Remember 007 car controlled by phone? Now Rinspeed has car run on iPhone

Gotta do any Bond related stories of course. And I spotted a funny story on CNN from the Geneva car show, that there is a car that is controlled with an iPhone. Not fully, it still has a steering wheel etc, but the electric car, made by Rinspeed, does substitute the car key for an iPhone and then uses the iPhone touch screen for some of the controls, such as turning the car on (the start button). There is a story about it with a picture for example at Swiss Info. Gimmicky yes, but how far now is the real remote control car that runs on a mobile phone?

Our fave spy has often foreshadowed technology development, from the futuristic moving map in Goldfinger in 1964, that seemed totally inconceivable, yet is now totally replicated in GPS; to the first case of person-to-person text messaging as far as I know, in 007 the Spy Who Loved Me and the most memorable 007 opening scene - where the skiing Bond leaps off a cliff, and then has a parachute in his backpack (the actual jump was not a movie trick, there was a real professional skiier-jumper who did the trick dressed up as Bond). But yes, the command to Bond, that led him down that mountain with killers shooting at him, started in a Swiss ski cottage, where he was cuddled with a Bond Babe, and he received a printout text message to his watch.

I remember thinking of that idea back in 1977 that it was one of the dumbest gadgets Bond had ever had, and then two decades later I too was hooked onto SMS text messaging. 007 often has showed us the way.

So yes, in 1997 Bond drove a big BMW that had the remote control drive ability, via an Ericsson smartphone. Now we are a little over a decade after that point, and there is a prototype car that is controlled by a smartphone. While the iPhone with the Rinspeed needs to be plugged in, this is also no big jump to turn that into bluetooth capable and offer the driver the chance to do remote control things with his car too. Now only a matter of time..

And clearly Switzerland based Rinspeed is a car maker whose owners must be big Bond fans too. They earlier released a car that could not only float like a boat (many cars have done that) but was also able to dive - like Bond's Lotus Esprite (also seen in Spy Who Loved Me).

And car makers? Like credit card companies, are discovering mobile. Like the wonderful South Koreans say, if you ask them where is the next internet, they won't say like most experts in the West say, that the next internet is on mobile - because that is where Korean internet already is - for them the next internet is now in the car..  Its all the power of McGuire's Law - the utility of any service or product increases with its mobility. Now we combine two of the most mobile devices, the car and the mobile phone. Of course! And James Bond showed us the way twelve years ago..    

Comments

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