There was a time when the sole purpose of the car was to get you from point A to point B, but that quaint time has passed.
It's the information age, after all, and like your PC, your car should be a rolling info-pod, continually serving up news, entertainment, advertising, and advice.
And since the well-wired dashboard could become multibillion dollar real estate, car companies are preparing to fill all that time behind the wheel, estimated at 12 percent of the average American's waking hours.
"The car is becoming just another information appliance," said Brain McCalley, development manager for Motorola's driver information systems unit.
There's just one problem for car makers: The car is a wee bit more complicated than a desktop computer. There's a huge development gap of up to several years between when a car is designed and when it hits the market. New info-appliances have to be tailored for each car, which contains from 40 to 80 microchips, years in advance.
The result? Electronic doodads in cars tend to be obsolete before the car ever hits the market. How the heck can you get 1999 info-appliances in a 1999 car?
Motorola believes it has the remedy. Tuesday the semiconductor behemoth unveiled its blueprint for MobileGT, a Java-based computing platform for cars that in theory can be easily tweaked to fit any model or make. It would then serve as an auto "plug and play" socket into which up-to-the-minute electronic gadgets, such as a Net connection, GPS navigation, or wireless devices, could be plugged in without years of pre-planning.
"Until now, anyone wanting to develop a new in-car system would typically have to design everything -- both hardware and software -- from scratch," said Skip McGaughey, director of marketing for the embedded tools group at IBM, which is working with Motorola to develop MobileGT.
Now, he said, "Developers don't have to reinvent the wheel." Or the dashboard.
In theory, that will save the car companies a good bit of money, allowing them to keep the costs of adding info-electronics low enough that they can plug them into cars for the mass market.
In addition to IBM, Motorola is working with QNX Software Systems and Embedded Planet to flesh out MobileGT.
The first cars sporting the MobileGT platform could roll off the assembly lines as early as 2002, Motorola said.
