"Boundary pushing" in-car stereo tech is driving me up the wall
Can I flip it over to play side 2?
We’d better make this quick, I’m in a hurry.
I say that to all the gals, you’re thinking. Well, ha ha, but listen, I have places to go, things to do, people to avoid. These shoes won’t walk themselves you know. Yes, shoes.
Let me explain: I lost interest in driving a long time ago, and while I still own a car, I used it primarily as a kind of elaborate metal-and-plastic grey traffic cone (albeit car-shaped) to stop other people from parking in front of my house. I suspect this means I am officially an old git.
Looking back, there was a time when I adored driving, especially in the 1990s. It was fun then. Working full time and long hours on a computer magazine in London, I would commute daily by car for the sheer hell of it. It seemed a boring hour-long schlep at first until I discovered that I could complete the journey in half an hour if I slapped a Shamen cassette into the car hifi…
… or just 20 minutes if I put some Led Zeppelin.
I would park for free on the street, around the corner from Tower Bridge – a dodgy area for sure, but free parking is free parking. Can you imagine trying that today? In two years, the worst thing that happened to my crap fourth-hand car on that street was that some fool once stole the thread-bare, tread-free spare wheel from underneath. Not only did they save me a trip to the dump, there was a half-price sale at Kwikfit that week. Result!
… or at least that’s how I remember it. I felt strongly at the time that the most important aspects of a car (apart from the engine, wheels, etc) were the quality of the in-car stereo and the comfort of the seats. The act of driving and the necessity of transportation were almost incidental.
Arriving at my destination, I would often turn away and take another sling around the block for a few minutes just so that I’d get to the end of Side 1.
More recently I find driving simply annoying. You crawl everywhere at a snail’s pace, cameras are watching you all the time, there’s nowhere to park when you arrive and – here’s the worst bit – persuading a modern in-car stereo to work is a nightmare. No more rummaging through a pile of cassettes on the passenger seat as you hurtle down the motorway and rediscovering a C-60 you thought you’d lost 15 years earlier – the one on which you’d recorded Hazel O’Connor’s Will You over and over again on both sides in a hormonal fit of teenage pique – and slapping it into the player slot with a laugh and a nostalgic flourish.
Indeed, these days you first have to find somewhere to pull over and then you spend the next hour in a skanky dogger’s lay-by trying to connect your fucking phone to your fucking dashboard via fucking Bluetooth, launch a fucking music app, scroll through 15 billion fucking lists and piss around with a fucking EQ system that was evidently coded by a team of fucking programmers who were profoundly fucking deaf.
So you can imagine my joy to learn that Will.I.Am, the multi-talented-at-something-or-other-or-famous-for-whatever-dunno-I’ve-forgotten-wasn’t-he-on-TV-a-lot-me-neither-I-didn’t-know-he-was-still-alive, has been involved in the development of a new kind of vehicle hifi.
Apparently MBUX SoundDrive adapts the music playback to match your driving. Speed up, swing round a corner, rev the engine, and it raises the tempo accordingly. I imagine the music must get quite exciting as you bomb at 70mph over speed bumps. What fun!
Completing the package, it’s also virtually hands-free, which is especially important for Will.I.Am as I expect he needs to use his elsewhere while driving (one to handle the gearstick, the other to hold the tissues). I can hardly wait to get SoundDrive installed. Nipping 300 metres to Aldi on a Saturday morning will never be the same again.
Oh hang on, the system is only for Mercedes-AMG luxury vehicles and the almighty flaccid knobs who drive them. Let me have a quick look outside… Nope, it appears I still own a Clio. Let me look in the mirror… Well, one out of two isn’t bad, I suppose.
Maybe I should be grateful. If you can bear to watch the whole launch video you may come to share my growing doubts about the concept and implementation of the system.
Primary among my concerns is that there are only 16 songs that SoundDrive can play. OK, so that’s 15 more than on my old Hazel O’Connor cassette, but on SoundDrive they’re all by Will.I.Wonka.
Let me tell you, this is a man who raps about “the melody”. If you think that’s clever, come over to my place and I will sing to you about talking. And he wants to “push the boundaries” of driving.
Every time I hear someone say they are going to “push the boundaries” I reach for my gun. I tried to overtake a twat dawdling along at 45mph in the middle lane of the motorway the other week and he kept straying across the white lines every time I drew close. Perhaps that’s what Will means by “pushing the boundaries” while driving. I certainly felt like pushing that bloke into a boundary after 15 miles of trying to get past.
“The car suspension moves like a rhythmical drum” Will raps in the ad – which makes me wonder if he needs to take his Merc in for a service. I once borrowed a clapped-out Renault 5 that did that and my arse was sore for weeks.
Eventually I hope this tech will trickle down to us little guys in our little cars. It will be interesting to put one’s foot down and get 5 seconds of Motörhead before pulling up behind a tractor then having to trundle through the inevitable 20mph zone while your sound system switches to the theme from The Archers.
Kraftwerk, the German electronic music combo, observed that a knackered old car tends to beat its own kind of rhythm as you hammer down the A555 from Cologne to Bonn. That was the concept behind its 70s hit Autobahn. Indeed, the electro-instrumental halfway through the song still reminds me of my Dad’s Austin-Morris, specifically in the way it would squeak and twang and occasionally make alarming cracking noises – even while it was stationary.
Not even imagining how grossly overblown the tech of the future would actually turn out, in the mid-70s the electronic band had charmingly acoustic ideas for their musical futurism. “We put in car sounds, horn, basic melodies and tuning motors,” Ralf Hütter told Uncut magazine in 2016. “Adjusting the suspension and tyre pressure, rolling on the asphalt, that gliding sound – pffft pffft – when the wheels go on to those painted stripes. It’s sound poetry.”
Objectively a very different kind of “sound poetry” than Will.I.Am’s, I might suggest. Personally, I’d deliberately drive into a brick wall at speed if it meant I wouldn’t have to listening to his tiresome self-aggrandising.
But there’s more than musical taste at stake here. I sincerely believe that SoundDrive is 1% entertainment and 99% fan-gadget. It promises to transform the human experience but, ultimately, is hundreds of thousands of lines of code devoted to making some shite rap song have a faster beat and louder bass for the few moments until you reach the next traffic light.
Enough gadgety claptrap has flooded the market for too long already. I don’t foresee SoundDrive joining Furbies and yoghurt makers in offshore landfill just yet but it does feel a bit like The Clapper – you know, that entirely unnecessary 80s device for turning on the lights or shorting out your TV set simply by clapping your hands.
Nobody enjoys a pointless gadget more than me, mind. Put it down to jealousy. I have the hump because I can’t afford a Merc with SoundDrive. It has nothing at all to do with the fact that it’s a load of Clap.
Does anyone have a spare cassette player I can borrow?
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. Back in his days on The Register, he used to duel regularly with the sub-editors over whether he’d be allowed to keep the adverb “cock-sucking” in front of every mention of Will.I.Am. He later admitted this was offensive and childish, and resorted to writing acrostics instead – as you can see for yourself.
Push that boundary! And that’s “… cock.sucking.Will.I.Am!”
Definitely getting to the 'old git' stage.
That aside though, no argument, this is a pointless product.