Motoring Middle East: Car news, Reviews and Buying guides

Where do you listen to music most? Bet it’s in your car

By Shahzad Sheikh

What are the most important features in your car? Apart from the obvious controls required to actually drive it of course.

Air Conditioning/Climate Control is a must to you I’ll wager, and I’ll bet you like your leccy windows. A sat-nav is nice, and head-up displays are really cool. Safety stuff is all worthwhile, because it, well, it keeps you safe.

But I bet the single most important luxury feature that most of you can’t live without (okay, second to the air-con) is the car stereo.

Volkswagen Middle East has just put out a survey revealing that 60% of ‘young people’ living in the UAE prefer listening to music in their cars – I’d agree with that apart from the ‘young people’ bit. I believe we all fall in that category – or do they mean young at heart?

So impressed are they with their findings that they’re even running a competition – ‘Your Music, Das Auto’ – where you download a beat (it’s actually Morse code for Volkswagen) from the VW Middle East Fastbook page and create your own song composition to go with it. The winner will get to be in their own music video.

Over at Mini, they recently spent a whole afternoon (see story here) telling us about their new connect system, a key feature of which seems to be a total integration of your iPhone into the car’s infotainment system. Part of this means not only being able to play the songs already on your phone but also streaming Internet Radio through your car’s speakers by using the data package on your phone.

Of course most modern cars will allow you to wirelessly play music from your Smart phone – which still seems like utter Voodoo to me. Imagine my surprise sometime back then, when I borrowed a Chrysler, and was able to pair my iPhone, on-the-go, using only voice commands!

So these days, whenever I get my hands on a test car, it’s not the 0-100, the handling, the braking or the ride I check first, but how quick and easy is it to pair my phone up with the car.

And not just for the requisite hands-free ability to use the phone, but to play my tunes should Radio 2 get a little stale and the conversation on Dubai Eye get a bit dull (not when we’re on obviously – Car Talk with James Piecowye, Monday nights from 8pm!).

The quality of the sound systems in most modern cars is magnificent too these days. It’s not really surprising that people prefer listening to music in their cars – the audio is better (and more acoustically tuned) than most home systems.

But I still think cars have got a way to go. Why are we reliant on the phone? Why can’t cars be fitted with data sim cards themselves? Shouldn’t we be able to download, categorise, store and play music directly from our cars’ hard drives?

I wanna be able to jump in the car and voice command: ‘play 80s Brit Pop’ or ‘give me some 70s soul’, or even ‘I’m the mood rock and roll’. Frankly though I’m guessing some of these systems are already making their way into cars or very soon will.

So what we really need to do now, is start thinking about our car compilations. Hmm… Here’s some suggestions to kick off – why don’t you let us know your favourite driving tunes below?

• Born to be wild – Steppenwolfe
• I drove all night – Roy Orbison
• Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car – Billy Ocean
• I like driving in my car – Madness
• Bohemian Rhapsody – Queen
• Life is a highway – Tom Cochrane
• Drive By – Train
• Speed Demon – Michael Jackson
• Little Red Corvette – Prince
• Mustang Sally – Wilson Pickett
• The Boys Are Back in Town – Thin Lizzy
• Freebird – Lynyrd Skynyrd
• Ace of Spades – Motorhead