Honda nav system offers weather, user-submitted POI deets

So you're a tech-minded Honda driver that enjoys tooling around the mean streets of Japan? Surely what you've been pining after for years is a way to know the barometric pressure at your exact location as you drive. Ok, Japanese meteorology enthusiast road warriors, welcome to the future: the InterNavi Premium Club will not only gather precise weather conditions outside your car and help route around road closures (say, due to snow), but also functions with an added "social networking service" so that you can leave a virtual comment about a particular GPS location. So while others are busying themselves waiting in traffic you've successfully routed around, you'll know how likely it is for the sky to close up and pour down rain as you jump out and grab a bowl at that awesome ramen joint geotagged by other salarymen InerNavi users.

[Scott @ Oct 17th 2006 7:15AM]

It snows in Japan?

[TheClassic @ Oct 17th 2006 9:22AM]

"It snows in Japan?"

Yes

[Chris @ Oct 17th 2006 9:25AM]

Did you somehow miss the winter Olympics in 1998 in Nagano Japan?

[tls502 @ Oct 17th 2006 9:02AM]

"Check out new dina on main street, it has the best cream of somyoungai eva!"

[Crowbar @ Oct 17th 2006 9:16AM]

Interesting - but will it be released for North American drivers? The model shown is clearly for drivers on the right side of a vehicle (grab the stick).

[David @ Oct 17th 2006 11:36AM]

Did somebody say "speedtrap?"

[jim @ Oct 17th 2006 12:15PM]

I heard rumors their new NAV in the acural 2007 TL let you import contacts - but haven't gotten any new news on that - I would think that would be more useful for me. Not against the weather system - just not something I've been looking forward to as much as beaming the contacts from my outlook.

[clay @ Oct 17th 2006 1:13PM]

how about total google earth integration? then we could just call up anything we wanted to, including traffic, traffic cams, weather radar, stores, gas, etc etc...I dont see a need for everyone and their brother putting out GPS units when all we really need is a computer that has all this info locally stored, and is updated wirelessly every so often...

[Killjoy @ Oct 17th 2006 2:00PM]

Because 1+TB drives don't exist yet and aren't going to be rugged enough to survive in a car environment anyway.

[clay @ Oct 17th 2006 2:57PM]

why would you need 1 TB+ storage? GPS units dont, neither does Google Earth on a home PC... They could create a GE strain for the auto community, which only sends DB data for the certain area that the car is located at the time. Plus. Cars dont need the imagery, which is I assume what will fill your TB worth of data. The bottleneck as I see it is how to connect the car with the net. If Honda can download traffic and weather than I dont see why a google earth program coudln't