Hasta La Gadget!

Give Mercedes-Benz credit for putting a PC Card slot in the dash of many models. That lets you copy MP3 or WMA music from your PC to a cheap SD or Compact Flash (CF) card, plug it into a cheap PC Card adapter, then plug it into the dash of your not-so-cheap Benz. The adapter (also called a PCMCIA adatper) and a 2GB SD card each cost about $10, although you can pay more. But check out the prices if you order one of each from an authorized Mercedes-Benz dealer: $102 for the PCMCIA multi-card reader, $48 for a 2GB Mercedes-Benz logo’d SD Card.

Just when you thought you’d heard it all, it turns out that pregnant women living near highways equipped with toll booth E-ZPass systems are less likely to have premature births and babies with low birth weights.

This may seem like an extremely random connection, but when cars use E-ZPass they do not have to come to a complete stop to pay the toll, which reduces congestion and emissions. As a result, premature births declined 10.8 percent and low birth weights dropped 11.8 percent for women who lived within 1.2 miles of the E-ZPass toll plaza, according to study from Columbia University’s Department of Economics.

If you lived about 2 miles from a toll booth with E-ZPass, which scans a device equipped to the car window and automatically charges the toll amount to a credit card, prematurity dropped 7.3 percent and low birth weight fell 8.4 percent, the study said. The study compared women living close to toll booths with E-ZPass with women living near toll booths without the systems.

Other studies have already revealed that systems like E-ZPass cut harmful emissions by about 50 percent, but the Columbia study is the first to study its effect on health, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The 2010 Ford Taurus gives you many of the high-technology pieces of a full-size $75,000 European or Japanese luxury sedan for half the price. For about $40,000, you can drive a big, comfortable highway cruiser with active cruise control, blind spot detection, rear cross traffic alert, butt-massinging seats, the excellent Sync Bluetooth and music control system, and free Mayday calling. What you don’t get is BMW-crisp handling on back roads, or Lexus-perfect fit and finish in the cockpit. In a week driving the Taurus, I found it poised on long trips and got mileage in the upper 20s.

The Suzuki SX4 is a low-end economy crossover with some pretty advanced tech built-in, including a removable Garmin navigation system with the same robust feature set you’d expect from a regular standalone PND. However, that doesn’t mean the two manufacturers thought everything through. As Edmunds.com found during its long-term test, the unit lets you issue voice commands, and can also stream MP3s from an SD card through the stock car stereo.

So far, so good. But it’s not so simple; first, the unit can’t play anything imported in the default iTunes AAC format and only works with MP3s. Not only that, but you must navigate through many submenus to get to the MP3 player. That’s still not the end of the world–until you cue up a song.

Once you motor away from a stop, that’s it; the system locks the Garmin down into “Safe Mode,” which is intended to prevent you from controlling the GPS while driving. Except that it also takes away control of the MP3 player! Plus, if you choose a song and then set out, it will only play that one song–it doesn’t move to the next one automatically. And it won’t let you re-establish control of the MP3 player unless you stop the car, or pull the unit out of its housing and reseat it. Priceless. (Thanks to Warren W for sending this in)

The new standard of excellence in high-end cars is the BMW 750Li. It provides more technology, entertainment, safety, passenger comfort, and of course (since this a BMW), performance. It comes with five cameras, two radars, four sonar sensors, seats that blow both cold and hot, a hard disk, and a sports suspension that can be dialed back to provide a limousine-like ride. It’s a glimpse of the future of technology that will over time reach mainstream cars at mainstream prices. To some, the BMW 750Li’s features will seem overkill. When I write this, it does to me, too, but on the road it’s a different story.