(KRT)—Nobody, it seems, wants to just gaze at the open road anymore.

The humble motorcar has recently morphed into a digital nerve center with all manners of electronic gadgetry for navigation, communication and entertainment.

Go into an electronic store and you’re besieged with car-tech options including satellite-navigation gear, iPod-friendly audio systems, wireless cell-phone setups, back-seat DVD and video-gaming gear, satellite radio, and even satellite TV.

If you have money to burn, electronics experts will even create customized car-tech systems for each of your cars.

Holy Mobile Digital Hub, Batman! What’s going on here?

“Anything that people do at home (with technology), they want to do in the car,” said Megan Pollock, a Consumer Electronics Association spokeswoman.

And it’s not just younger males trying to impress their pals. It’s business people and even moms.

Tom Lininger, installation manager at Ultimate Electronics in Roseville, Minn., has been in the thick of car-tech trends since 1982, and says that laptop computer stations are in.

He has worked on some pretty wacky projects. One guy wanted an Xbox video-game console installed in his Audi, but the console wouldn’t fit as is. Lininger took it apart placing its hard drive and electronic guts under a seat, installing its disc drive where the ashtray usually goes and situating built in dual displays into the dash and center console.

David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, has studied auto-gadget trends and thinks he knows what is causing this tech push. Motorists are trying to compensate for being bored, he said.

The hugely popular iPod has become a car-tech favorite in recent years as hardware purveyors of all kinds have scrambled to make the iconic device part of the motoring experience.

Video is big, too. Parents have kept kids entertained for a while now with back-seat video displays hooked to DVD players or gaming consoles.

For safety, in-car video displays can’t legally be installed where drivers are able to see them. Some entertainment and navigation systems have extra safeguards to keep them from being used by those at the wheel in moving autos.

Car-gadget overload will continue to increasingly raise safety concerns.

In tests Strayer and others have run, drivers older than 21 aren’t dangerously distracted by radios, audio books or chats with passengers. But talking on a cell phone makes a driver four times as likely to crash. Text messaging is bad, Strayer said. And navigation systems that require drivers to look away are also dangerous.

“An awful lot of driving is uneventful and safe, and it lulls people into thinking they can do more,” said Kathy Swanson, traffic-safety director for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety. “But there is that much less capacity to react when something does happen.”

Sifting through the data gives Swanson reason to be hopeful. It seems that every generation, beginning with the one that used AM radios, has been fingered as most likely to suffer death by distraction. Yet the percentage of accidents caused by distracted drivers has remained relatively unchanged through the decades.

Types of distractions change, Swanson said, but the number of drivers who succumb to them apparently does not.

© 2005 St. Paul Pioneer Press