Horsepower, Torque, and Gigabytes

Car stereo manufacturers like Alpine and Pioneer are all hard at work developing next-generation car stereos, which is nothing unusual. The difference now, however, is they are investigating how big a hard drive we're going to need to store all our music and movies on the road.

Pioneer has already introduced a unit that can store thousands of MP3s, and is able to rip CDs, and even generate all the correct track, artist, and album data through a database built into the unit (provided by Gracenote). This makes decent sense to me, as I can slowly bring CD after CD, and the system will copy the CDs as I listen to them.

As far as mainstream adoption goes, I'm a little more skeptical. For example, if I have a huge MP3 collection at home, transferring to the car is a major obstacle, despite fancy plans to incorporate wireless networking for "auto-synching" (no pun intended) music collections with the home network. Sounds great and all, but doesn't really work for anyone who lives in non-suburban areas (e.g. all apartment dwellers or street parkers), which happens to be the majority of Americans.

For all the iPod and other HDD-based MP3 players out there, it makes a lot more sense to use a docking station in the car...

Video is a different story. As I've stated before, portable media center devices will probably all fail, so I don't really have a clear picture of how consumers would get their video libraries in the car. To me, it's going to take quite a lot of work to provide a better solution than "carry a few DVDs with you."

Links:

Read the article at USATODAY.com

Gracenote - the provider of the CD lookup database (CDDB)

Pioneer USA

Another article on automative entertainment technology

Our opinion on portable video players