BUILDING AN ON-RAMP FOR AUTOMOTIVE

Schumacher, who earned his PhD in plasma physics 21 years ago, has subscribed to that philosophy during his entire career, in which he has passed from the theoretical world of nuclear fusion, to the futuristic environment of Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, to the corporate competition of automotive electronics.

And Schumacher, who holds 13 patents and has been published in some 40 technical publications, said he has never seen business potential of the kind that lies before him right now. "The opportunities in the automotive Internet area are just exploding," said Schumacher, director of the Mobile MultiMedia Business Group for Delphi Delco Electronics Automotive Systems (Kokomo, Ind.). "This is the most exciting thing I've seen in my career."

Indeed, when it comes to sizing up this automotive opportunity, Schumacher may have a point. Delphi Delco estimates that the market for automotive multimedia is growing at an astounding compounded rate of 35 percent to 40 percent annually. What's more, Schumacher and other Delphi Delco executives don't foresee a drop-off anytime soon. The reason: Automotive multimedia doesn't depend on a single product. Instead, it encompasses products ranging from in-car PCs to advanced audio systems to rear-seat entertainment devices.

As Schumacher follows those opportunities, however, he faces a task that differs from his other work experiences. Instead of designing plasma devices and high-end military electronics, as he did while working for Hughes Electronics during the 1980s, he must now evaluate potential markets and then nudge technology in the right direction.

And as he looks over the horizon, Schumacher sees a powerful guiding light: consumer eagerness. "The Internet is going to revolutionize the consumer's experience in the car," he said. "It ties the car to your home or your office computer. It ties the car to the service center. It ties the car to entertainment content. And it allows you to turn dead time into very productive, very entertaining time."

The cornerstone of Delphi's lineup of automotive Internet devices is a system loosely defined as an automotive PC. Delphi has already engineered two such products for OEMs: Cadillac's Infotainment system rolls out in the Cadillac DeVille this fall, and Frieghtliner will introduce its new Truck PC in the first quarter of 2001.

In both cases, the products are basically "smart radios"-that is, radios augmented by PC cards with fairly fast (usually 100 MHz or so) 32-bit processors. The processors serve as a computing engine that allows users to control a cell phone, download e-mail, tie into the Internet, find news headlines or check stock quotes. The system accomplishes all that via a service that links it to a remote Web server. "If you want to, you can track 20 stocks a day, or listen to news headlines, or ask the system to read the first few paragraphs of every article in The Wall Street Journal's Money section," Schumacher said.

Systems such as the Infotainment serve as a design challenge for engineers, however, because they don't employ traditional input devices such as keyboards or a mouse. Instead they use voice commands. Delphi has dealt with that design challenge by placing enough computing power on board its in-car PCs to handle an audio vocabulary of between 200 and 500 words. "A 100-Mips32-bit microprocessor is good enough to do voice recognition, text-to-speech, Internet access and navigation," Schumacher said. Schumacher is also convinced that the potential of in-car PCs is matched by an equally powerful trend: the shift toward satellite radio. Two companies, XM Satellite Radio (Washington, D.C.) and Sirius Satellite Radio (New York), have already forged alliances with automakers .

"Today, if you're driving cross-country, you have to tune to a new station every 100 miles or so," Schumacher said. "With satellite radio, truck drivers will be able to go across the country without retuning the station."

Barron's Online recently reported that an analyst at Merrill Lynch predicted that Sirius alone would have 1.3 million subscribers by the end of 2001, 5.8 million by year-end 2003 and 18.1 million by the end of 2007, representing 8 percent of U.S. motorists. "This is going to revolutionize radio in cars," Schumacher said.

At the same time, Delphi is working on advanced audio systems that eventually could transform the family vehicle into a rolling music library. Recently, Delphi demonstrated an audio system with MP-3 playback using flash memory cards. It also demonstrated a CD-ROM-based system that stores up to 12 CDs worth of music. Both systems, Schumacher said, have potential in the marketplace.

"Ultimately, we will all have multigigabyte systems in our cars that will store our entire music libraries," he said. While Delphi deals with that prospect, it also faces a problem that dogs every maker of automotive electronic products: how to make systems reliable and durable.

Because automotive environments are hostile, Delphi engineers must spend countless hours "bulletproofing" the company's new products. Dust, dirt, vibration, impact and temperatures ranging from 40 degrees below zero to 125 degrees Fahrenheit pose a challenge that few other manufacturers ever face.

"The execution of those electronics has to be done a lot better than it needs to be done for the home or the desktop," Schumacher said. "We have to build devices that will stand up to the dust, dirt, vibration and temperature for 10 years."

Still, Schumacher is confident that it can be done. He's equally confident that consumers will eagerly line up to buy the products when they hit the market.

Given that, he said, success is likely to follow. "I once heard a professor from the Wharton School of Business say, 'Follow the money and you'll fall into the right opportunities,' " Schumacher said. "That seems to be the case here."