Nissan Offers a Hard Drive Option

Posted on May 16, 2007
Filed Under Innovation |

Nissan is doing something interesting with their newly launched Pathfinder:

For the technologically inclined, the Pathfinder comes with an optional navigation system and 9.3-gigabyte hard drive, dubbed the “Music Box,” for MP3 storage, along with Bluetooth capability.
On one hand it’s pretty cool that (non-luxury) vehicles are starting to show up with onboard storage, and if the trend holds we’ll certainly see networking capabilities (beyond Bluetooth) sooner rather than later.

Having said that, I can’t understand why Nissan would go with a 9.3gb hard drive when a 60gb would be just a few dollars more. At some point in the price curve, the price flattens out irrespective of how much storage capacity is provided because the BOM cost is in fixed price components like cases, a motor, heads, and packaging.

I’m not criticizing Nissan because I think this is a great vehicle option, but why not accelerate the trend to transforming automobiles into extensions (or nodes?) for personal entertainment? Portable entertainment has already moved beyond music into video, why not build the vehicle option to where people are going instead of where they were?

I also started to think about possible extensions of popular services like Sonos and Sling for in vehicle use.




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