Mitsubishi Electric Corp announced the "NR-HZ001" series, the 2008 models of its car navigation systems, which feature a built-in HDD and consist of two models including one supporting a function to watch "full segment" terrestrial digital broadcasts.
The company made the announcement Sept 26, 2008. The two models will be released Nov 5, 2008. There is no suggested retail price, but street pricing is expected to be about ¥250,000 (approx US$2,353) for the full segment model and ¥200,000 for the 1seg model.
"Even though the cost of car navigation systems is declining as a result of the emergence of PNDs, high prices will not deter consumers if a product has added value," said Eiji Nakayama, executive officer in charge of Automotive Equipment.
The most distinctive feature of the series is the employment of the "Multi Relay Operation," which standardizes the transition of multiple operation systems such as touch panels, remote control and voice recognition.
Mitsubishi believes that voice input is ideal for operating a navigation system while driving, the company said. However, the voice recognition capability of car navigation systems is rarely used because it frequently malfunctions due to misrecognition. Mitsubishi, therefore, standardized the transition of operation to enable passengers in the front passenger seat and backseats to take over operation from the driver, the company said.
The number of proper names of destinations that can be input by voice was also increased from the roughly 70,000 in the previous model to 10 million. The size of the vocabulary that can be searched through at the same time is limited to about 1 million because the search target is limited on a prefecture basis at the beginning.
In addition to those functions, the new products realized hands-free calls with Bluetooth connection capability supported as a standard feature. Mitsubishi developed a car navigation-dedicated LSI in house and used it for those products to meet the enhanced functions above. The company will mount this LSI on other car navigation products it supplies to automobile manufacturers.
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