Apps like Bing Maps, Waze and MapQuest fight over the crusts, but this market has one king: Google Maps. This era is dominated by web mapping platforms - which have put the world inside people’s pockets. Navigation made obvious use of the medium’s bristling technology and inbuilt GPS functions. Amsterdam-based TomTom, originally a B2B applications company, pivoted their focus onto PNDs, and became a household name alongside US company Garmin.Īnd lo, then came smartphones and apps. Portability becomes vogueīy the turn of the century, market weight was shifting toward portable navigation devices (PNDs), which allowed consumers to buy road navigation separately from their cars. Mitsubushi added a GPS system to its 1992 Debonair model, and BMW released the first European model with GPS: the BMW 7 series. Toyota introduced “Electro-Multivision” GPS inside the Toyota Soarer, featuring an attractive 6-inch color LCD screen. Mazda may have been the first, but GPS soon became an industry buzz, with several carmakers piling on. Reviewers at the time remarked that it took just nine seconds for the screen to zoom in, which is as amusing as it is unrelatable. Eunos Cosmo became the first production car with a built-in GPS navigation antennae system, which Mazda claimed was accurate to 45 meters. The ‘90s saw commercial car navigation heat up. So a few years later, Ford piloted SD cards in their MyFord Touch system. But CDs could only map a limited area, while taking up space in the car. Afterwards, fellow countrymen Alpine released their version of CD navigation using GPS satellites. These informed the dead reckoning system inside Toyota’s Crown Royal Saloon G, available only in Japan. It used dead reckoning-a navigational technique that orients itself with fixed positions, measuring distance and direction traveled from these positions.Īt the end of the decade, Japan pushed CD-ROM routing technology. Nicknamed ‘Homer’, after a tracking device from James Bond, it was quite the gadget: a modified IBM PC integrated into the glove compartment, a large disk for map data, all displayed on a flat screen. Steven Lobbezoo developed the first commercially available satellite navigation system for cars in Germany. But for all its technical prowess, it remained a niche product, shifting only a few thousand units. This dallied with a digital compass mounted in the car, and two wheel sensors fitted to the non-driven wheels. It used geocoding, meaning it could reference a street address with a latitude/longitude point. The forerunner of the GPS came in 1985, with the Navigator from Etak. There was nothing portable about it -to receive positional information it needed to be hardwired to a modified car transmission. It wasn’t quite GPS, but instead used an ‘inertial navigation system’, or gyroscope that was sensitive to both rotation and movement. Enter Honda Electro Gyro-Car, in many ways an updated version of the Avto. With moving paper, glass lenses and brass housing, these systems carried a certain post-Victorian quaintness.įast-forward a half century to the 1980s, when digital modernity began dripping into consumer homes and cars. The best documented example is the Iter Avto device, into which the driver would load scrolls depicting fixed routes. These used simple rotary technology to feed directions to the driver. Against this backdrop, early inventions like the Jones Live Map and Baldwin Auto Guide represented a quirky lunge into modernity. Streets were often poorly signposted and barely lit. Analogue to digital, fixed to portableġ00 years ago, motoring was a novel but jagged experience. This article plots the rise of in-car navigation from novelty invention to ubiquity. Navigation continues to be developed by market winds, such as customization. Today, they’re background characters in our busy lives - obedient, omniscient friends who always know the best route. The navigation technology that lives in our smartphones and dashboards might seem young, but is the crystal of centuries of exploration and cartography, technical tinkering and commercial competition.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |