Goodbye Gregory's? <p>goodbye Gregory's?
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday May 30, 1996
Street directories are on the road to extinction. In-car satellite navigation systems arrive in Australia next month. Phil Scott gets told where to go.
Imagine a map-reading partner who never confused left with right, who never lost the plot and who always knew which lane to be in or exactly how far to the next turn-off.
Well, it exists and its name is Philips.
Philips directed me, flawlessly, across the 64 kilometres from Dudenhofen, in rural Germany, to my hotel door in Wiesbaden last week.
Set beside the speedo on the dashboard of a common or garden Opel Vectra family car was a tiny computer screen, a little bigger than a cigarette packet. Developed by the Dutch electronics group Philips, this satellite navigation system has been fitted to six ordinary Opels while negotiations continue on pricing it for mass production.
Opel's research says the customer threshold of pain is about the same as that for a premium car sound system. Philips doesn't think that's quite enough for this beautifully simple satellite navigation set-up, the same CARIN system BMW will introduce to Australia next month.
Switch it on, punch in the city, select the hotels menu, and up comes a list of locations. It works just as easily if you key in a street name, hospital, theatre, airport or railway station.
In my case, one click on the desired hostelry and sat nav did the rest. Within a minute, my screen had plotted the car's present position by triangulating some satellites and advised me to "turn right".
A simple arrow on the screen display reinforced the synthetic voice command which sounded a bit like the guy who used to read the time for Telecom crossed with Darth Vader.
Being bloody minded, I turned left. He was unfazed.
Up came a bent arrow on the display. "Make a U-turn when possible," he advised. I complied. For the next 63 kilometres, beginning on rural B-roads, running through small villages, on and off several autobahns and through crowded city streets, he didn't miss a beat.
"At the roundabout, straight on," he warned from 500 metres out. Then the screen display would count down the metres and throw up the intersection schematic, in shades of blue with crisp white arrows. The distance readouts were big on clarity in contrasting pink and yellow.
"Turn right to join the motorway," he advised and the screen showed 300 metres to go. To the metre, up came the desired ramp.
Plenty of warning was given as various autobahns converged. He advised, well ahead of time, the need to stay in the right lane. Up came the aerial view as the autobahn split in two, with the arrow showing clearly where I was meant to be. I didn't have to take my eyes off the road or the instruments.
Studying the screen more closely revealed all sorts of other information - the name of the road being travelled, the nearest village and the distance to the next deviation.
Even through rush hour in downtown Wiesbaden, sat nav managed to make me look like a local, never caught in the wrong lane, always picking the correct turn.
While the Opel and BMW use the Philips CARIN sat nav system, Mercedes has one developed by Blaupunkt and its parent company Bosch. Both systems provide more than fail-safe navigation. They produce information on parking stations, theatres, restaurants and cinemas. Cheaper hand-held systems sell for about $400 in Germany but aren't quite as easy to use.
Consigning that dog-eared Gregory's to the boot is about to happen here, too. The required mapping of our major cities and connecting highways is being programmed onto computer compact discs at a rapid rate. The software is ready to go and BMW will be the first to sell it, with all the necessary hardware, in its new 740 and 540 models.
The only problem is the price. On the BMW 7 Series, the asking price will be nearly $5,000. Opel, Holden's German sister company, hopes the system it's evaluating on the Vectra will meet with big demand at around $1,000. The negotiations continue.
The boffins who know these things insist the price will tumble, just as it did for anti-lock brakes and airbags.
Your late '90s Holden Calais has a fair chance of being able to find its own way home ...
© 1996 Sydney Morning Herald