Now that I have a new car, iTunes, and a little bit of a commute… naturally, I would want some decent sounds to listen to.

So I started looking at what it would take to get the car hooked up with an ipod, since that would probably be the easiest way to enjoy music.

Essentially it is a mess. I found a few sites where people have modified their car to hook up to an iPod and the results are expensive. Usually, there is a little box that emulates a CD changer which then talks to the iPod in the Apple iPod remote protocol. These boxes cost about $200 and require you to pull the head unit out. For a while, the hardware hacker in me said ‘hey, I could do this.’. Then my reality about how much time I have hit home and I came to my senses

This whole thing just shows how lack of standards cause problems. What if the auto industry standardizes on a connector… will it be Apple’s iPod connector? Why does the wiring in a car have to be such a mess? Why isn’t it just a network rather than the mess of cables they have right now?

For now, I’ll just burn a few CD’s and then deal with this later. I mean, I don’t even have an iPod.