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Gear Shift; When Gadgets Go on the Road by Perkal

"When I was a youngster, I wondered why the glove compartment in our family car was called the glove compartment. Not once did I see a glove in it.

Today's kids may wonder why the cigarette lighter socket in the car is called the cigarette lighter socket, as it now functions primarily as a socket for electronic gadgets. For some of us, a single socket is no longer sufficient, as I discovered on a recent family road trip to and from the beach at Emerald Isle, N.C. I needed a six-foot extension cord with a four-socket adapter, so many gadgets did we carry in our car.

There was the Nuvi navigator and digital entertainment system mounted by suction cup on my windshield. There were two iPods, accompanied by a device that charges the iPod and emits an FM signal simultaneously so you can hear the iPod on the car radio.

Wedged into an unoccupied pop-open drawer on my dash was a satellite radio offering more than 200 channels. My Razr cellphone sat in a cup holder along with a Bluetooth earpiece. My Starcom PDA, a pocket-size laptop with a slide-out keyboard, was tucked into the map compartment on the driver's side. In the back were a laptop, a DVD player, my daughter's cellphone, two digital still cameras and a digital camcorder.

The modern techmobile is revolutionizing driving and the nuclear family, about which more later.

It's also making a mess of my car, which, like others driven by early adopters (meaning those of us obsessed with new gadgets), now resembles my desk in its unsightly tangle of cords. It's not my fault. The problem is innovation lag.

In the case of the automobile, it occurs because the design of the basic car is unable to keep pace with the innovation of peripheral gadgets. Just after most new cars were factory-fitted with tape players, for example, CDs got popular, requiring drivers to attach portable CD players to cassette adapters. Not long after the car manufacturers installed CD players in dashboards, MP3 players, such as the iPod, came on the scene, requiring yet another round of awkward retrofitting.

I thought my car, a 2003 Mercedes, was pretty modern with all its factory-fitted gadgets.

The best one is a Tele Aid telematics system, a satellite-linked SOS/traffic information/concierge service (like the better-known OnStar) that knows where your car is at all times and can find you a motel or a restaurant and make the reservations. On Tele Aid, you can get a human being. I'm not used to that anymore. It's a shock to discover a living being, particularly one who sounds like Truman Capote, saying: ""Good Morning. Is this Fred Barbash, and are you at the intersection of Interstate 95 and Route 58 in North Carolina? How can I help you?""

I prefer the voice-activated menu on Tele Aid. Say ""traffic,"" and you get a traffic report. Say ""radius traffic,"" and you get a traffic report for a five-mile radius around your car, assuming you are somewhere that's monitored. For some reason, I always feel I must shout, the way my grandfather shouted when making a long-distance call.

""RADIUS TRAFFIC!"" I shout.

""OKAY,"" says Tele Aid.

I have not even begun to address the safety issues here.

Some people find the Nuvi's touch-screen controls irresistible and constantly zoom outward so they can see where they are in relation to the rest of the North American continent. It puts life in perspective to see that little arrow (you) creeping along the edge of that big continent (North America).

It may also put you in the hospital, or worse. Do not play with your Nuvi on the highway.

There are other potential distractions, as well, such as my built- in multi-function car computer, operated from the steering wheel, capable of reporting on a little screen, among other things, miles per gallon; miles traveled since the last time the car stopped more than four hours; and the need for oil, a light bulb replacement, windshield washer fluid, and a visit to the dealer for service.

Also on the steering wheel are buttons to operate the radio; a stick to turn on the voice-activated radio controls (You shout, ""GO TO ONE-OH-SEVEN-POINT-SEVEN!""); the cruise control; and the windshield wiper switch, which miraculously adjusts itself according to the amount of water on the windshield and must therefore be turned off in car washes.

On the rear ceiling of the car is a visual signal that lights up and beeps ever more urgently as you get closer and closer to a stationary object or a pedestrian. It's called Parktronic, an acoustic parking system, and uses ultrasonic sensors to measure the distance to objects. My rearview mirror deploys an auto dimmer, which automatically adjusts to day and night.

Pretty modern it seemed, until I decided I wanted a navigation device, a satellite radio, an iPod, a DVD player and a cellphone, all of which required retrofitting.

Newer car models are now arriving with all these things installed. And convergence is underway among the peripherals. The latest Garmin navigation device, for example, incorporates an MP3 player, an AM-FM radio, a satellite radio, and a cellphone-linked Bluetooth dialer and speaker in a single fabulous gadget.

But innovation never ceases, and even the latest car designs will soon be overtaken by the latest gadgets.

Meanwhile, technology has dramatically changed the family road trip and promises to unhinge family relationships in unknown ways.

Many years ago, for example, my brothers and I would act up in the back seat until our parents would threaten to dump us in a cow pasture on the side of the road. Nowadays, kids are too busy to act up. They're watching ""Shrek"" or listening to iPods.

We seldom hear from them. ""Are we there yet?"" has vanished from the language. No longer do I argue with my 11-year-old about why he can't have Grand Theft Auto.

Sadly, however, quality time has declined. We don't play ""20 Questions,"" as I did with my brothers and our parents on road trips, in between fights.

On our recent trip, we did disagree from time to time about which generation of music was to be played on the satellite radio, the '50s, '60s, '70s or '90s (the '80s, for some reason, are never requested); classical; Broadway; any of 45 Major League Baseball games during the baseball season; or the BBC, C-SPAN, Fox News, ABC News, MSNBC and Wolf Blitzer, who either never sleeps or has a double. I wish Wolf Blitzer were the voice on my Tele Aid. ""Happening right now in the Situation Room, at the Intersection of I-95 and Route 58 . . .""

While the kids accept these advances, my wife can be a techno- skeptic.

She has ridiculed every gadget purchase I've ever made, including my Humminbird fish finder. (You tie a transponder on a fishing line, hurl it into a body of water and wait to receive a depth reading and little blips representing fish that appear on a screen worn on the wrist.)

I have responded by becoming defensive, desperate to prove the usefulness of the latest gadget I've purchased, how it saved us from some horrible fate.

The road trip is now a quest for vindication.

I imagine a gang of nasty tattooed bikers pursuing us on the back roads of the Carolinas. My Parktronic beeps violently and alerts us. I activate the ""fastest route"" or ""emergency"" function of my Nuvi, which guides us swiftly onto the interstate. I press the SOS function of Tele Aid, which summons a voice: ""Is this Fred Barbash . . . ?"" and I tell him to call the state police.

""I was so wrong about your gadgets, dear,"" my wife says. ""Thank goodness you didn't listen to me. How could I have been such a fool?""

In my dreams. Nothing that dramatic happened on our trip to and from the beach.

However, there came an intersection where my wife thought we should turn west while my Nuvi pleaded with me to continue north.

Gambling that the Nuvi might know a better route and would prove its worth, I went with the Nuvi. I actually think it was a better route, but the price was, well, priceless.

After a few miles of stony silence, I realized that in deferring to the gadget's judgment rather than my wife's, I was depriving her of a traditional family role as navigator, an age-old wifely function dating from the days of the covered wagon to the days of the station wagon.

She intensified her ridicule of rock classics on my satellite radio. Every time a song came on, she would denounce it as a ""B- side."" I could not admit to her that I was indeed unfamiliar with Elvis Presley's ""Just Because"" and had never heard of half the shows on the radio's Broadway channel.

Still struggling for validation, I kept checking the traffic channel in hopes that it would direct us away from the usual 25-mile backup south of, and north of, Richmond. Finding no such traffic jam on the radio, I checked the traffic service on my Tele Aid, which also reported in its computer voice that there were no ""incidents.""

All the devices reported to me at once, the Nuvi, the Tele Aid and the traffic channel on the radio in a cacophony of synthesized speech. I, in turn, started shouting at Tele Aid in a desperate effort to change the function. From the rear, I could hear the theme to ""Ghostbusters,"" I think it was, coming from the DVD player while the Razr in my cup holder vibrated against the plastic as junk mail announced its arrival on my cellphone. My daughter's foot hit the wire that ran from the front of the car to the rear and cut out the power for my toys.

Then, the suction cup holding the Nuvi to the front windshield de- suctioned and tumbled onto the floor. Switching to battery mode, it cried ""recalculating, recalculating, recalculating.""

I prayed my cellphone would not ring, as I had that very day downloaded ""Bad Day"" and installed it as my ring tone. I should have downloaded ""Bad Dream."""

This article was published on Sunday 17 December, 2006.

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