Drive (15 page)

A more cautious approach can mean being a few beats behind—as the automakers were after being tone deaf to the popularity of the iPod. The sound system in Odell's new Lucerne included an AM radio, FM radio, XM satellite radio, a CD player that reads both regular audio and MP3 files and a jack for an MP3
player, such as an iPod. The next stage will be to let the driver navigate through iPod menus using steering wheel controls. Still, it's all a little late in coming for some music lovers. In 2004, BMW was the first carmaker to respond to the iPod's ubiquity by offering an adapter, and other companies now offer their own versions, but the roads are filled with people in late-model cars and trucks who must suffer through the hassle and poor sound quality of connecting their MP3 players via aftermarket FM transmitters.

As fun and handy as a GPS can be, my favourite gadget, in or out of a car, is the iPod. Some people like to listen to books while they drive, but my twenty-gigabyte iPod holds more than 5,400 carefully chosen songs, so I like to plug it in, leave it on random and drive away. When I got my first iPod back in 2001, I used a cassette adapter in the car. But in the fall of 2005, the cassette player ate the adapter and I switched to an FM transmitter, which I endured until I knew I was going to drive my car to California. That's when I bought a new car stereo—one with a jack for an MP3 player.

Even without an expensive sound system, music is such a pleasure in a car, especially on a road trip, because we have a chance to actually listen to music—a rare treat these days. When I was younger, I would go to a store, buy an album, go home and put it on my turntable and sit down and listen. Other than reading the liner notes, I didn't try to multi-task. Instead, I concentrated on actually hearing the music. Nowadays, I buy CDs—or, increasingly, download songs—and then play them while I do my email or surf the web. But in a car travelling down a highway, I can finally listen again. In fact, for many people, that's one of the best things about the automobile. As one friend, who had just completed a road trip to a wedding, wrote in an email: “After driving a total of twenty-four hours in the past week (to and from Vermont) I have one main thought: music is better in the car than almost anywhere. Other than that, I kinda hate cars.”

INSTEAD OF PLEASING
iPod owners, GM opted to focus on OnStar. First introduced in the United States in 1996, OnStar combines GPS and communications technology to offer a growing range of goodies. It will notify emergency services at the touch of a button; call to offer assistance when an air bag deploys; run a monthly diagnostic of the car and email the results to the owner; allow hands-free phones calls; remotely unlock car doors for drivers who've locked themselves out; help the police locate stolen vehicles; activate the horn and lights for drivers who can't find where they parked; and provide directions. OnStar was originally an expensive dealer-installed option with fewer features, and early on it didn't have many takers, but it is now standard equipment. “What do you really want to offer? Those debates go on,” Odell said. “If we want to lead the charge, it's got to be something vehicle-centric. We don't sell iPods, so we want to find something that enhances the value of the car and also meets either pent-up needs or develops needs by coming up with a breakthrough product.”

Another technology the company hopes to play a leading role in is XM NavTraffic. At one time or another all of us, usually while cursing stop-and-go traffic, have thought, “If I'd only known then what I know now, I would have taken a completely different route.” Traffic updates on the radio sometimes help, especially with major tie-ups, but Intelligent Transportation Systems, or ITS, promises to offer so much more than Arnie Pie in the Sky, the traffic reporter on
The Simpsons
, could ever hope to. ITS takes advantage of computers, sensors and communications technology to save lives, time, money, energy and environmental damage because drivers receive immediate, up-to-the-minute route-specific information, including the traffic speed on a route; reports of accidents, disabled vehicles and bad weather; and news of construction slowdowns and road closures. First launched in 2004, NavTraffic is available in luxury cars from various manufacturers and works with several aftermarket navigation systems.
Dozens of metropolitan areas in the United States already provide the necessary ITS data.

If drivers find this information worth the money, then the technology will eventually follow the well-worn path to becoming standard equipment. Since the first cars hit the road, owners have eagerly snapped up add-ons to enhance the appearance, safety, speed and comfort of their automobiles. Horns, tail lights, speedometers, radiator temperature meters and hood ornaments all started out as accessories. Over time, they stopped being luxuries and became necessities. Ford dealer Mike Shanahan's customers no longer come to his showroom looking for cars with air conditioning and power windows. Now they take those features for granted and ask about the number of air bags.

Rather than more horsepower, most buyers want comfort and safety. And the more time we spend in our cars, the more we demand. So far, automakers have been good at meeting our demands. We wanted better seating and the designers gave it to us. We wanted more places to put our stuff and many new cars have additional glove compartments, storage areas under seats and even umbrella holders. We wanted good sound systems to help us survive long commutes, and sure enough we got them. (Ford has also developed Sync, a voice-activated in-dash communications and entertainment system for cell phones and MP3 players.) We wanted to keep the kids occupied in the back seat—playing I Spy, Punch Buggy and other car games doesn't cut it anymore—so automakers started offering video screens. David MacDonald of Environics showed a profile of minivan owners to an auto parts executive who looked at the data and said, “These people are low on the spectrum when it comes to technology, so why is it that every one of these things I see on the road has one of those screens in the back?” The father of three kids under the age of ten, MacDonald laughed and said, “That's not enthusiasm for technology, that's crowd control.” Shanahan agrees. “If you're driving a car, you'd rather your kids are watching a movie than
screaming and yelling and throwing food around and hitting you in the back of the head when you're driving,” he said. “So it's actually a safety feature.”

Most of all, we demanded cup holders. The stories of people picking their new car based on the number and design of the cup holders are too numerous to just be urban legend. Americans have enjoyed eating in their cars at drive-in restaurants since the 1920s. Of course, drive-in patrons usually finished what they were eating before they left. Drive-thru windows—which first appeared in the 1940s and have proliferated in recent decades, especially at fastfood joints—made noshing on the go more popular. Trying to scarf down a burger while driving is dangerous, but most people were more concerned about drink spills, so cup holders first started showing up in the 1980s, especially in minivans. They weren't just for Slurpees and milkshakes; as American society's obsession with coffee grew deeper—and there's probably a bit of that proverbial chicken-and-egg thing going on here—the cup holder became a beloved feature in domestic cars.

Almost everyone agrees that foreign automakers schooled the Big Three on interiors for years. Not on cup holders, though. European designers were slow to pick up on the trend for two reasons. First, they couldn't imagine why anyone would want to gulp coffee in a car when the civilized, and sensible, thing would be to enjoy it at a café. Second, Europeans tend to take a more focused approach to driving, and manual transmissions are far more common there, so they couldn't imagine drinking anything while driving. Apparently, Japanese designers were equally baffled because my 1991 Maxima had no cup holders, which meant my otherwise tidy car invariably had water bottles rolling around in it and I have to admit I hoped my next car would have at least one of the handy little cavities.

Now that cup holders are a given in most cars, the race to design better ones is on. Several vehicles come with adjustable cup holders; others offer ones that can keep drinks hot or cold and,
with ambient lighting starting to show up in cars, the Ford Focus now has an option for LED lighting inside the cup holders while the Dodge Caliber has glowing rings around them.

So, as we drive around in cars with cushy interiors, we eat and drink, listen to tunes or audiobooks, talk on the phone and let the kids watch movies on rear-seat DVD players while we get directions and up-to-the-minute traffic information from a GPS navigation system instead of pulling over to read a map. Depending on the car and the living room, the car—especially if it comes with a sophisticated sound system, seats that heat and cool, and mood lighting—may be better. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be comfortable, especially for commuters, and cool gadgets are fun, but by turning our vehicles into cushy living rooms, we're only making it more inviting to spend even more time in our cars. Unfortunately, that means many of us will.

7
St. Louis
Sedentary Behind

a Steering Wheel

“HAVE FUN SITTING
in a car and getting fat for two months,” my eighteen-year-old nephew taunted me before I started my trip. Now, I'm far from a health food fanatic, but I did resolve to avoid fast food as much as possible during my journey. In truth, I was worried about surviving the road food. Interstate highways encourage making time and discourage getting off to seek a good place to eat. Besides, many of the independent diners that once served real, though not always particularly healthy, food to travellers are now shuttered because of the success of the fast-food industry. When I'm on the road back home in Canada, the only place I can handle is Tim Hortons. Once a coffee-and-donut chain co-started by the great National Hockey League defenceman— who died in 1974 after crashing his De Tomaso Pantera sports car—the company has expanded its offerings to include soups and sandwiches and now has more than 2,750 stores across Canada. A friend who has toured the United States as a musician emailed me before I left: “Say hello to interstate service stations for me. It's been too long. My only advice: Subway (y'know, the sandwich place).” And so, here I was on a Saturday night in what I now realize were the outskirts of Fenton, Missouri, with nothing appetizing within walking distance. Not even a Subway. So I reluctantly climbed back into my car to search for some dinner. Foolishly, I drove around for half an hour, not really sure where I was or where I was going, and still nothing caught my fancy. Sometimes there's really no choice: I ended up at a Steak n Shake for the first and, I really, really hope, last time in my life. At least the name was funny. I could actually see the place from my hotel,
though reaching it by foot would have meant jaywalking across several lanes of fast-moving traffic—risking my life, in other words. The suburbs were killing me.

Whining downtown snobbery aside, cars really do kill people. Or at least make them sick, because even when drivers can avoid crashing into each other or mowing down pedestrians, our vehicles are not good for our health. Traffic noise isn't just annoying—according to a report by the Toronto Board of Health, it may increase blood pressure, disturb sleep patterns, impair learning in children and can even lead to depression. But the assault on our ears is mild compared to what the air is doing to us. The bad news starts with that delightful new-car smell: some of the plastics and other materials, as well as the paints, glues and sealants in an automobile's interior give off chemicals that may cause throat irritation, kidney or liver damage or even cancer. But the air outside is an even graver concern. In addition to emitting greenhouse gases, cars and trucks spew carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulphur oxides and fine particulate matter. After Atlanta limited traffic during the 1996 Summer Olympics, the resulting 28 percent reduction in the concentration of ozone led to a drop of between 11 and 14 percent in the number of children who needed medical attention for acute asthma symptoms. Similarly, hospitals near Buffalo, New York, and Fort Erie, Ontario, saw fewer people with respiratory diseases in the days following September 11, 2001, because of a 50 percent cut in traffic across the Peace Bridge. And a Toronto Public Health study linked 440 deaths and 1,700 hospitalizations in the city each year to air pollution generated by cars and trucks.

As bad as the air is, our “car first, exercise last” attitude is worse. Just as it's healthier to eat an apple that might have been sprayed with pesticides than to scarf down a Krispy Kreme donut, for most people it's better to stroll in bad air than to get no exercise at all. And yet we're raising a generation of kids that never walks or cycles. They take it for granted that, as the title of the
popular parenting guide
Get Out of My Life, but First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall?
suggests, the only way to get anywhere is by car. Children who walk or cycle short distances become more active and less automobile-dependent. Aside from increasing stamina, alertness and academic performance, physical activity improves kids' overall health and fitness while reducing the chances they will be obese.

Since 1979, obesity has more than doubled in the United States. The rate is now over 32 percent and cheap gas is one of the culprits. When fuel prices rise, more drivers opt to walk, bike or take transit, expending more calories than if they'd simply sat in their cars. People also have less disposable income to eat in restaurants, most of which overserve their patrons. (Some fast-food burgers contain close to 2,000 calories, while the average homemade one comes in at about 420 calories. In addition, restaurant meals are often much higher in fat and sodium, which most of us are already getting too much of.) When Charles Courtemanche of Washington University in St. Louis looked at the relationship between obesity and gasoline prices, he concluded that a one dollar per gallon increase in the cost of gas would lead to a 15 percent drop in the American obesity rate.