In this Press Release the Consumer Electronics Association and the Society of Automotive Engineers has announced a partnership aimed at leveraging each others knowledge with the end goal making in car products basically 'Plug and Play'.

Now, the reason why this is relevant is that the Empeg guys who now work for SonicBlue and who built the Empeg/RioCar hardware and software are the guys who can really deliver the promises that this sort of agreement potentially offers.

Its also interesting to note how large the OEM Autosound markets are [2.85 Billion annually (in 2001)] - This in part explains why the Empeg was EOL'ed - SB wouldn't make any fraction of that selling approx. 4000 mp3 car players to a niche market over 2 years.

It also vindicates the decision by SB to keep the empeg team together - the Car OEM sound system market is huge.

[To compare - the total market for "sales of mobile electronics for aftermarket autosound, mobile video and navigation and radar detectors" is "more than $3 billion" for 2001 - these figures are from the president of the CEA].

I alos note that the SAE has a "1394 Working group" - I hope this is to extend IEEE1394 [aka Firewire/iLink] to the automotive area.

If so, then this gives a extra push to Firewire as a interface consumer electonics should have to interoperate in a mobile environment.

I look forward to the day when my Sony Headunit will plug and play and interoperate automatically with my OEM mp3 'juke box', GPS nav system, head-up display and whatever else I have in my car.

Maybe this announcement won't go anywhere - but if it does I expect Hugo & the team will be involved in this somewhere.

Well it's about time!! ;-) The music industry managed to standardize communication with MIDI twenty years ago or something. It would be truly a breakthrough to be able to by car products based on stand-alone features than because it works well as a 'system'.

As you say, this is the most likely reason empeg was bought.