What and how would you an iPad Classic Car Magazine to be?

The Apple iPad is quite a famous gadget and after many companies missed the hype around the iPhone lots of media companies are investing into iPad applications to be part of the game this time. Wired for example set some sort of a benchmark.
As we are thinking about bringing a zwischengas-iPad-application sometimes during 2011 we are wondering what the features would be that iPad users would look for. Of course the App needs to make use of state-of-the-art multimedia, i.e. sound, video, images, but that's probably not enough. It must be more than a website with different navigation patterns and controls, right? But what exactly?

Forgotten car accessories - the antenna

Many of you will still remember the times when, after buying a car, you went to a car supplies store and you bought an antenna to mount on your car. For this you had to drill a hole into the body and fix the antenna to the car. That was in the sixties and seventies. Many of these mostly manual telescopic antennas were later replaced by automatic telescopic antenna, offering the comfort of automatic activation when you turned on the radio. In the 80ies we started to install GSM phones of the first generations into our cars and an additional antenna was needed. With every new GSM generation typically also a new antenna was needed. In the nineties then and later the different antennas were consolidated and today they usually come with the car as standard equipment. At least me, I haven't installed an antenna lately. And nobody uses telescopic antennas anymore for new cars. Today they look like shark fins or are integrated into the wind screen of the car.
However, old cars still do have these funny antennas and if it's a manual one that needs a key to get it up then hopefully you received the key when you bought the car. The good thing about these old antennas is that they almost last forever, or at least as long as the car.

Applying Open Source to future classic cars

One key issue that drive many car enthusiasts mad is the risk that cars from the 90ies (some even say 80ies) can't be driven in a few years anymore because there are no spare parts and specialists to fix electronics problems. This is a real thread. Many of the component manufacturers have disappeared and cars become more and more complex, each part depends on other parts to work.
So here's a solution:
Why doesn't Bosch or another one of these electronics manufacturers propose a standard component platform with defined and open interfaces and deliver a sample program code to simulate what we had in cars in the past as Open Source? Car specialists or even manufacturers could take this electronics platform, adapt it to specific cars and alter the control program code to fit the purpose. As many of the car components (i.e. the CAN bus) are standardized already today this should be possible. Thanks to the fact that all code would have to be published again, more and more versions would be available and could be used for many different cars. BMW is trying to do something like this for its older race cars whereas not open source, but at least the direction is right.
So, dear car and electronics component manufacturers, please think about this and start to build a future for many great cars we have today (think Ferrari F40, Aston Martin DB7, TVR 350C, Alfa-Romeo 8C, Porsche Carrera GT, etc.).

Does modern car electronics limit the ability to become a classic car?

There's a heated debate between car enthusiasts whether modern car electronics limits the lifespan of cars after 1980. Bosch announced the CAN bus in 1983 and produced it from 1987 onwards. Since then many different vehicle bus systems have been standardized and implanted into cars. With the bus the previously independent components (i.e. ABS, engine electronics, traction control, etc.) are connected and need to cooperate to make the car work properly. Therefore cars became much more complex as a system. There was of course electronics in cars before the introduction of bus systems, i.e. in the electronic fuel injection (e.g. Bosch L-Jetronic and others), starting in the late sixties and popular in the 70ies and 80ies. But these components were still fairly restricted and in many case can be replaced with simpler systems should there be a lack of spare parts. The problem with "modern" electronics is threefold:

a) Electronic components age and stop to work when connections corrode or individual parts defect.

b) Many manufacturers have disappeared, and even if the manufacturer still exists then there are no spare parts available because the lifetime of many of these components was so short

c) To analyze and diagnose problems you need the right technical equipment and specialist engineers. Often neither this equipment nor the specialists are available.

An interesting example for these problems was recently given by Mario Theissen (former BMW formula 1 team lead) in Auto Motor und Sport. "We once had a Brabham-BMW in Goodwood (must have been in the 80ies, comment from the editor). It took us all the experts of our house to make it run. The problem is electronics. You need to keep the components well maintained as there are no application systems and components available anymore today." Apparently BMW is thinking about building a more modern engine control technology that can be adapted to older racing cars from different time periods to solve the problem.
And this probably will be the solution also for other cars, such as the sports cars and GTs of the 80ies and 90ies to preserve them for the future. There will be a business building such an adaptable and configurable bus system and control electronics. And there will be computer development and tuning environments to configure these systems and even optimize them to be more fuel efficient and environmentally improved. Car owners maybe will have to spend 3'000 or 8'000 Euros to adapt their car, but that's little money if they can continue to use their loved future classic for another 5 or 10 years and create the base for value enhancement over the years.

Two additional thoughts.
What really helps of course is the fact that modern microprocessors are much more powerful than the technology from years ago. With this it will be easily possible to emulate and simulate what has been before.
From a business point of view the effort of reengineering ancient electronics is more viable the larger the volume of cars you can equip. This sort of goes against the notion that the more exclusive a car is the more expensive it can become as a classic. So there will be some trade off here.
But the chances are good that you can continue to drive your BMW M3 E30 until it's a true classic. Let's keep our fingers crossed!