Cars with wifi

Sunday, August 5, 2007 by Dave Winer.

My new car, which I love, is missing a couple of features my old car had (backup camera, sonar) that I totally miss. But there's a feature no car has ever had that I want so bad that I miss it even though I've never used it.  

You can see auto manufacturers creeping up to the obvious feature, they can play MP3s, some have built-in hard drives, many have iPod interfaces (mine does, it understands playlists!). The final obvious step in this evolution is to allow a car to access services over the net, and to be accessed over the net from my laptop or desktop. Rather than carry an iPod with me to the car, and remember to take it with me when I leave, I'd rather just copy music, audiobooks and podcasts over to the car's hard disk, if its parked within range of my home's wifi (it is) or within range of a friend's wifi, the same way my iPhone can connect with wifi when it finds it. 

There's no doubt Apple and Microsoft are thinking this way. I hope the car manufacturers are too.