Driving by the Glow of a Screen

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

More than two decades have passed since moviegoers first watched James Bond tail a Rolls-Royce to Goldfinger's Alpine retreat by tracking a moving blip across a screen on the dashboard of his Aston Martin. Now advances in computer technology have turned this Hollywood fantasy into automotive reality.

In California, some 2,000 motor vehicles -- from Michael Jackson's Mercedes- Benz to Palo Alto garbage trucks -- have been equipped with a gadget called the Navigator, which helps drivers get to a destination by displaying their vehicle's location on a glowing green map. And beginning next month, visitors to three hotels and six Budget Rent a Car stations in and around San Francisco will have access to counter-top DriverGuide units, which can calculate the shortest route between any two addresses in the Bay area and print out a concise set of directions. Later this year, DriverGuide will also become available in a smaller, dashboard version.

The Navigator, introduced last year by Etak, a Menlo Park, Calif., company, is an electronic road map that calculates position by means of dead reckoning. Data from a solid-state compass installed in the vehicle's roof and from sensors mounted on its wheels are processed by a computer in the trunk and displayed on a dashboard screen. The car's position is represented as a fixed triangle; the map, showing a web of streets and avenues, scrolls down as the car moves forward and rotates sideways when it turns.

DriverGuide, produced by Karlin & Collins, a Sunnyvale, Calif., firm, is the electronic equivalent of rolling down a window and asking for directions. The prototype unit looks like an automated-teller machine, but it issues information rather than cash. By punching buttons and choosing from a variety of screen menus, users specify where they want to go. Twenty seconds later, the machine spits out a printed sheet of driving instructions constructed from a data base that contains the location of every intersection and alleyway in the Bay area, including 3,400 turn restrictions and 4,800 traffic lights. Says Barry Karlin, president of K&C: "We save fuel, and we save time."

How the devices will fare in the marketplace remains to be seen. Their current price tags will certainly limit sales: Navigator sells for $1,395, and the DriverGuide is expected to cost about $1,000. Toyota already offers a computerized dashboard map on an expensive model sold only in Japan, but while U.S. automakers are testing the devices, none have plans to offer them as options before the early 1990s.

Etak and K&C remain optimistic and are busy expanding their cartographic data bases. Etak has computerized the maps of 85% of the nation's urban areas, while K&C is programming Los Angeles, Miami and Atlanta. Both companies speak confidently of the day when onboard computers will act as mobile information systems, displaying everything from the latest traffic conditions to the location of the nearest hospital. Predicts Karlin: "Ten years from now, nobody will need to drive with a road map folding and flapping in the steering wheel."

With reporting by Charles Pelton/San Francisco