You're probably thinking about crazy dials, turbo switches, exhausts, mufflers, but if you know enough about me, you'd know Apple would become uncool before I started doing that. My mates on the other hand spend hundreds/thousands on that sorta stuff on their already riced up 'performance' car, and try to kill themselves while getting their thrills hooning around (one's slid down the side of hill in Mt. Dandenong...you know who you are).
What I want is a interactive computer in my car (to go with the cheap interior LEDs that flash in tune with music
). Think about the GPS/audio/DVD/TV systems in luxury cars right now, but even better.
A system that has a hard drive so you can store all your music, videos, DVDs, photos and whatever else on it and play it on demand.
A system with a CD drive for impromptu discs, with radio and line-in input so you can plug in a mate's iPod.
A system that has GPS mapping in-built, along with Google Earth imagery overlaid on it.
A system with Bluetooth capabilities so I can connect the handsfree up to the stereo.
A system wireless capabilities so it can sync my music collection up with my computer, download traffic info from VicRoads, download weather info, and download RSS feeds so I can check out the news while waiting around in traffic. When mobile data charges drop, maybe it can even be live.
I'm sure I can think of more later, but that's a fairly good start. All controlled via a nicely-designed graphical touch-screen interface of course, as well as the buttons I have on my steering wheel.
Because of the harsh conditions in cars (vibrations, extreme temperatures) typical computers usually don't cut it, or don't last for long unless they're specifically modified (e.g. more fans, heatsinks, vibration protection mechanisms). Plus they're a bit bulky to put in a car (especially a small-ish car like mine) without losing heaps of space.
And that brings me to the point of this post in the first place - Shuttle's
designed a PC specifically for the car to fill this growing niche. Another great site to check out for these kind of things is
mp3car.com, which is probably the best community out there for this, along with a cool store and lots of free software for you to try out and customise.
It's an expensive ongoing project, in terms of money and time, but given how bored I sometimes get stuck in traffic, I reckon it'll be worth it. Money and time aside, my car also comes with an integrated audio system (as is the trend with most new cars, even cheaper cars), so there's no standard double-DIN slot for me to fiddle with. Apart from fibreglassing my own (which would actually be a pretty cool project itself), the only other option is to find somewhere that stocks a replacement plate (I can only find left-hand drive ones
)
Once I clear the backlog of stuff I have to do, I'll hopefully find some time to start this - of course, I'll stick up some blog posts about it here when I do that.