Idea Aided by GM Cash : Car Navigator Finds Way Into Marketplace
To inventors, the automobile industry has long represented the mother lode. Their ideas have ranged from the Simpson gear train of the 1950s, which became the basis for virtually all automatic transmissions, to a harebrained scheme in which a car’s entire passenger compartment would eject in case of a collision and waft gently down to earth under a parachute.
Lately, the backyard tinkerers have given way to physicists and other heavily credentialed sorts whose ideas are rooted in high technology. And one such group has now tapped the ultimate lode--General Motors--with what GM considers the first practical and affordable navigation system for a car.
With the help of a “substantial” infusion of cash from GM and the prospect of much bigger bucks down the road, a Sunnyvale, Calif., start-up company called Etak has brought to market the first self-contained, computer-based device with a small screen that actually shows drivers where they are and where they’re going.
The Affordability Factor
Whether it is “affordable” depends on one’s priorities, not to mention pocketbook. A motorist can have one for $1,395, plus the cost of cassette tapes ($35 each) that contain digitally transcribed maps of major cities. (It took Etak six tapes to “map” the Los Angeles area.)
If it sounds like a yuppie toy, the developers take it more seriously. They’re pushing the “navigator” as a valuable tool for delivery and rental-car fleets, for sales people, realtors and other frequent drivers, and as the basis for other products.
“All the marketing clinics have been very favorable,” said Robert McMillan, director of engineering at GM’s Delco Electronics division in Kokomo, Ind. “We see the most interest among people who make their living finding their way around. “
In about three years, GM expects to install the device in vehicles on the assembly line as the centerpiece of a sophisticated electronic communications system. With GM’s sales of more than 7 million cars and trucks worldwide a year, it’s easy to imagine a royalty windfall for Etak. GM also has warrants to buy 10% of Etak.
Sold in Southland
For now, the navigator is making its way into shops in Los Angeles and San Francisco that sell car stereo systems, cellular phones and two-way radios. As Etak maps other metropolitan areas, a task it expects to finish by the end of next year, it will become available in those communities.
“Certainly we’d expect sales for 1986 in the $10-million to $20-million range,” said George Bremser, former chief executive of Texstar Corp., who was recruited by Etak’s founders to be chairman, president and chief executive.
People have been trying for decades to come up with a navigational system for a car. One early proposal was a road map on a roller that would scroll as the car’s wheels turned. A bell would ring when a certain number of miles had been driven and it was theoretically time to turn.
The auto firms would like to avoid systems that depend on the stars, costly radar systems, easily interrupted radio signals or other approaches normally used for ships and aircraft. The major companies, including GM, are developing navigators that would rely on radio signals beamed from the expanding number of navigation satellites that could pinpoint a vehicle’s location.
So far, there haven’t been enough such satellites aloft to offer a 24-hour system. That will change by the end of this decade. Chrysler, for instance, hopes to combine signals from the navigation satellites with laser disks that can hold far more map detail than other systems like Etak’s--a single laser disk could cover the entire United States with seven levels of maps, scaled as low as 50 square miles. But the satellite approach assumes the development of a satellite receiver that’s small and cheap enough for cars.
Vote Still Out
Donald Gero, manager of electronic product development at Chrysler’s Huntsville, Ala., electronics operations, said “the vote is still out” on which navigation technologies will prevail in the 1990s.
But McMillan said that GM’s Delco Electronics unit, which makes navigation systems for missiles, spacecraft and ships, came to believe that conventional navigation technology “is not suited for the automobile because it has its wheels on the ground. We really must capitalize on that.”
Etak, founded in 1983 by three engineers from SRI International, the Palo Alto research firm, did just that by combining wheel sensors and a compass with a modest computer and the cassette approach to mapping. The result is a “dead reckoning” type of navigation system that doesn’t rely on any outside signals or require any programming by the driver.
“What they were doing closely paralleled what we felt ought to be done,” said McMillan. “We’d been looking at a number of navigation systems when our people heard about Etak. It was a neat way to get a leg up. We feel very confident this is the way we want to go.”
Bremser said Ford and Chrysler also wanted his company’s device, “but GM showed by far the most interest and willingness to act quickly.”
The technical breakthrough, Etak said, was in calculating the navigational algorithms whereby a vehicle’s movements, as measured by the wheel sensors and compass, could be correlated with the map information depicted on the screen. The credit for that goes to co-founder Stanley K. Honey, formerly a navigation expert at SRI and a devoted sailor who has built on-board navigation computers for use in yacht races.
On the dash-mounted monitor, the car is represented by a small stationary arrow. As the car drives, the map shifts on the screen, showing the car passing through intersections, turning and proceeding along clearly marked streets. The driver can zoom the picture in or out for more or less street detail. The screen can also show, with a flashing cursor, the location of a requested address in relation to the car. The computer automatically adjusts for errors and is accurate to within 50 feet, Etak said--about six times more precise than satellite-based systems.
The on-board computer is roughly as powerful as an IBM PC personal computer, meaning it doesn’t have nearly enough memory to hold all the information that, say, a Thomas Bros. map book contains. But by breaking the map information out as tapes that can be used according to which geographic area that the driver is in at the moment, the system lessens the need for computing power--one reason for its relative affordability.
The small tape drive is the type used in the now-defunct Adam home computer. In a demonstration car shown around Los Angeles recently, it was on the floor near the driver’s feet. The screen and the tape drive were connected to the shoe box-size computer in the trunk.
Huge Map Database
To put together the huge map database depicting the entire U.S. road system, Etak hired away the chief designer of the U.S. Census Bureau’s digital map system.
Etak expects to eventually get into the electronic map business, according to Bremser. And next year, it will link its navigator with two-way radios for a vehicle locater system; with it, fleet dispatchers can watch their vehicles’ movements on a central screen. It also plans specialized tape maps that could highlight anything from tourist attractions to Chinese restaurants, and it envisions a way for the navigator to alert motorists to traffic problems.
“In our more grandiose moments, we like to think we’re founding an industry,” said Donald Warkentin, Etak’s marketing director.
Etak and GM won’t say how much money the auto firm has invested. In addition to the warrants to buy into Etak, GM bought exclusive North American rights to the device. GM will lose the exclusivity if the royalties that it pays Etak fall short of a certain level, Bremser said.
He identified the other principal investors as the venture-capital units of Security Pacific and California First Bank and Newport Partners, a venture capital firm in Newport Beach. He wouldn’t say how much they invested, either.
