Rob Wray from mp3Car takes a more in depth look at all of the features of the 2010 Ford Dewalt. Crew Chief is an optional feature that allows a user to track their fleet of trucks or vans, with information such as mileage, usage, idle time and more.

Rob Wray from mp3Car takes a look at what one can accomplish with a car computer. This truck has a huge LCD in the back of the truck, plus custom keyboard, built in navigation, media player and tons of other tech goodies.

All signs indicate that Google is gearing up to be a competitor of Navteq and Teleatlas by using a combination of StreetView, Crowd sourcing and government data. Google just dropped Teleatlas map data usage in the United States and is now using Google data only. In 2008 Google dropped Navteq for US coverage. Both Navteq and Teleatlas have been rumored to be tough to work with, insist on complicated licensing agreements and are very expensive. Both Navteq (owned by Nokia) and teleatlas (owned by TomTom) are also at heavy conflict with their data licensees because they also produce hardware and compete with their customers like Garmin. Readwriteweb has details of some recent Google changes.

This may make for better tech and lower prices but this still leaves the problem that there isn't a free and open solution. We need a passive, free, open crowd sourced global map solution. Open street maps, Google and others don't offer that.

While we are talking about crowd sourcing and Google, checkout our post on Google Crowd sourcing 3d buildings and map repairs (video below)
Talk about this in our crowd sourced map forums.

Today on Google's blog, Google announced the release of an application called Google Building Maker to crowd source 3d building data. This will pave the way for some really interesting navigation and turn by turn applications. Is this going to be as addictive as Google implies in this video? Talk about this in our map crowd sourcing forums.

• The validation and realignment of 116,000 kilometers (72,000 miles) of secondary roads in the United States, a complement to the existing freeway network already in the database;
• The validation and realignment of approximately 25,000 kilometers (15,500 miles) in Germany, covering the country’s entire freeway network; and
• The addition of more than 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) of new road geometry in Ireland and more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) in Turkey.
• More Details in the press release here.

Navit is an open source turn by turn directions app using the free Open Street Maps.

Rob Wray from mp3Car interviews Artur Seidel from Elektrobit.

Here is the transcript to those two videos:

Hi. My name’s Rob Wray from MP3 Car. We’re doing this video blog today to give you some news. The PND, the Personal Navigation Device, it’s dying. It’s dying fast. I mean Garmin, Tom-Tom, Dash – say your final prayers. Even our beloved car computer has numbered days.

What’s killing them? A deadly virus? No. It’s an infestation. An infestation of millions of cheap globally-available connected devices. Never heard of such a device? Well, I bet you have. You have one in your pocket. This device, your mobile phone, combined with new hardware and software innovations, are allowing you to connect your mobile phone to your car and kill your Tom-Tom. Let’s go take a look.

So I’m sitting in a standard Toyota Scion. This happens to be a fancy aftermarket car stereo, but this could just as easily have been your standard display that came with your Prius or Range Rover or other luxury car. It also could have been a host of aftermarket radios and displays that have built-in video inputs.

Alright, so now that we’re in the car, let’s go through the process. You’ve got a couple steps here, some of which are already done. You take the video cable that you get from the Apple store and you plug that into the video input in the back of your screen. Again, this can happen in any car with a screen. You can go out and get an accessory adapter that takes this video input. So get the cable, plug it into your iPhone. Hack your iPhone which is about a thirty-minute process. There’s tons of websites that explain how you do it, and lots of developers have gotten together and made nice apps that make it really easy to do this

So hack your iPhone. Then you want to install an apps called Screen Splitter, which I’ll link below. Install Screen Splitter. That allows you to duplicate the content of this screen onto this screen. And then you install the app of your choice.

We’re going to do our drive test now with a little app called X-GPS. So both of these apps are in their infancy. They have a few flaws, but they’re really great in showing off this concept of why your Tom-Tom is going to die.

Let’s go for a drive. I’m going to run my Screen Splitter application. So now I’m sharing the video from my iPhone down to the car. I’m going to go ahead and run this little app here called X-GPS. It’s going to automatically tilt because it knows I have the screen in horizontal mode, which is then going to match the mode of the display down below. I’m going to go ahead and turn on my GPS signal. Aaah, I have to use the iPhone touch screen, and I’m going to go ahead and turn on my GPS signal, and off we go.

Let’s go for a drive. You think the most logical choice of applications would be Google maps. It’s built into the iPhone. The problem with Google maps though is that it doesn’t realign itself based on the horizontal position of the iPhone. So you can see that I’ve got maps running up here on top, but it’s displaying in a horizontal format down here. So let’s go take a look at some other apps that work well in the car.

So maybe your next thought is to use Google Earth. Well, Google Earth would be a great option except it crashes when you use it with Screen Splitter. So I’m not quite sure if it’s just there’s too much CPU load and Google Earth shuts off, but don’t use Google Earth. Try an app from a company called Earthscape. Earthscape’s app works great. It loads, it has the follow-me option, and it’s a great overview of where you are, give you some great side imagery while you’re driving around.

So let’s take a quick look at that. They have two modes. They have a pan mode and a follow-up mode which is perfect for driving. Let’s go for a drive.

Another great app I love to use in the car is Pandora. Let’s check this out. So we’ve got some Dave Matthews playing. [Music] You’ve got album art down here. All the Pandora controls on top here. The audio input comes through my device so I can control the audio levels right here on the device. The skip tracks. All these things that you can do with Pandora normally you can do and have it all amplified right here on the big screen.

So YouTube? Yep, that works, too. [Music] So any movie you have on your iPhone can also be played here, too.

Let me guess. You want to know how to get started. Okay. We’re going to need a couple of things. You’re going to need a cell phone that has video output. I happen to have an iPhone 3G, and you can buy this little cable over at the Apple store. It’s a little bit expensive, but it does some nifty things. It takes audio and video out, so this plugs into your iPhone, and this plugs into the audio and video input source in the back of your car.

So then your question is, how do you get audio and video into your car? Well, there’s a ton of aftermarket devices like this one here that’s made by Paq, but almost every car with a video screen has a device like this that you can install in your car and it has video and audio inputs to quickly allow any screen in your car to take the output from your cell phone. So get a cell phone with video output, get a cable, and get one of these adapters, and then you can get video in your car.

Now that we know that the PND is dying, you may ask what is the future of products in your car? Well, to answer that it’s going to be mesh-ups of existing consumer electronics hardware. In my right hand here I have a very simple wireless Bluetooth mouse from Apple. This is one piece of the future. In this hand I have a 7” touch screen, and this is just basically a four-wire resistive touch screen. And so what I think we’re going to see is we’re going to see hardware mesh-ups where electrical engineers and industrial designers mesh these two products together.

So we take the serial output of this touch screen display and we mesh it in with some Bluetooth wireless technology, and now we have a really quick instant aftermarket touch screen modification for your cell phone.

So now you can throw this guy, your cell phone, in your glove box with your video output device and then instead of even touching your cell phone, now you can control you cell phone with this wireless touch screen, so you can take it in and out between cars. It’ll be different sizes of screens manufactured based on what size screen that you have. Eventually multi-touch technology will be implemented in these aftermarket screen accessories. And that is just the beginning of the future.

Mark my word. Your cell phone will kill your Personal Navigation Device. It might take a year or two, but it’s going to happen. There are a million technologists and hackers that are visiting our website monthly that are getting technology like this into their cars.

Join them and help them kill your Tom-Tom and your Personal Navigation Device. This is exciting stuff. Thanks for watching our blog.