easy riders

By James Y. Bartlett

Cars that know where they are going.

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”

After years of building cars loaded with things they thought we wanted — things such as sun roofs and automatic seat belts and halogen fog lights — the world’s automobile makers have finally gotten smart and given us what we really need.

To wit, cars that think for themselves. And sometimes for us.

Come 1999, some of us will be able to take the last decade’s winnings out of the stock market and invest in an automobile that eliminates forever that hideous domestic (and stereotypical) scene in which “he” is driving hell-bent for leather down some back road, muttering to himself, “I know the turnoff is here somewhere,” while “she,” looking at the dashboard clock that tells her they are close to an hour late, sits, fumes, and drums her freshly painted fingernails derisively on the center console.

Yes, the day is at hand when man won’t have to stop and ask for directions. Instead, he can simply punch up a few buttons on the on board GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) navigation system, send a signal bouncing from car to satellite to car, and find out exactly where he is and exactly how to get where he is going.

O frabjous day!

Such wonders of science and technology, which some might say immediately and completely justify every cent ever spent on NASA, are now at hand. You will find such a system, called OnStar, on several 1999 General Motors luxury cars, including the Cadillac Catera. Integrating the car’s on board electronics with the GPS technology and a hands-free cellular phone, the lost driver can call GM any time and get directions, while the happy spouse in the temperature-controlled passenger seat smiles approvingly. OnStar also will help you obtain emergency roadside service, and assist you in theft notification and in other situations that might arise.

Lexus has introduced a sophisticated navigation system of its own, perfect for the stop-and-ask impaired. Lexus engineers have designed a touch-screen display on the dash of the GS400 and GS300 models. In addition to controlling the audio system and interior temperature settings, the system utilizes computerized map databases and the satellite system to track your vehicle’s position and plot the best routing to the desired destination. It will even tell you when and where to turn. This should end fingernail drumming forever! By 1999, the Lexus database system should feature complete road maps for more than 56 metropolitan areas.

Ford is installing fancy new computer terminals in its up-market models, such as the Lincoln Continental, including mobile computers capable of sending and receiving e-mail and faxes, and surfing the Internet.

All of these advancements are beginning to alarm the safety conscious, both among the citizenry and the government. The Big Three U.S. carmakers already have begun a series of meetings with the Society of Automotive Engineers and various regulatory agencies of the federal government to study deleterious effects that may result from a driver trying to download and read his e-mail while driving. If the driver is stuck in a traffic jam anywhere from Interstate Highway 5 in Los Angeles to the soon-to-be-sunk Central Artery Highway in Boston, that’s one thing. But if he’s trying to surf the Net while snaking down U.S. Route 1 along Big Sur, that might be another matter altogether.

Of course, he could be driving yet another smart car. The newest Jaguar XJR, for instance, comes equipped with an adaptive cruise control feature that uses a forward-looking millimeter wave radar to judge the distance between the Jaguar and the cars on the road ahead and automatically adjusts the cruise control to maintain a safe distance between vehicles. A similar technology can be found in the 1999 Acura TL-X luxury sedan. Both cars use a small radar transmitter tucked behind the grille and a control box located in the trunk to tell your car to speed up or slow down, depending on the traffic conditions.

It’s almost as good as letting the car drive itself. Although we’re not quite to that point yet, some automotive engineers are testing a system in California that uses sensors buried in a stretch of test road to guide cars along, driver-free. Until those tests are completed, you’ll still have to steer.

And if you’re going to steer, you might as well steer something nice, like one of the new generation of BMWs. In addition to the famed engineering from Bavaria, the new Bimmers will feature a high-tech key system. The new BMW door key does a whole lot more than just unlock the doors and turn on the horses. It can be individually programmed to meet the preferences of the owner in any number of ways. Do you want to unlock just the driver’s door, or both the driver’s door and the passenger door? Or all the doors? When driver A unlocks the door, the key recognizes who it is and automatically adjusts the seat just the way A likes it. Up to three different drivers can set their preferences, and the car will obey with the alacrity of Aladdin’s genie.

Of course, the new BMWs boast some serious safety improvements as well. Along with several other luxury models, such as the entire fleet of Mercedes cars and the new Infiniti G20, BMW has installed side-mounted air bags designed to protect the car’s passengers from side impacts. Despite the bad press air bags have received, automotive crash specialists know air bags can save lives in collisions, so they now surround the driver from the side and even the top, inflating to provide a soft and life-saving pillow of air.

The other big news for the upcoming ’99 auto season is the growth in what could be called the Male MidLife Crisis Cars. BMW is a prime shaker in this category with its sleek, sexy, and sporty Z-3 roadster, a perfect car for tooling through humid and carefree summer nights, top down so the new trophy wife’s hair can blow in the wind. BMW now offers the M coupe, a hardtop version of the Z-3, for those who don’t want to muss their hair.

But the competition grows. Porsche, in addition to updating its 911 Carrera for the first time in 34 years, has introduced its Boxster, a two-seat, removable hardtop roadster with plenty of vroom and enough sexiness for anyone who can hold their guilt in abeyance. Not to be outdone, the Chrysler Corporation will soon introduce its own MidLife Crisis Machine in the form of the Plymouth Pronto Spyder, top-down, Art Deco-designed and, they say, with plastic body panels of molded-in color.

On the other side of the coin is the continuing growth of the sports utility vehicle category, otherwise known as Cars For Smacking into Anything. These thinly disguised trucks have been getting bigger and bigger, but now they’re getting fancier and fancier to appeal to soccer moms who want to upgrade from the trend-pioneers, Dodge Caravans.

The new Mercedes ML320 is about as upgrade as you can get in the SUV category. There’s enough room for seven adults inside and, say the car’s promoters, 16 large boxes of diapers. Sixteen boxes of diapers, though, sounds like overkill.

Interestingly, designers at Chrysler are working on a new design for the Jeep Grand Cherokee, the car that started it all. The prototype is called the Jeepster, and with its stark, slick-back design, you can almost see a MidLife Male tooling around town in one.

O frabjous day! What will they give us next?

James Y. Bartlett, golf columnist for Forbes FYI and Florida-based writer, drives a solid and dependable car with 108,000 miles on it, and always stops to ask directions.