Cars and Computers - Thinking about Control

Special Report From The Late Great Yahoo Internet Life

For carmakers, integration of hightech features demands a new design language for interiors and new ideas about how drivers should interact with their vehicles. In the past, when a new function was added to a car, it required the addition of yet another backlit button on the center console. In the rarefied wood-grained luxury segment of the market, the past decade brought so many new features that at night the consoles began to resemble, in the words of BMW chief designer Chris Bangle, "a swarm of fireflies."

Visual overload has led manufacturers to consider a host of new interface technologies to keep automobile cabins from looking like the cockpit of a 747. Automakers such as BMW, Jaguar, Lexus, and Mercedes-Benz have begun to consolidate many of their cars' console controls on LCD screens, but even those can be distracting during highway driving.

BMW's sleek 745i and upcoming CS1 feature the company's new iDrive interface, which replaces all center-console buttons with a multidirectional, force-feedback joystick that spins like a dial. The silver knob has generated some uproar among experts, because it can send an inexperienced user on a hunt through a Byzantine network of on-screen menus that can be more confusing and irritating than the world's worst voice-mail system (while you're cruising along at 85 mph). But after a few days, the system's unusual structure begins to make sense.

Still, it comes down to doing things with your hands and eyes when your hands and eyes are otherwise engaged in keeping you collision free. This has prompted car companies to experiment with something even more whizzy—voice control over your navigation, radio, and climate control systems. While it's still primitive compared with what went on in, say, Star Trek, voice recognition has made great progress in the past decade. Cars such as the BMW 745i, Cadillac CTS, Infiniti Q45, Jaguar S-Type, and Lexus LS 430 all have some voice capabilities. Just don't expect a vast vocabulary.