Tablets + Cars = ?

Tablets are growing more and more popular nowadays, but they are still, FOR THE MOST PART (I don’t want any controversy here), a rich mans toy. They can cost as much as a laptop but are not versatile enough to replace one. This trend has apparently been noticed by a few of the higher end car makers, BMW and Peugeot.

BMW was the first car maker to include full integration in their cars with Apple's iPod and it seems as they want to continue this with the very first car maker that can fully integrate iPads into their cars. BMW seems to enjoy telling everyone that they are the first at this but is it really something that they should be telling people? What do I think? NO!

First of all the car that modeled the iPad integration was a convertible 3 series. This is about as sporty as you can get without stepping up to the "M" division of BMW which makes all their sport tuned vehicles. So with such a sporty car, safety should be a chief concern. Apparently the engineers over in Germany were not thinking about that when they designed the iPad holders. When the iPads are docked onto the car, they protrude a couple inches from the back of the headrest. In the 3 series being one of the smaller of BMW's lineup and being a convertible, the rear passenger do not get very much space. What do you think would happen to the people in the rear seats if you even lightly rear ended someone? SMACK! Their faces are going to be smacked straight into that $700 piece of glass and its going to hurt. Real bad.

Second, you are buying a $50,000 car that’s meant to be fun to drive and look amazing. When you stick two iPads behind the front seat headrests it absolutely ruins the former beauty of the car. The whole thing just looks UGLY but I really hate the white Apple cord that plugs into the bottom of the iPad (shown above). When you are paying $3000 (!!!) for a seat upgrade so that the leather is nicer I think the least BMW could have done is to match the cord to the leather color. BMW showed this off at the Paris Auto Show in a 3 series. For those of you who don’t know, the 3 series contains BMWs entry level (the 1 series doesn’t count) lineup of cars. These cars have been given best car in its class for more than 10 years by reputable sources such as "Car and Driver" and "Road and Track" because of how good they look, how well they drive and the quality of their build. Notice that I did not mention anything about technology, that’s because the 3 series generally is more about the drive rather than the tech. This is why I feel that if anything at all the iPad integration should not be allowed in the 3 series but rather, it should be an option in the 7 series, which is BMW's flagship luxury car with all the tech you can possibly think of available as an option, oh and theres also a little, just a little bit more space between the back of the headrest and the back seat in the 7 series.

Okay I'm done ranting about the horrendous iPad integration into BMWs so we'll talk about Peugeots advance into tablets in cars market. Peugeot recently showed off its new concept car, the HR1, at the Paris Auto Show. Unlike the BMW, this integration of a tablet into a car looks amazing and fits perfectly with the futuristic look of the car. Since this is a concept car, there are not many details but we know that the tablet (it seems to be an Archos branded) will, when docked, be able to connect seamlessly to the cars built in computer and electronics system. Also, rather than using the tablets touchscreen, you will be able to control it via some sort of gesture recognition system. More often than not, these kinds of radical new technologies don’t usually work as well as they sound.