Forget the Bermuda Triangle. Ever tried getting from Shinagawa to Chiba by road? Well, you have the WanGan (Tokyo Bay route) if you like a jam, or how about trying to find the new UmiHotaru tunnel? Don't bother; getting to the entrance is hell, as inadequate signs and the Thunderbirds- esque industrial drabness surrounding Haneda Airport and the go-nowhere loop roads circling the runway itself conspire to propel the uninitiated round and round the tunnel's entrance, but not, it seems, into it.

So, driving in Tokyo can send you round the bend. but imagine if you had a wise and calm counselor with you who would patiently guide you to the next turn, through a difficult junction, and put up with your mistakes.

DaimlerChrysler's Intelligent Traffic Guidance System (ITGS) does just this, providing an in-car voice guidance system in the guise of a female voice who - at the press of a button - can explain to an irate driver just where to go.

Superficially, ITGS looks like an ordinary car navigation (car nabi in Japanese) unit. But there's much more. Map data, for example, continually updates itself, showing one-way streets, roadwork sites, and traffic flow, all automatically programmed into the unit's auto route-planning function. What really distinguishes ITGS from normal CD-ROM- and DVD-driven car nabi units is its information links. Want a stock market update? Press a button and up it comes, along with weather flight and travel details, train timetables, parking information, restaurant and leisure events listings, and, dare we say, police speed and alcohol checks. If you go left instead of right, Ms. ITGS takes about 10 seconds to gently get you back on the right track. And if you crash, the system's E-Call emergency service automatically contacts rescue services for you.

No, she hasn't got a name, and no, we are not incompetent, maintains ITGS' designer, Eiichi Nakayama. "We designed this system to cope with the most confused drivers; especially [those] who are unfamiliar with the roads and can't read the signs," he says. Nakayama hesitates to call the ITGS "foolproof," but the system makes it functionally impossible to be lost for more than about 15 seconds.

What makes ITGS tick is a dedicated 9.6Kbps mobile telephone and adapter link to the Advanced Traffic Information Service (ATIS) center located in Hibiya. This - the result of a public-private consortium between NTT and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in January 1997 - is part of an alliance between DaimlerChrysler (DC), Bosche, Matsushita, and Denso to make cars more intelligent, says DC's Isato Mochida. "First comes the navigation units, then comes the services. Unit sales of navigation systems here are a magnitude of order bigger than in any European country. When you start approaching sales of a million units (as did Japan last year), you are entering another world," he says. With navigation almost standard equipment, the big question then is what comes next? Naturally, its navigation-based information systems.

Smarter cars

At JPY300,000 as an accessory - or standard on E- and S-Class models - ITGS might seem little more than another executive toy. Actually it's just the tip of a recent wave of smart communication and information provision systems rolled out by Nissan, Honda, and Toyota over the last 18 months that are beginning to exploit the car nabi terminal's potential.

Nissan wants to add the personal touch, explains Yuji Nakajima, managerial specialist at Nissan's Intelligent Transport (ITS) Systems Development Group. "There are two ways car information systems can develop. One is navigation and the other is leisure. We have to think about the fact that the driver can be flooded with information, so we should make the system safe as well as convenient," he says. Nissan's answer is to patch the driver through on a direct voice link to some twenty operator staff at its Yokohama-based information center, the human face of their Compasslink Information Service, a 52 percent Nissan-owned subsidiary. Other owners include Hitachi, Matsushita, and NTT.

"Imagine you're hungry. You connect to the operator and ask her for a medium-priced sushi bar near you. She'll access the data from our local IP providers (which include Pia), tell you your choices, and/or download them into your navigation unit, depending on your selection." Like ITGS, Compasslink works through a mobile telephone adapter linked into the local NTT Tuka (mobile) and other public mobile networks. A mike mounted in the driver's side pillar works through a data link converter offering 4.8Kbps of voice and data, connecting the driver and the (Hitachi subsidiary) Xanavi Infomatics-provided nabi unit. Unlike ITGS, Nissan doesnŐt operate in English. Nonetheless, "it's like having a personal secretary in your car !" says Nakajima.

While the voice link also avoids having to stop the car and click through a series of menus to download information, Nissan feels its award-winning stereoscopic Birdview Navigation system, which provides a visually pleasing three-dimensional GUI, is a key sales point. "The navigation unit is the key gateway technology for multimedia services in the next millennium," says Nakajima. "But Compasslink still keeps the human touch," he adds.

Honda, meanwhile, is boosting its car navigation units by hooking them to the Internet. Beginning July this year, its InterNavi System service - offered by a consortium formed last June between Honda, Sony, and Pioneer - uses the Internet to provide driver-tailored websites. This results in a mixture of what Honda calls "drive planning" and entertainment information being provided to car navigation units connected to its Internet Information Center based at Saitama. Like the previous units, InterNavi provides an information service on a standard 9.6Kbps link through a mobile telephone device, but InterNavi also boasts a Windows-compatible flash memory PC card, enabling drivers to download information from their home PC and program it into the navigation unit.

Honda has also gone for low cost; you can pick up the navigation unit - including modem, hands-free access unit, and the flash card - for around JPY70,000.

Last but not least, Toyota has weighed in with its Monet system, initially rolled out in November 1997 in three cities, and now extended nationwide. Value-added features include real time visual images of road conditions and e-mail reception for JPY500 per month (excluding telephone charges) on top of a JPY2,500 yen setup fee. "It's extremely cheap and we think this is only the beginning," says Satoshi Nagao, general manager of Toyota's Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) Planning Division. More on this later.

Mean drivers

But of the potential 75 million subscribers (the number of private cars in Japan), as of March 1999, Honda had attracted a grand total of 700, Compasslink a mere 1,000, and Monet only 5,000 customers. While traditional car nabi systems have boomed, the new car nabi plus devices have, well, so far, gone bust. It's making the men from the motor trade defensive. "We are not satisfied," admits Nissan spokesperson Nobuhiro Hayashi, who rather illogically blames the economy. Honda says that the system's cost is still perceived as too high by its target market of GenX 20-somethings, according to spokesperson Kunio Tanaka. More realistically, says Nagao, the poor showing is likely the result of the primitive 9.6Kbps download speed. This year's scheduled launch of next-generation mobile telephone services (CDMA-1) is expected to help the car nabi market. Toyota, for one, hopes that many of Japan's mobile phone users will discard their old phones in favor of the new ones and that drivers will update their navigation systems. (See: "Hello I-Mode" in the April CJ - Ed.)

Nobody would reveal to CJ how much these systems cost to develop, but the price tag was certainly huge, says Takashi Yoshina, manager of Mitsubishi Motors' Technical Administration Department. Hence MMC and other second-tier auto makers have been reluctant to join the fray. "Deploying driver services will become an essential feature of ITS, but we are reluctant to commit investment until there is real evidence of strong customer demand," he says. Instead, MMC is playing a waiting game, as is Suzuki. "We think driver services are important," says Suzuki's Michiya Horikoshi. "But we just don't have the resources of the bigger companies to develop those systems yet. It's something for the future, though," he adds.

The Long and Winding Road towards the car PC

So far, so bad. But high development costs and poor results have not dimmed Japan's denki (electronic) manufacturer's enthusiasm to move ahead into sophisticated next-generation multimedia services, and to start development of the logical outcome - the car PC. "We're just at the beginning of the bell-curve. Car nabi got popular because of word of mouth. The same will happen to Mobile Broadcasting Corp. (MBC)," says Hiroshi Nakamura, group senior vice-president of Fujitsu's ITS Business Group, referring to the Toshiba-led effort to make the current driver-communication systems look like child's play.

With a powerful conglomerate of companies - including Toyota - backing it, on June 1, 1999, MBC hopes to kick-start and then revolutionize in-car multimedia in the latter half of 2001, according to Masaaki Igarashi, senior manager of MBC's Business Development Department. MBC plans no less than to beam TV programming, CD-quality music and a welter of quick access download info with its S-band 256Kbps, 30-channel broadcasting service, direct from a satellite and backed up by a ground-based gap filler service for those drivers who finally do manage to find the Hotaru Tunnel.

It's a challenging concept, admits Igarashi. Toshiba and Toyota will support the system, combining Fujitsu's communication and Matsushita's car nabi technology together with Matsushita's extensive experience with DirecTV and car nabi. Nippon Television and FM Tokyo will supply the initial programming. While MBC expects JapanŐs Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications to OK the service this summer, MBC is still working out details with Tokyo-based Japan Satellite systems (which provides SkyPerfectTV) and undisclosed satellite makers of the required space hardware.

Back in the driver's seat

So how about the consumer? Igarashi and MBC believe the rising tide of digital broadcasting services will also lift MBC services into a bright future. About 1.5 million people so far have bought into SkyPerfecTV and DirecTV, but MBC is also counting on NHK's 2000 relaunch of its DBS services, this time using '90s technology on the BS-4b satellite. They're also relying on that particular bird's potential 10 million customers. The point is, says Igarashi, that you can't strap a 45 cm antenna to your roof to pick these services up, so MBC will fill the gap. And, just in case, the consortium will offer the services at bargain prices; the receiving gear will cost JPY30-50,000 and the monthly subscriptions will start at a (low) fee of JPY1,500 yen. The JPY5 billion capitalized-MBC calculates it needs 1.7-2 million takers to make a profit.

If it works, Nissan's prediction about the ordinary old car nabi might come true sooner rather than later. That's exactly what car audio and nabi maker Clarion is pressing for with its open-platform super nabi, which it is dubbing as Japan's first car PC. Clarion has been taking a close look at MBC and systems like Monet, says the company's general planning division manager Hidetoshi Mochizuki, and has concluded that an auto PC will sell. "At the moment customers don't want to pay extra for information, but as multimedia penetrates, they will want to. And car multimedia in Japan is going to be very, very advanced," he says.

Clarion's main idea is to rework the $1,300 US version of its parent company's PC (launched in the US in December 1998) for the Japan market by late 2000. Looking suspiciously like an old-fashioned, '80s style Blaupunkt AM/FM tape cassette car radio, Clarion's auto PC will in fact be a Windows CE-based, voice-activated do-anything multimedia console which will do the nabi, access the Net, and display TV, and further be capable of down/uploading data via infrared links with Windows CE-family palmtop and laptops. "Things are due to get very complicated. We're at the product-planning stage with Microsoft Japan and other software vendors I can't tell you the names of. The main points are that it will look very simple, but as it'll be built on a USB bus, you can add a printer or a mouse, do Video on Demand, car karaoke, or check your e-mail. It will be an all-in-one solution!" says Mochizuki.

Or maybe not, because as Clarion presses ahead, the reality is that most car manufacturers in the world hate Windows CE. In fact no less than Ford, General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, Nissan, Toyota, and Renault have formed the Automotive Multimedia Interface Consortium, or AMIC, to keep Bill Gates from getting into our cars. Now that's another story ..

Paul Kallender is a Tokyo-based science writer.