Phil online

Well, I’ll tell you why not: Money and Time

Don’t get me wrong. I love the carputer in my minivan. It’s great for the kids, watching movies ripped from DVD or extracted from Tivo. It’s great for my wife who now has an MP3 player with all her CD’s ripped into it. It’s great for me with its color GPS navigation and magic routing. But that is the passenger car.

In my car where I’ve been planning to install Carputer-II, it doesn’t make much sense. I can’t watch movies in my car, I rarely have passengers, and I don’t take it on long trips. I mostly just drive to and from work (30 minutes each way). I already have an MP3 player in the car; I have a GPS with roadmaps; I even have internet on my cellphone. Is it worth $500 and several hours of my time to upgrade to color touchscreen updated maps with voice prompting?

Probably not.

I didn’t understand how people could say (as they sometimes do), “I’ve decided not to install this carputer so…” Why the hell not?, I’d scream in my head. But I always knew the answer.

Money and time. And ROI.

I don’t know if I’ll finish Carputer-II. I haven’t really started it, except for planning. And this is part of the planning process. This is what you might call a feasibility study.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 27th, 2005 at 9:40 am and is filed under Carputer, Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.