This Car Does Everything but Drive Itself

Living in New York, I consider it an upgrade when I take a cab instead of the subway, so you can only imagine the cool factor as I cruised the streets in Pioneer's showcase intelligent car. The car, a Scion replete with Pioneer's logoware plastered all over it, turned heads aplenty as we cruised by, but what they didn't see was the state of the art electronics inside the car.

The centerpiece of the car is the AVIC-Z1 built in navigation and entertainment system. It's got all of the advanced text to speech and multiple driving view capabilities, de rigueur in the GPS world, plus a whole lot more.

While I love the portability of my mobile GPS, the Pioneer in-dash system really did feel much more Jetson-like. It did some really cool things like learn the routes I liked to take, offer live traffic updates and rerouting when possible, let me enter multiple way points, and offer a fabulously rich points of interest directory. But mostly I found that having an in-dash, big screen GPS was just easier for me to cast my eyes toward than my mobile GPS, which often finds its way to the floor of the car.

The AVIC-Z1 navigation was just the beginning of the car's swagger. Built into the system are also an iPod controller, DVD, CD, satellite radio, and AM/FM radio. The Gracenote database lets you rip your CD collection and store it on the system's 30GB (20GB is taken up by the GPS software) hard drive with all the proper song information cataloged. Options like a TV tuner, CD changer, Sirius and XM subscriptions, and more are available. My car had four LCD panels, two built in to the back seat for individual movie watching and two that came down from the rear ceiling for connecting to the car's Xbox. There was a built in iPod sleeve and connector and a sleeve for your cell phone. The AVIC's Bluetooth lets you place a voice-activated call to the cell phone, and IBM's voice activation lets you use voice commands in addition to the touch screen. The whole thing blares out through 1000 watt honking speaker system built in to both the front and back of the car.

Those of you wondering how anyone can drive with all that commotion going on will be gratified to know that, as a safety feature, you must have the car in park to do much option changing. Other "moms love this" features include the rearview camera that projects its image on screen whenever the car is in reverse. Those of you who are wondering how much a joyride like this costs should plan on spending about $2,250 for the AVIC plus any add-ons. In New York City, walking is often faster, but this was one sweet drive.

For more on the Pioneer Psion watch this CNet video.