Guest Post: The Future of In-Car Entertainment

Once upon a time, FM radio, tape players and occasional games of ‘I spy…’ were pretty much the only options available in the field of in-car entertainment. Today’s consumers who’ve become accustomed to near constant access to an entertainment matrix of smartphones, laptops, mp3 players and HD TVs expect more, and the industry has been forced to come up with some creative solutions to the growing demand for cars equipped with all the means for entertainment a passenger could desire.

HD car seat TVs
The saviour of near-countless anguished parents driving children to far-flung holiday destinations, car seat TVs have been a familiar site on the roads for over a decade, and HD is now the industry standard. However, these cleverly engineered devices may well have become redundant before they ever had a chance to become truly widespread…

Making your car a casino!
The release of mobile devices with the ability to stream videos, play games and do just about anything else you could ask a digital device to do has rendered several other forms of in-car entertainment obsolete. Users who enjoy using south african online casinos can now do so in their cars, turning any luxurious journey into a thrilling casino session, with some glasses of (non-alcoholic!) champagne and a seat-mounted iPad in the back of the car!

A future of endless possibilities
Google’s maverick engineer Sebastian Thrun is currently spear-heading an incredibly ambitious project dubbed ‘Google Chauffeur’, which has already delivered the technology necessary for cars to drive themselves – the driver simply enters their destination details and lets the car do the work! Google Chauffeur-equipped autonomous cars aren’t yet road legal, but they prove that in the not-too-distant future, drivers could have the power to sit back, relax and do whatever they want while their cars drive automatically.

If this technology does indeed become road legal, in-car entertainment will diversify massively, undoubtedly incorporating gaming, in-car cinema and even office functions. Hard as it may be to imagine, even the very activity of driving may too become regarded as a form of entertainment for drivers who have spent most of their time on the road simply being chauffeured – when a nice stretch of road appears on the horizon they’ll be able to switch to ‘manual’ and enjoy a great drive, before switching back to auto-pilot when they reach the awkward city streets.