CIO —

Consumer electronics should help us to get our work done and make our lives more enjoyable. It shouldn't kill us.

But a new generation of devices that bring e-mail, the Internet and digital entertainment into our cars has the potential to do just that. "The trend scares me to death," says David Strayer, a professor of psychology at the University of Utah who has studied the use of cell phones are other electronic gadgets in automobiles.

That's not just scare talk. A study by the National Highway Transportation Safety Institute (an arm of the Department of Transportation) found that nearly 6,000 people died in 2008 in crashes involving a distracted or inattentive driver, and more than half a million were injured. And while we might think that hands-free devices remove that risk, it turns out that few of us have the mental bandwidth to focus on more than one task while driving. "You can be looking out the windshield and think you're paying attention — but you're not says," Strayer says.

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What's in the "Connected Car"

The issue isn't a new one, but the plethora of tempting devices unveiled at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, has added urgency to an ongoing debate. There were some 380 exhibitors showing auto-electronics gadgets such as mobile TV and high-speed Internet access for cars. Indeed, sales of such technology totaled about $9.3 billion in 2009, according to the Consumer Electronics Association.

Here's some of what was on display in Las Vegas:

Ford (F) has updated its Microsoft-backed (MSFT) Sync technology and made it the basis for a new driver interface and dashboard design IFSIA)" target="_blank">called myFord Touch. Displays include two small color LCD screens on either side of the speedometer, with the left-hand one showing vehicle functions and the right-hand one displaying entertainment, phone and data controls. An 8-inch touchscreen LCD sits at the top of the center stack and has a customizable interface, so that a driver can choose to display his own choice of functions rather than navigate via menus.

For connecting those gadgets, the media hub on myFord Touch systems includes two USB ports, an SD slot and RCA audio/visual input jacks. The car also can become a WiFi hotspot when a USB broadband modem is connected to one of the ports. Some of the Ford technology is voice controlled, some isn't, but in either case it seems like that's an awful lot of information for a driver to handle while, he or she is, well, driving.

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