Auto Trends

Let’s see here, we’ve got the Eco-pedal that will tell us exactly how fast we are allowed to drive by pushing up on our accelerator pedal. We’ve got the Insurance premium gadget that will monitor our driving like a tattle-tell to our insurance company and rate our premium by how good of a driver we seem by our acceleration and braking rates.

We’ve got vehicles that will monitor our health while we drive to see if we are fit enough to be on the road… and now we have a new mother-in-law alert (Ford Smart Intersection) that will whine at us at every intersection if we come at it too fast. Most of us have one of those that comes every year at around Christmas time. Do we really need one 24/7.

Well, research shows that we perhaps do, approximately 40 percent of all vehicular accidents occur at an intersection when we are not paying attention. It appears as if we are often too distracted by all our gadgets… such as MP3 players, phones, GPS, DVD, Eco-pedals, health monitors, etc…

If they keep putting this stuff in our vehicles… pretty soon we are going to need a co-pilot just to take care of all those little things, while the other person can actually concentrate on driving. It is interesting to think that much of this problem is caused by the increasing amount of car gadgets… and yet they think they can make everything better, just by adding another car gadget on top of the rest.

But we’ll get off our soap box and get down to the facts. The Smart Intersection will work by warning the driver with a flashing red light and alert or voice command (“Hey dummy… stop!”) if they are approaching an impending danger at an intersection, such as another driver.

Using GPS technology, which is already quite abundant right now, the computer system will monitor where all the vehicles are, when the lights are going to change, etc., and decide the appropriate action for the driver and let them know if it senses they are deviating from the plan. Ford is busy working on this idea… so we could start to see more of this come to fruition in the coming models!

Technology, love it or hate it… is what is driving the world and giving us lots of stuff to report on every day!

Just when you thought that you had everything, MIO comes out with an original idea that makes everybody say, ‘now why didn’t I think of that…’ or possibly more like, ‘how stupid’. But either way, any eighties baby should remember the original Knight Rider series, starring none other than the infamous David Hasselhoff.

  But more importantly, you should remember the black 1982 Pontiac Trans-Am named K.I.T.T. with the cool T-tops and sweeping red lights running across the sleek front end bumper, letting everybody know that this wasn’t no ordinary Pontiac.

Okay, so maybe this GPS isn’t quite as cool as the original K.I.T.T. car, but for $270 we’d say you weren’t getting off too bad for a fully functioning GPS with a one of kind theme. Looking at the unit at a glance, it doesn’t necessarily appear a whole lot different than any other in-car GPS unit. That is until you notice the two sweeping red lights on either side of the sleek black casing.

Turn the unit on and out pops that old familiar voice of actor William Daniels that says, “Hello Michael, where do you want to go today?” Then you type in your destiny and that same familiar voice will guide you to your next great adventure, weather it be to the local grocery to buy some cantaloupe, or maybe even the gas station to battle the high prices of oil these days.

Here is a list of the main features you will get with the Mio™ Knight Rider™ GPS Portable Navigation Device :

• 4.3 inch TFT color LCD display with anti-glare touchscreen
• Preloaded map of the U.S. and Canada, plus over 4 million points of interest (food, gas stations, museums, etc.)
• Directions, turn-by-turn voice guidance, and Greetings provided in the voice of K.I.T.T. (William Daniels).
• Knight Rider’s voice synthesizer lights move during navigation instruction and initial greeting
• Unique interface design offers the look and feel of the original K.I.T.T. unit (well, not really, but we’ll let that slide)
• KITT recorded voice files includes 150+ male & 150+ female names to select from for the greeting… (yeah, you won’t have to put up with K.I.T.T. Calling you “Michael” for the duration of your time together)
• Voice guidance comes in 16 languages, including English, French and Spanish… (We always wanted to know what a French K.I.T.T. would have sounded like)

Once your done laughing at what a ridiculous idea this is and tell your friends that only a moron would buy this, you can go over to Radio Shack and get your name on the list with the rest of us Knight Rider fans!

What do you get when you have hundreds of unsold cars sitting around on the lots during recession-like conditions? You get a heck of a lot of drained batteries, and Nissan is tired of it.

Last month, Nissan announced that they would start featuring their vehicles with portable in dash car battery chargers to help keep their vehicle batteries fresh. Besides these vehicles on dealer lots not being test driven by interested customers, new vehicles currently have more electric components than you could shake an entire redwood forest at.

You’ve got your stereo, amplifier, alarm system, navigation unit, iPod, cell phone charger, DVD entertainment system, and now even a microwave it would seem. These draw a lot of juice out of a battery that sits for over a month without properly charging.

In fact, Ford has even recognized this problem and recommends all 2005 and up Mustang drivers to keep their vehicles on a trickle charger when it’s not in use for extended periods of time. These non-daily driven vehicles receive the most strain it would seem because to fully recharge a battery, you need to either drive a vehicle often, or long distances.

This is where a solar power charger can come in handy. ICP Solar is the company working with Nissan on their solar chargers for dealers, but you can also purchase similar models for your own application. These gadgets go anywhere from $100 to $1,000, depending on your power requirements.

Solar powered chargers could be the wave of the future… but for now they are can’t do a whole lot beyond the scope of trickle charging, but that is because the technology hasn’t quite caught up with how to effectively harvest a substantial amount of the suns energy into a small area.

Take the design of the next generation Toyota Prius. Even with the entire roof covered in solar panels, it will have no more capability than powering a portion of the air conditioning. But technology is forever improving, and it won’t be long until they will be capable of a lot more.

Until then, as the winter months begin to once again ascend upon us, solar battery chargers are a great way to keep your battery primed through the coldest months. They work when its cloudy or blue, with old cars or new, and the electricity’s free too!