Come the weekend, Minoru Saitoh and his girlfriend Junko jump in Minoru's Honda del Sol and head out of Tokyo. They're not always sure where they'll end up, but they never get lost.
In a country where road signs are few and far between, this is some achievement. But then Minoru and Junko do have digital help.
A liquid-crystal screen mounted on the two-seater's dash displays a colorful road map. A small circle in the center of the screen shows them where they are at all times. A red arrow points in the direction they're traveling.
For novelty-loving Japanese, in-car navigation systems have become a hot item. Their popularity reflects the uniqueness of Japanese car culture. For one thing, most Japanese use their cars for joy-riding rather than commuting. (It has been calculated that if all the cars registered in Japan were to hit the road at the same time, the distance between them would be about four feet.)
A second feature of Japanese car culture is the amount of money that young men like Minoru lavish on cars and electronic accessories. Anywhere else in the world, cars laden with such desirable options would be an open invitation to larceny. But in law-abiding Japan, stealing other people's cars is simply not done.
At 27, Minoru still lives with his parents, even though he holds a high-paying job in a large electronics firm. This arrangement leaves him plenty of cash (plus the incentive to get out of the house on weekends). He spends much of his money on monthly payments for the del Sol and its expensive extras.
The idea of car navigation has been around for at least 10 years. Honda claims to have been the first company to get a navigation system on the road. But the system suffered from one serious drawback - it was irredeemably analog. Introduced as an option for the 1980 Accord, the system bombed.
Clearly, if car navigation systems were to be a success, maps would have to go digital. Digital maps allow error checking and correction. But the cost of digitizing the cartography of an entire country was more than one company could afford. So in true Japanese style, the car companies got together with the electronics firms and - with government blessing - formed the Japan Digital Road Map Association. By 1988, the job was done.
Where to store all the information thus generated? The obvious answer was on compact disc. Four CD-ROM discs are sufficient to hold maps covering all of Japan, at several different scales.
And how do you determine the car's position? In the form of signals from the 20-plus satellites that make up the Pentagon's $10 billion Global Positioning System. Triangulate a fix from any three of these satellites and you know where you are to within 100 feet.
Pioneer has sold 20,000 units of its in-car navigation system. The deluxe version sells for $4,175. In addition to telling you where you are, it can also call up information on nearby restaurants and hotels. And, to distract young drivers from Japan's endless traffic jams, Pioneer has also issued discs containing games, quizzes, horoscopes and the inevitable karaoke.
The cheaper version - a snip at just $1,915 - plays wallet-sized memory cards rather than discs. You need 32 of them to cover the whole country, but at $40 a pop most people tend to buy only two or three.
In Pioneer's wake comes the rest of the Japanese electronics industry. Sony, NEC and Toshiba are just a few of the firms that have recently announced GPS-based car navigation systems.
Will these products become the next wave of Japanese exports to hit the US? Not yet, since most of the US has yet to be digitally mapped. It is an ironic legacy of the cold war that the US should have digital maps for the likes of Novosibirsk, but not for Nevada; for Moscow, but not for Manhattan.
General Motors does have car navigation experiments underway at car rental fleets in Los Angeles and Orlando, Fla. But it will take US firms a few years to catch up with Minoru and Junko.
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Yeah, but will it improve the food? Get yer seat-back service here!
