My brother-in-law recently turned up at my house in a brand new BMW 3-Series. He’s rightly pleased with his acquisition: it’s a fabulous car, brilliant to drive and extremely well built. But I think he’s just as chuffed with the fact that he can connect his Zen portable MP3 player directly into the car’s stereo system and control it remotely.
Of course, this is old news for BMW drivers. The Bavarian car company was the first auto manufacturer to recognise the importance of MP3 players in modern life, and thus to offer a connecting cable for an MP3 player (first in the glove box, and now in the centre console). Since then, most of the other car companies have followed suit, with at least some, if not all, of their cars offering MP3 player connectivity.
This hard-wire facility is becoming widespread just as the Irish government is set to legalise the small devices that broadcast your MP3 player to your car radio via a low-power FM signal. That’s right, if you’ve been using a device like the Griffin iTrip or the Monster iPod WRLS, you’ve been breaking the law. Since such devices are FM transmitters, they fall under the auspices of ComReg, the communications regulator, and you currently need a licence to use one, just like RTE, Today FM or Newstalk need one to broadcast to the nation. (I am one such law-breaker, though I have given up using my mini-transmitter, as the signal was unreliable and the result unsatisfactory. If I want music in the car I just play CDs.) We’ve been promised that such devices will be legal by the end of the year, but it’s a case of too little too late.
Even better solutions are coming down the road now. Scosche Industries has just received a major award at MacWorld for its new iPod/MP3 Bluetooth interface. The Californian company has perfected simple Bluetooth connectivity for your MP3 player, with a small transmitter attached to the headphone jack of the player, and a receiver attached to the auxiliary jack of your car stereo. This ensures constant CD-quality sound through your car stereo, as compared to the oft-fuzzy FM signal of other devices.
There are two other bonuses with the Scosche system. The first is that your Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone can be piggybacked onto the system, allowing you to make and receive phone calls hands-free. The system will mute the music when a call comes in, and you’ll hear the call through the car’s speakers. And by adding a receiver to your home stereo, you’ll be able to use your MP3 player at home, provided it’s within 30 feet of the receiver.
It’s hard to believe that just a few years ago most automobiles came with no in-car entertainment whatsoever. In fact, Volvo and Saab once steadfastly refused to fit radios to their automobiles. The Swedes were convinced that radios in cars were a distraction to the driver, and anything that impaired road safety was eliminated. Most of the other contemporary car companies refused to fit radios out of meanness.
Of course, the Japanese car companies built their market share around the world by being the first to offer radios as standard. They understood that consumers wanted certain niceties in their cars. (The fact that Japanese cars always started, no matter what the weather, also helped.)
These days, all cars come jam-packed with niceties. Many now have better stereo systems than most houses, with multi-speaker, multi-source fittings standard in every car, with some designed to the specific acoustics of the car.
It turns out that those pesky Swedes may have been right about road safety. Recent research from Australia has shown that your in-car entertainment system may have a greater effect on driver performance than using a mobile phone, or maybe even drink-driving.
I’m not talking about operating the often inscrutable and fiddly controls of many sound systems. No, evidently, we use up a huge amount of mental energy just listening to our sounds. The worst offender is talk radio: the more heated the discussions get on the radio, the more absorbed we get as listeners – and the less capable we become as drivers. (So if you’ve always thought Eamon Dunphy was a deadly presenter, you were probably right.)
The type of music we listen to also affects our driving. Up-tempo sounds subconsciously exhort us to drive faster, while soothing music reduces our speed. Listening to music may also affect our awareness of hazards in our peripheral vision.
Before you rip the stereo out of your car’s fascia, music isn’t the worst distraction for drivers. British research has just revealed that most motorists spend less than 75% of their time behind the wheel concentrating on actual driving. The rest of the time they’re worried about work or family issues – or thinking about sex.
So who needs an MP3 player?
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