Car Not Exactly Like An IPod? There's Some Pap For That

Michael Copeland at Fortune has his priorities straight. “In my rusted jalopy, a 1991 Volvo 240 sedan, I have installed the future,” he boasts. His use of the “f-word” tells you he’s not talking about a V8, forced induction or any other fossil fuel-sucking upgrade. What then? An EV conversion? That would be too interesting. Too car-related. No, Copeland’s future shock was a simple feat: “All it took was a friend whose iPhone came along for a ride.” His argument is the same tired trope we hear every time a business writer dips a toe in the product-analysis game: make it more iPod-phone-y!

when you think about it, the car is the ultimate mobile device. And automakers need to start acting more like consumer electronics companies if they don’t want to cede one of their last great opportunities to Apple, Research in Motion or Google [Ed: as if!].

Sigh. Didn’t we go through this when Thomas Friedman called for Steve Jobs to take over GM? Incidentally, whatever happened to the Draft Oprah movement?

But this line of thinking is not only played out as a macro-industry commentary, it’s also fait accompli on the product front. After all,

Ford, in partnership with Microsoft, has been offering in its cars its “Sync” platform, which cleverly uses your mobile phone to connect to navigation, entertainment, and other applications

But this isn’t enough. The point of this whole thrust isn’t to merely make cars the next frontier in the endless barrage of tweets, status updates and instant messages. The point is to remove the car part of the equation, and create vehicles which allow you to keep your nose buried in your iPhone while whisking you from place to place. Rather than causing dangerous distractions, melding the car-phone interface will actually make us safer!

I don’t care how much you love your smartphone, a driverless car is much cooler… …What the Stanford team has done is break driving down into a computer science problem. They reduced the act of maneuvering a car into software code that, to oversimplify greatly, takes data from a series of sensors and a navigation system and combines the data with certain rules — stay within a portion of the road — to create a virtual driver. Some computers in the trunk act as the brains for the car, crunching all the data that gets fed on-the-fly into the driving program.

Earth to iPlanet Innovation: this exists. It’s called public transportation, and it’s incredibly popular in much of the world. Meanwhile, here in the US, the rush to make cars as iPhoney as possible has caused “distracted driving” to become one of the hot topics to blog, tweet and chatter about while we’re driving. In the futurist’s mind, the short term distractions are but a step on the way to robot chauffeurs. In reality, it’s more of a step towards the line for the bus. Or the emergency room, at the hands of a texting driver. Phones are phones, cars are cars. Let’s enjoy them one at a time.