Rental Cars Begin Offering High-Tech Help to Lost Souls : Technology: They’re navigation screens that plot the ideal route from Point A to B, and this author tried one.

I have seen the future of rental car navigation. It is, like the present, imperfect.

But it has a snazzy display screen; it talks, and if you push the right buttons, you can quickly learn more about where you are than a Thomas Guide will tell you.

The system in question is a satellite-fed, computer-powered gadget now found next to the dashboard in select cars in the rental fleets of Avis and Hertz.

Avis started offering the system in a handful of its rental Oldsmobiles last year, and since has added outfitted cars to its fleets in several major U.S. cities. Rates for outfitted Oldsmobiles run about $48 a day on weekends, higher for weekdays.

Then a few months ago, Hertz quietly started putting the navigation system into hundreds of its Ford Contours, Ford Tauruses and Lincoln Town Cars in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Orlando, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, New York and Washington, giving customers a free chance to test the new units. Meanwhile, at least one other rental company, National, has been testing a comparable feature in Detroit and Atlanta. The next step comes Oct. 1, when Hertz starts charging customers an extra $5 a day to rent the few hundred cars that carry the feature, putting its weekend rates for an outfitted Ford Taurus at roughly $43 daily. Again, weekday rates are higher.

These systems are a great boon to the directionally impaired and someday, the optimists say, they could become as popular as cellular phones. Under the system used by Hertz and Avis (devised in part by Rockwell International in Seal Beach), we drivers still do the steering, accelerating and braking, but the guidance system gives an instant picture of where we are and what we need to do to reach our destinations.

Early this month, I picked up one of the specially outfitted Hertz cars at LAX and took it for a weekend spin.

“There’s a brain that sits in the trunk,” explained Hertz regional vice president Charlie Shafer. The display was a screen mounted on an adjustable stem just to the right of the steering wheel, the monitor face was about 4 inches by 6 inches. (The software in Los Angeles-based cars includes maps for most of California, and Las Vegas.) Once you’ve pressed the red button to turn it on, the system is largely self-explanatory. Shafer said Hertz expects business travelers to be Neverlost’s best customers. But vacationers alsocould gain a lot from the system.

To get directions, you key in the city and the address or the cross-streets of your destination. Combining the data, the Neverlost screen displays your vehicle as a moving cursor-like triangle on the screen, following a highlighted path through the grid. It also tells you, down to a 10th of a mile, the distance to your next turn.

First I bade Shafer farewell, then asked my navigator to get me from the airport to Highland and Willoughby avenues in Hollywood. In a few seconds, the computer had an 11-mile route via La Cienega Boulevard. Except for the one lane briefly closed for roadwork, no problem.

Seeking directions, you can specify the “fastest” route, a freeway route or a non-freeway route. When your turn approaches, the device pipes up with a beep and a voice offers brief instructions: “right turn ahead” or “left turn followed by right turn” if you’re approaching a couple of turns in rapid succession; even “please make a legal U-turn,” if you’ve overshot a turn. Sometimes the voice speaks up 50 yards before your turn, sometimes 10 yards. My favorite feature of Neverlost was its ability to recalculate: If you stray from the chosen path, you can hit the “enter” button again, and without recriminations, the computer calculates a new path beginning with your current position.

The worst glitch arose when I turned onto Fairfax Avenue, but my cursor slipped over to Orange Grove, a parallel side street one block to the east. It was easy enough to manually scoot the cursor over to proper position, which I did after a few blocks, but such uncertainty on tightly laid-out streets could easily befuddle an out-of-towner.

Next came the narrow, winding, occasionally truncated and gated streets of the Hollywood Hills. Except for misreading one fire road as a public street near the Hollywood Reservoir, Neverlost reliably delivered me and my wife first to an address in Laurel Canyon, then to a Ventura Boulevard eatery, then to the end of the Mulholland Highway, and finally tracing an escape route down to North Beachwood Drive. These weren’t always the routes we would have chosen, but they were comparable alternatives.

Compared to that, the route to Death Valley was easy. We and our two passengers worried at first, because neither Death Valley nor the nearby towns of Shoshone, Barstow and Baker were listed in the Neverlost catalogue of cities. But once we’d found Death Valley in the monitor’s list of regional points of interest, the route popped up and we were sailing along the 10, the 15, the 127 and the 190.

On the way back to the city, we consulted an old-fashioned road map and devised a final challenge: We abandoned the highway for a county-road shortcut shown on the map through remotest Inyo County. This was an old road, but no one had told our computer about it, which made us pioneers on the monitor, our cursor bravely tracing a new purple line, pixel by pixel. across the black void of the desert. Happily, when we returned to the grids of civilization about half an hour later, our cursor faithfully followed.

Reynolds travels anonymously at the newspaper’s expense, accepting no special discounts or subsidized trips. To reach him, write Travel Insider, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053.