TVs, VCRs On Board: Are They Worth the Entertainment Value?

Remember when summer family vacations meant playing word games, counting cows or just reading a good book during those long hours in the car?

Those trips could be fun, but parents often had to deal with squabbling siblings and cries of “Are we there yet?”

Today, there is a new dimension to the family road trip. Parents can now wire their vehicles with so many electronic entertainment gadgets and systems that they could drive to the Grand Canyon and back without hearing a peep from the kids.

On-board VCRs and televisions have gained so much popularity that some families have quite literally turned their vehicles into mobile theaters.

Harried drivers might applaud the notion of keeping their passengers happy with video games or movies. But to Robyn Freedman Spizman, author of “Kids on Board: Fun Things to Do While Commuting or Road Tripping With Children” (Fairview Press, 1997), it means a loss of quality time to interact with your children.

“I’m not against high-tech entertainment in the car,” she said. “But if we use it to baby-sit the children, we are missing valuable opportunities . . . for playfulness and teaching our children.

“Memories can be made on wheels. . . . You don’t want them to just remember the videotape they watched from Atlanta to Disney World,” said Spizman, who suggests such traditional alternatives as counting games, books and sing-alongs.

“Four or five years ago, when entertainment systems first came on the market, they were for the very wealthy or imaginative--priced from $1,500 to $3,000 for a stationary system,” said Jim DeFrank, owner and president of California Car Cover Co., a Chatsworth catalog seller of high-end accessories.

But today, affordable VCR and TV systems are making their way into the vehicles of middle-income families. Though movie buffs can still easily spend as much as $8,000 to outfit their vehicles with Surround Sound-equipped video systems, consumers on a budget can also buy portable entertainment systems for about $600 to $700, DeFrank says.

Portable systems offer the additional advantage of removability for parents who don’t want their children watching movies and playing games all the time.

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Screens, by law, must be out of the sight range of the driver, says Nanci Kramer, a spokeswoman for the California Highway Patrol in Sacramento.

Kramer tells the story of a CHP officer who just last week gave a warning to a Los Angeles motorist who was caught watching a basketball game with his son on a small-screen TV while driving.

It’s important that drivers aren’t distracted by what’s on the screen or coming from the sound system, warns Jeffrey Spring, a spokesman for the Automobile Club of Southern California.

“The danger is that a driver would try to watch and get distracted,” he said, likening the risks to that of motorists using cell phones while on the road.

Safety advocate Julie Levinson Vasquez of the National Safe Kids Campaign in Washington further advises that audiovisual equipment should be securely attached so that it does not become a projectile in the event of a crash.

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Jeanne Wright cannot answer mail personally but responds in this column to automotive questions of general interest. Write to Your Wheels, Business Section, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053. Via e-mail: highway1@latimes.com.