The Price of Portability

   Technology in the automotive world has risen exponentially in the past few years. The newest addition to the burst of technology is the ability to turn your car into a Wi-Fi hotspot. I’m sure it’d be a great way to impress your colleagues or unsuspecting friends, but in the real world, is it worth the extra money? Dodge offers Mopar Web for the majority of its new vehicles. The price to add it for a 2013 Dodge Dart is $412.00 not including the required subscription. That’s a lot of money to fork over for a mobile Wi-Fi device.

   Walking around the campus of my college, all I see is students and adults on their phone. Conversations no longer take place face to face, but virtually. Twitter, Facebook, and other atrocious forms of social media have become the prime tool for communications. I’m sure Dodge realized this necessity to continue Twittering and Facebooking during long road trips and now offers it to customers. Christopher Brudick at Automoblog.net stated that, “Wi-Fi for integrated systems (traffic data, weather, streaming music, etc.) is fine. But using a car as a hotspot…BAD idea.”

    In car Wi-Fi faces a massive speed bump when considering the actual act of driving. Texting and driving has become an epidemic in recent times. Imagine when an 18 year old gets their hand on a car with Wi-Fi built into it. They will surely use that as an excuse to check their Facebook and Twitter updates regularly.

   Should all of the blame fall in the laps of Dodge’s engineers? Of course not, they’re just trying to set their car apart from everything else. However, they should’ve kept their target audience in mind. Their website has a picture of an adult with a laptop. I get it, Americans work a lot and they work very hard. But, do you really need to be working on the way down to grandpas and grandmas house? No, in reality, you don’t. 

   Social media has destroyed the family dynamic that Americans once had. I would hate to take my family on a trip where my wife is working on her laptop and my kids are busy checking their social media statuses. Having Wi-Fi in cars has negatives that drastically outweigh the positives. The implementation of Wi-Fi technology in vehicles would create a distraction for the driver and passengers, ruin family dynamics, and take away from the joy of driving. Overall Wi-Fi in cars is a terrible idea.