

The technology is not too much of a stretch beyond the current scrolling schematics that can be found in devices from firms like Garmin and TomTom. Indeed, graphics good enough to recognise most of the streets in Central London were crammed onto a single CD - along with a rather nasty video game - for 2002’s PlayStation 2 shoot-fest, The Getaway (pictured above - imagine a big green arrow instead of the cars and you can imagine what a future satnav screen might look like).

Apparently various German, South Korean, Japanese and US carmakers are already playing with 3DVU’s technology, with a view to bringing the lifelike interfaces to market in 2008.

Somewhat oddly, Levanon argues that adoption of 3D navigation applications will be driven by manufacturers' desire for differentiation, not demand from paying customers. Auto IT would beg to differ. Particularly in city centres, it’s all too easy to take a wrong turning when street intersections are only yards from each other. Pictures of the buildings would clearly help drivers to pick out the correct route.

In the longer term, head-up displays that paint translucent arrows or other visual indicators on the windscreen, overlaying the actual view of the road seen by the driver, seem like the optimum solution for getting where you want to go without confusion.

Satnav firms head in the wrong direction

Investors.com has published an interesting article about the future of satellite navigation systems. It notes that the portable satnav unit suppliers, principally Garmin and TomTom, are busily adding features to their dashboard doohickeys in a frantic bid to make them more compelling. TomTom’s top-of-the-line GO 910 unit has a 20GB hard disk that can call up streetmaps from the US or Canada or most countries in Europe out of the box, for example, while also storing your MP3 tunes and photos. TomTom’s online demo (see pic above) depicts a driver merrily tapping away to view photos while barrelling along the highway, which seems about as wise as gargling with brake-fluid.

It’s not clear that buyers actually want - or want to pay for - an increased level of complexity, but the satnav makers have apparently convinced themselves that there’s no alternative. Car manufacturers are bound to make their factory-fitted navigation units cheaper and/or more functional and, as Investors.com notes, buyers who’ve become used to sucker-mount satnav are highly likely to see GPS as a worthwhile fitted option when they next buy a vehicle. And at the other extreme, navigation facilities are already creeping into PDAs and phones. TomTom and its rivals understandably feel squeezed in the middle.

Unfortunately creeping featurism is probably the wrong response: it seems much more likely that success for these firms will come from a razor focus on improving the quality of navigation, and the usability of the human-machine interface. A plug-in unit ought to be able to keep ahead of factory-fit options when it comes to state-of-the-art screens, graphics, speech recognition, intelligent rerouting, and all the other things that actually have something to do with guiding the driver to where they’re going.

A karaoke machine on the dashboard is not required.