In My Day

When I was young, maps were printed on paper, either bound into atlases or large sheets that were a puzzle to refold. We plotted routes to get from where we were to where we wanted to be. In-car electronics were largely limited to the AM/FM radio and maybe a tape player.

Maps in the car now are a mass of bits and bytes. Increasingly, the car itself is reading that data directly to make control decisions without any direct input from us mere humans.

The Decline of Paper Maps

The transition from paper maps to in-vehicle digital navigation got rolling in the mid-1990s. Early atte