 |
| Navstar's satellite will help make the sales of self-steering cars possible by 2019. |
GETTING lost in a new car will soon be all but impossible, thanks
to Google Maps on smartphones. Apple launched CarPlay in Mercedes-Benz models at
the Geneva Auto Show, saying the system “takes the things you want to do with
your iPhone5 while driving and puts them right on your car’s built-in
display”.
Apart from Mercedes-Benz, BWM, Jaguar, Land Rover, Honda, Kia,
Mitsubishi, Nissan Opel, PSA Paugeot Citroën, Subaru, Suzuki, Ford and Chevrolet
are described as committed partners on Apple’s website.
Of these brands, Witness
Wheels has moaned most frequently about the shortcomings of Ford and
Chev’s systems when compared to Luddite-friendly systems in competing brands.
A recent survey at the New York Auto Show in fact stated Ford’s
voice command system is hopeless, saying the problem with “small screens and
convoluted programming is you can’t get the voice commands to work”.
Hence, Ford will do well to link up to Apple’s CarPlay, which
features Siri voice control and is specially designed for driving scenarios.
Apple states their system also works with your car’s knobs,
buttons, or touchscreen, “so you can use them while your eyes and hands stay
where they belong”.
But what about people who don’t have an iPhone5?
The good news is that the Android phones come standard with sat-nav
and the phones do not need cars with display units or even Bluetooth
connections.
The Google Maps Navigation comes with voice search with the typical
“turn … left … in … 50-meeturhs” guidance, making this system the cheapest
geo-satellite positioning system on the market.
While Google has a disclaimer which warns: “Traffic data is not
real time and directions may be wrong, dangerous, prohibited or involve
ferries”, Wheels
has tested the system throughout South Africa, finding it does the same or
better job than a two-year-old Garmin and Tom-Tom GPS.
Google Maps on a smartphone, linked to a car’s speakers through
Bluetooth, also does a far better job of plotting a route than the overpriced
on-board navigation systems on offer by Merc, BMW and Audi, as Google also
includes dirt roads.
In less than five years, drivers will not even have to link their
smartphones to their cars, as cars will be able to steer themselves on voice
command.
The company Prime Research showed at the recent New York auto show
that world car experts predict autonomous cars will become commonplace on roads
in major cities by 2019.
To make this possible, cars have already turned into computers. A
new car already has more than 100 million lines of binary code, which is more
than a F35 Fighter Jet (20 million), a Boeing 787 (10 million) and even
operating systems like Windows 8 or Apple Tiger.
These binary lines compute in fractions of a second urgent
operations like brake assist, which U.S. consumers rate as their most important
autonomous driving aid, followed by intelligent lights, pre-crash systems,
adaptive cruise control, pedestrian and blind detection.
