by xe

Created on: April 10, 2009

Auto electronics from an ostentatious and elitist entertainment perspective are evolving more quickly than needed, while the application of resources and attention to addressing and improving energy efficiency and ecological urgencies are being neglected. The basic definition and operating methodology of the personal automobile is undergoing tremendous change in these opening months of 2009. Automobile sales have plummeted, fuel economy laws are changing, and government intervention with automobile companies will be leveraged to skew the offerings from that of a free market to what the politicos want us to buy.

At the same time, there is currently more competition for the next alternative(s) in vehicle power train offerings than there has been since the early 1900's. Plug-in electric, hybrid-electric, hybrid-hydraulic and on and on . . it is not possible to stand even ten years in the future and look back at the next few years to predict with any confidence what the vehicles will become. If this topic is intended to discuss electronics that improve our world for the betterment of mankind as we plummet through the universe on our Spaceship Earth, then we are too slow. If as I suspect, it addresses electronics that do nothing in those areas, then the evolution is absurd in premise.

During this era of redefinition of the basic vehicle architecture and motive power; in combination with the reduction in available engineering resources that can be applied to the problems at hand; it comes across as somewhat frivolous to me that we seem obsessed with worrying if we can plug in our beloved music replication devices in our cars. While globally hundreds of thousands of fellow hard-working human beings are losing their jobs, the underpinnings of nation's industrial base are crumbling; at least some elements of the automotive press and over-indulgent elite seem so detached from our real world that they wish to redirect valuable technical resources to pandering to their redundant and contextually irrelevant entertainment whims.

The automotive industry, if it is to survive, must engage in a major course correction away from believing that they are in the fashion industry towards the harsh reality that value and service to national and global survival are their new imperitives. Gone should be the day of fretting over the style of subtle graining of the fake-leather plastic seating surfaces and false-wood-grain radio bezels. Shouldn't those grown and educated engineers be placed under adult supervision and reminded that value to the customer and society as a whole are their new charter?

Over the next several decades, I predict that the personal automobile (along with the light truck and crossover personal-use markets) will move in the same direction that the horse-drawn wagon did a scant 120 years ago - from daily necessity to toy of the elite. Racing cars are already unrelated and virtually irrelevant to the daily-use vehicle we use. Transportation must become just that, and let the electronics-obsessed elite play somewhere else.

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