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Rather than distract the highway-speed driver with a screen, much less a keyboard, this device would have to understand speech, and respond with its own voice. Given how much people hated their current navbots -- it surprised no one when Mercedes owners christened their Teutonic dominatrixes "Helga" -- the innovators viewed allowing the owner to customize the personality of this device as a must. The reverse would also make sense. The device should be able to shape itself to the owner, learning not to be too chatty before the human's first cup of coffee -- detecting stress or other psychological conditions in the voice of the driver.

These seers believed if they worked hard enough, such devices would start to become common in the 2010 model year. They were evangelistic about how much you'd like the result, especially the first time it said, "I can tell from the direction we're going and the reports I'm getting from up ahead that there's no way we're going to be able to pick up your daughter at her school on time. Would you like me to call her and tell her we'll be 17 minutes late?"

There was no name for this device. The designers called it simply "The Entity."

So here we are in 2008, and the question remains -- where my sweet navbot at? Seems a good time to call one of these seers and inquire about progress or the apparent lack thereof.

"Give me a break. We still have two years to make it happen," says Ed Langstroth, who is now platform coordinator for the Electronics Research Laboratory of the Volkswagen Group of America in Silicon Valley.

"There's a certain amount of connectivity and intelligence required," Langstroth says. "The nav has to talk to your schedule, all those different things." The machines installed in the dash are "sitting right behind an engine pumping out 200 degrees of heat, with ridiculous vibration, in a Detroit winter of minus-40. Automotive specs are very constraining. Still no excuse at all, but that's one thing.

"Text to speech is really really hard to do. A lot of people just turn the voice off and watch the screen -- and get in an accident. Exactly. The very best nav is a friend in the passenger seat. But that person can see you and knows the relevance of how quickly we need to turn, or whether we're in the wrong lane. There's so much going on. The modern nav system tries to do that. But that very simple human interaction is so complex. The human says, 'We missed it, but it's okay.' He doesn't say, 'Recalculating,' he says, 'I know another way.' When the computer tries to do it, it fails."

"Entity"-like smart automotive systems that attempt to collect information from everywhere, digest it and tell you everything from whether you should immediately bail off the freeway and hit the surface streets, to where to get the cheapest gasoline this morning, are already coming on the market, says Steve Koenig, director of industry analysis of the Consumer Electronics Association. He points to early versions like TruTraffic, marketed by Dash Navigation. "It is the harbinger of new devices to come," he says. All navbots "will eventually go that way." But as all that becomes increasingly common, the real frontier is still the machine's temperament, says Langstroth.

"Personality, from an engineering perspective, is still an afterthought. But every day it's becoming more and more important. Cars are all the same now. Navs are all the same. The interface -- now that is going to be the differentiator. Is the experience enjoyable?

"What you're seeing here is a brand-new relationship being created. Before, it was human-to-car, now it's human-to-nav-system. When you see people start making excuses for their technology" -- when it gets confused and people say, oh, that's okay, little fella -- "that's a new relationship emerging."

Okay, but how about right now? How do you explain this Guy Noir effect -- people leaving their navigation system on even when they don't need it and don't even much like it?

"There's a couple of theories," says Langstroth. "One is that it shows value -- 'I just paid $2,000, I'm going to get good usage out of it.'

"Another is the overarching human need of knowing where you are in the world -- in life in general. It projects that I know where I'm going as I move my vessel throughout the world."