Remote unlocking of your car’s doors via your smartphone , activating horn and lights and remote start, previously part of GM’s paid OnStar service, is becoming a standard feature, GM says.  Buy the car, download the app, and the car can be remote-controlled via your smartphone for five years, whether you pay for OnStar, or not. “Thirty-six 2014 model year GM vehicles are compatible with the RemoteLink mobile app,” says GM in a press release, meaning that most of GM’s new cars are permanently on-line, can be reached, tracked, can reveal their locations, OnStar, or not, ignition on, or not. Read More >

I’m driven

Everybody seems to be on the bandwagon for self-driving cars, everybody except the NHTSA. In  new guidelines,  the NHTSA urges states to allow use of self-driving cars “only for testing and requiring safeguards to ensure they can be taken over by a driver in the case of malfunction,” the Detroit News writes. Read More >

Toyota announced today what it calls the “Big Data Traffic Information Service,” a giant mashup of data harvested from currently 3.3 million of telematics users in Japan, and 700,000 Toyota customers equipped with a Digital Communication Module (DCM), a gizmo that constantly monitors and transmits vehicle data.  Combined with other telematics data, the harvest powers navigation and information services. Unlike other systems, Toyota’s on-line platform can also be used by local governments and businesses. Read More >

Some forty years in the making, start-stop  technology has arrived on your smartphone. Volkswagen launched an app that stops YouTube videos automatically when you look away from the screen. And it starts again, when you look back. The app uses facial recognition technology to capture when the viewer is looking away, only to resume when eyeballs are back on screen. PWHS (People With Heightened Sensitivities) will not like it: Averting your eyes during a shocking scene on YouTube won’t help anymore. The price of progress, I guess.
But what are the origins of this startling technology? Read More >

Toyota’s CEO Akio Toyoda threw another bucket of cold water on wild fantasies of autonomous cars. Instead of developing cars that drive themselves, Toyota is thinking more of cars that assist you in driving. Read More >

Audi has – via Audi Connect – turned its cars into mobile WiFi hotspots for a few years already. Now comes the killer price: For just $15 a month, you can have all you can eat wireless internet in your car. Read More >

3D printing is all the rage, and it caused a huge uproar when people started making guns with 3D printers. It was just a matter of time for really lethal stuff to be 3D-printed in your nerd-neighbor’s basement: A car. Read More >

Check her rear

Not only will GM’s OnStar switch from the allegedly ultra-reliable and most dense Verizon network to the allegedly not-so reliable and not-so-dense AT &T network, as Reuters reports. It will also “make each of its cars an Internet hotspot with a high-speed broadband connection,” as Automotive News has it. Read More >

In the world of dealer standards, it is usually the OEMs that write the standards, and it is the dealers who have to pay the usually steep bills. Occasionally, an OEM even is tempted to recoup the steep cost of developing a new corporate identity by marking up the signage sold to its dealers.  Dealers hate it. Ford is doing something dealers will love: Ford will offer dollar-for-dollar matching funds to its 3,100 U.S. dealers to upgrade their shops, from new construction to improved digital programs, Ford executives told Reuters. Read More >

Sprint Nextel presents a new “Velocity” in-vehicle communications and entertainment architecture at the LA auto show. You can’t buy it from Sprint, but Sprint hopes your automaker will buy it from them. This did not keep Sprint from taking jabs at its presumptive customers: Read More >

In-car entertainment and navigation systems bamboozle customers and ruin the out-of-the-box experience.”You see a lot of people get into the vehicle, and they can’t figure out the damned system,” Mark Harland, manager of GM’s connected customer team, told Reuters. “They get frustrated, and they get online and bash it, and that ends up on J.D. Power and Associates.” GM decided to do something about it. Will it make the damned systems more intuitive? No, it throws 25 people into the fight against technological ignorance. It has been tried before … Read More >

Chinese upstart carmaker BYD isn’t as lucky as it used to be. Its sales and stock price are deep in the Chinese squat toilet. However, it is outdoing itself in the gadget dept. BYD,  the company that brought us the remote controlled car, now brings us the watch that opens your car’s doors and starts it. Call it keyless entry that goes with the times. Read More >

Researchers at MIT’s AgeLab finally have proven what designers have long suspected: Some typefaces are easier to read than others. Because this would be a boring message,  and because the New England University Transportation Center and typeface vendor Monotype were also involved in the study, the researchers put it in context with in-dash menus.  And came to the conclusion that the choice of typeface is a matter of life and death. Read More >

Four years ago, I bit the bullet and bought a Traqmate for my race car. I continue to believe that the Traqmate is the best tool out there for the club racer on a budget. The predictive lap timer feature alone is an amazingly powerful tool that allows you to make multiple changes in the way you drive a single lap and see the results in real time.

Unfortunately for me, my Traqmate is wired into that race car pretty securely. Is it possible to get similar data for a lot less money — say, for seventy or eighty bucks instead of the $999 Traqmate charges for the basic in-car system?

Read More >

If car racing is not for you, you can always compete for who has the loudest and most expensive car audio system.  From April through September contestants congregate at the Columbus Motor Speedway for a race of the biggest and baddest sound systems.  Read More >