Auto Trends

As our wallets continue to grow fatter with stuff to carry around on a daily basis (health insurance cards, car insurance, credit cards up the kazoo, drivers license, etc.), the New York DMV http://www.nydmv.state.ny.us/edl-main.htm is offering a nifty solution to the added passport bulk.

They have embedded a chip (RFID, if you are technically inclined) in their new line of drivers licenses which can act as a U.S. passport by offering an identification number to the border patrol upon scanning it, in lieu of an entire passport book.

This unfortunately won’t work for all international travel, but mainly our friends in Canada, Mexico, and of course the Caribbean Islands. The drivers license works, by giving the border patrol a photo identity card, plus an convenient RFID to scan, which will then gives them all the necessary information on whether or not you belong here.

The powers-that-be, have assured us that no information will be used within these chips that would enable the stealing of ones identity. It would be bad enough to lose your drivers license, but your license and passport in one could spell double trouble, but you can rest assure that Uncle Sam is at your back this time… err, he better be!

The total cost of the special drivers license is $30 over the standard issue, which when compared to the fee of a drivers license and passport separately, you are saving a good $50 or more, no matter where you hang your hat.

Unfortunately, the saying doesn’t go, “As New York goes, so does the rest of the country,” so us other blokes around the country may be waiting awhile before this gets around to our neck of the woods… But that’s okay, we’ll let them New Yorkers iron out all the flaws first!

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!