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Saab's Factory AS3 System comprises of a double-din head unit, CD Multichanger and Amplifier, all of which works well with the car and is fine on short journeys.
It is not until you embark on a longer journey that you start to realise the limitations of such a system. Having 10 CD's to hand (11 if you count the in-dash unit) may sound like and endless choice but let's say a CD gives you 75 minutes of music: 75mins x 11 CD's = 825 mins, which equates to 13 hours, 45 mins. Sounds a lot? Think how many hours you spend in your car each day. A reasonable commute to work and back would be perhaps just over an hour or so? - that's 11 days (or two working weeks) "So change the CD's" I hear you say! Except if you're like me, you don't think about changing the CD's until you're sat in the car on your way to work - d'oh! |
There's nothing worse than starting a long trip out with the family at the weekend when it dawns on you that you're facing four hours listening to the music you've been listening to all week on your commute to the office - aaaaargh! So I started to think about upgrading my dull head unit to something with more capacity. I looked into in-dash head units with mp3 capability. Not bad, but it didn't really give me that much more capacity, and there would always be the problem of searching that single line display for a particular track. Hang on? I have a PC in the house that has hundreds of CD's stored in MP3 format. Maybe I can put some sort of hard-disk attachment to the in-dash unit? I've previously driven from Manchester to Athens without once looking at a map - just at a satnav system. I'd always wanted one for my car after that. £2000 seems a lot of money for a moving map though! So... a vast array of music in MP3 format, satellite navigation, perhaps a hands-free phone kit. That's a lot of devices to put in a car. It's also a lot of expense and will probably look silly with all these boxes. It would probably be cheaper to put my computer in the car. Hang on! a PC in a car! It would be cheaper. It could do more. So why not! And so my CarPC project was born... |
