How to Upgrade Your Car's Dashboard Smarts

LAS VEGAS—Certain, yous might remember connected cars offering all kinds of bells and whistles that your current bucket of bolts can't match. Merely yous'd exist wrong. Invest a few upgrade dollars in your electric current ride, and at that place are several vendors here at CES 2022 that give your automobile a big IQ boost.

We've already discussed how to get a smart assistant in your machine using devices like the Muse Auto kit or the Garmin Speak, but CES brings us several more options, each with their own prepare of capabilities.

Smarter Heads Mean Smarter Cars

Kickoff there are the head units. The ones I liked best were Sony's XAV-AX5000 and Kenwood's DNX995S. Both of these guys are compatible with Android Car, which ways you'll be able to use Google At present, Google Maps, Voice Search, and a whole bunch of apps in addition to using these devices as in-nuance phones. The Kenwood DNX995S is expected to run you $i,500 and will play 192kHz 24-flake FLAC and .WAV files.

CES 2022 bug art The Sony XAV-AX5000's toll wasn't available at the show, but if it follows the residuum of Sony's XAV-AX line, then I'd expect something in the $500 range, especially since it combines Android brains with the ability to play non but high-resolution 96/24 FLAC files, merely too 48/24 .WAV files, generally considered to be superior to CD-quality audio.

The Encephalon to Beat

Those are groovy, but you can get even smarter. In my opinion, the electric current car brain to beat is the Raven, basically a connected car brain in a box based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 SoC. This not bad guy is about the size of an upside down rear-view mirror and mounts to your dashboard. The size might have a piddling getting used to, simply it's really not much bigger than mounting your smartphone to your nuance, and it comes in a much slimmer form factor, besides. It packs a lot into that form gene.

Get-go, it'due south easy to connect as long as y'all can discover the ODB-II connector on your auto—if yous can't, your dealer definitely tin can. That's the only in-vehicle connection Raven needs, and information technology supplies the device with both power and access to your automobile's diagnostic information.

Raven

Once upward and running, Raven also supplies both a cabin-facing and a road-facing camera. The route-facing cam captures everything in front of your car using a 140-caste lens while the inner cam includes night vision and too recognizes gesture commands to some of Raven's functions. Yous tin record clips in a variety of ways, including a very cool time compression format if y'all want to tape the entirety of your favorite route trip. Raven only has 16GB of internal storage out of the box, simply it can take microSD cards and expand that capacity upward to 256GB.

Aside from the cams, Raven too includes GPS, air pressure sensors, and microphones for clear notifications. The ODB-Two connectedness means Raven can display and react to your automobile's telematics in real fourth dimension while its Wi-Fi connection means pairing it to your smartphone is a snap and that same connexion can double equally a Wi-Fi hotspot, too. Raven says it'll be releasing additional functionality using the Android app platform, just for now, information technology can already rails your car's location too as provide crash detection and security alerts.

Raven is $299 ($269 if you pre-club now), and is expected to ship at the terminate of February. While you can walk the floor at CES and hear about continued cars that offering more bells and whistles than the Raven, few if any will be shipping in Q1 of 2022 and none of them will smarten upwards your electric current ride. Nosotros'll exist testing the Raven in an upcoming review, and then stay tuned.