ANYTHING that keeps tykes pacified on long car trips, like video systems in rear seats, is a boon to automotive safety. Today, Chrysler is poised to offer in its 2009 models a new entertainment option for the children: Wi-Fi and Internet connectivity. The problem is that the entire car becomes a hotspot. The signals won’t be confined to the Nintendos in the rear seat; front-seat occupants will be able to stay online, too.

Bad idea. As drivers, we have done poorly resisting the temptation to move our eyes away from the road to check e-mail or send text messages with our cellphones. Now add laptops.

Tom Vanderbilt, the author of “Traffic,” a best-selling book about our driving habits, said last week: “We’ve already seen fatalities from people looking at their laptops while driving. It seems absolutely surprising that Chrysler would open the door for a full-blown distraction like Internet access.”

On Chrysler’s Web site, Keefe Leung, a manager in the company’s advanced connectivity technology group, explains the rationale for the service: “People are connected in their lives everywhere today. They’re connected at home, they’re connected at the office, they’re connected at Starbucks when they go for a cup of coffee.” But, he says, “the one place that they spend a lot of time that they’re not connected is in their vehicle, and we want to bring that to them.”

Clearly, for safety reasons, Mr. Leung cannot condone use of the service by drivers. When he is shown in the videos demonstrating the service, called UConnect, he always occupies a rear seat.

When I asked him last week about possible misuse of the service by drivers, he said that it was “tailored for kids in the back seat” and that the company would provide instructions to owners about its intended use.

Still, Chrysler is the company that came up with the “living room on wheels” concept for its minivans, and Mr. Leung can’t resist talking about the Internet-connected car as “another room, an extension of your home.” It isn’t, though. At my home, the living room is stationary. But on the road, my “room” may collide with yours.

In case you’re curious, the United States Transportation Department this month released the final totals for traffic accidents last year: 2.49 million people injured and 41,059 dead.

That’s just a single year’s tally. As Mr. Vanderbilt says in his book, many people have been willing to accept curtailed civil liberties as a response to terrorist threats, but many of the same people “have routinely resisted traffic measures designed to reduce the annual death toll,” like curbing cellphone use while driving.

The Transportation Department is pleased that the number of traffic deaths in 2007 was the lowest since 1994 and reflected a historic low in deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled.

But when one talks with public health groups and insurance industry representatives, one doesn’t hear jubilation. The decline in the total number of deaths obscures a more complicated story. While we have made large gains curbing alcohol-impaired driving and instilling the habit of buckling up, we have wasted most of the gains by using cellphones while driving.

Two studies, one Canadian and reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, the other Australian and reported by the British Medical Association, examined cellphone records of people injured in automobile crashes. Both studies concluded that when drivers were talking on phones, they were four times as likely to get into serious crashes.

The studies show that laws mandating the use of hands-free phones are little help: the increased risk of injury is attributable to the cognitive impairment from the phone conversation, which distracts in ways that a conversation with a seatmate does not, and was just as high for those using hands-free sets as for those with hand-held ones. (Don’t look for a similar study for the United States: the carriers refuse to supply the necessary records, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, in Arlington, Va.)

J. R. Peter Kissinger, president of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety in Washington, calls “distracted driving” one of the leading threats to “all of us who drive or walk in this country.” Will drivers exercise good sense and not use their laptops while driving? He is not sanguine: he knows of few drivers who follow the example of a colleague, who locks her P.D.A. in the car trunk before setting out so she won’t be tempted to put it to use while driving.

A laptop will pose a similar problem, even if it remains on the lap of a front-seat passenger. Mr. Kissinger said: “I can picture two teenagers in the front and the passenger pulls up a YouTube video. I can’t imagine the driver saying, ‘I’m going to pull over and stop so I can safely watch what you’re laughing at.’”

Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute, shares that concern. “Adding another electronic distraction,” he says, “is a formula for disaster.” Even if the entertainment devices are in the hands of a passenger, what will happen is perfectly predictable — “the driver will want to see,” he said.

Chrysler was not the first to endow laptops in the car with Internet connectivity; individual users have been doing on their own in any number of ways, such as by selecting laptop models with built-in cellular wireless access or by using PC cards supplied by their wireless carrier. An off-the-shelf mobile router and PC card could essentially duplicate the networking setup of UConnect Web and at a cost far less than the $495 plus installation fees that Chrysler will charge.

Which occupants in the car will most avidly use UConnect? Is it the children in the back with game consoles that provide plenty of self-contained entertainment without the Internet? Or is it the adults in the front seat, whose ability — never strong — to voluntarily remain unconnected is now disappearing?

Will we notice if our living room on wheels, fully loaded with every amenity, sails off the road?

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EARLIER WIRED ARTILE:

Chrysler wants to turn your car into a rolling WiFi hotspot where you check your Facebook profile, upload pictures to Flickr, and eventually be part of a nationwide traffic-control network.

The UConnect Web system Chrysler will unveil Thursday -- and introduce next year -- marks the start of the dot-car era and puts Chrysler in front of BMW in their race to bring wireless internet access to your dashboard. Most of the other automakers, not to mention Microsoft, are right behind them, and there's a push to bring some standards to the hardware.

"It's something everyone's looking at," says Aaron Bragman, an auto-industry analyst at Global Insight. The rush is fueled by the runaway success of Sync, Ford's hands-free iPod and cellphone system. "It's very popular, and it drives a lot of sales," Bragman says.

Sales are something Chrysler desperately needs, and it hopes that filling its cars with gadgets will lure buyers. Among the toys it's showing off next week are rear-seat swivel screens, blind-spot cameras and something it calls "rear cross-path sensing."

But UConnect Web is the star of the show, and Chrysler's betting on it to make its cars appealing to millennials — the twenty-something buyers who've made Sync so successful. The company clearly wants to gain a reputation for high-tech cars.

"In today's market, Chrysler's mission is to bring innovation to market more quickly," Chrysler Vice President Frank Klegon says.

Chrysler says UConnect Web uses cellular and WiFi technology to provide "instant access" to the internet. Anyone in the car will be able to check e-mail, download music, play games and even upload photos from an SD card directly to Flickr. Chrysler says any wireless device and "all major gaming systems" will work with UConnect.

It remains to be seen which models will get UConnect and what it will cost. Chrysler says it will be competitive with laptop wireless cards, and customers won't be tied to long contracts.

It also remains to be seen what regulators might have to say about all those added distractions -- "How long before California bans it?" asks Bragman -- and whether consumers want them. Although car buyers love hands-free systems like Sync, nothing suggests they want to surf the web behind the wheel.

"There could be some opportunity there, but we constantly see that internet access in the car is pretty much at the end of the priorities for consumers," says Thilo Koslowki, an IT analyst with the tech research firm Gartner. "The car is not being seen as an internet-browsing platform."

Koslowski says automakers are "leapfrogging consumer demand" and should focus on making their cars compatible with iPhones, BlackBerrys and other devices. "I don't think the industry is looking at it from that perspective," he says. "Right now most of the emphasis is on replicating what you do at home on your desktop or laptop."

But the drive to bring connectivity to cars is about more than Twittering from the road, and the dot-car era won't get rolling until the Intelligent Transportation Systems is sorted out, says Egil Juliussen at Telematics Research Group. The idea -- which has been promised for years -- is to have cars communicate wirelessly with each other and with the road to increase safety, relieve congestion and manage traffic. Among other things, such a system would allow cars to track everything around them and respond accordingly to avoid collisions. It could also provide real-time traffic information -- so drivers could avoid backups -- and create a national system for paying tolls electronically.

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