Best car tech at CES

Apart from driving in the dark, there were other car technologies, unveiled at this year's Consumer Electronics Show at Las Vegas. One of these was voted the best car tech at CES by CNET...

CNET

Our winner in the car tech category was Dash Navigation's Dash Express, which takes GPS navigation to the next level. With its two-way connectivity--giving it access to other Dash units--as well as its preprogrammed, historic traffic-flow data, Dash Express has the potential to provide drivers with real real-time traffic information. Its Yahoo Local search gives drivers access to a points-of-interest database as big as the Web itself, and Dash throws in neat features such as the ability to search for gas stations by fuel price and for movie theaters by showtime.

Dash Express is the first portable navigation system to have built-in two-way connectivity (cellular and Wi-Fi), giving drivers access to a whole new world of information via the Internet and the network of other Dash-connected users. The system display real-time traffic data, which comes from the network of other Dash drivers, while Web connectivity gives drivers a points-of-interest database served up by Yahoo Local, with whom Dash announced a partnership last week.
First, the system comes preprogrammed with historical traffic flow data for all major roads, so it has an idea of what the road conditions are like in the area during all times.

The advantage of the Dash Express system is that you have access to all the resources of the World Wide Web.

In addition to these functions, you get all the standard navigation features, such as turn-by-turn directions including text and voice guidance (no text-to-speech functionality in the first iteration), and as a bonus, all map and POI updates are done automatically and over the air, so you don't have to do a thing. Dash Express will be available in March, and we hear that it will be priced "competitively with other high-end navigation systems," which means that it will likely be in the $600 to $800 range.