What accessories would you buy for your next car?

By | March 15, 2010

Having been a car owner now for over 5 years, I must confess I didn’t give much thought to car accessories of any kind until much more recently. One of my friends offered to give me a CD player for my car from his Toyota with a CD changer, and I turned it down! Too much work.

But … there are some accessories I would really have liked on my little steed. For example, an input socket for the CD/radio player and/or a CD player that plays MP3s. To name one.

I would have also liked much stronger headlights for the thick pea-soup fogs that sometimes render even my regular fog lights useless. Some suggestions include halo headlights which remind me of BMW headlights, for some reason. Would these be ideal? or would HIDs be better?

On the internals, I would like to have an internal GPS system with turn by turn navigation… Why? Because my lovely co-pilot often isn’t very attentive to turns, destinations or instructions, and sometimes becomes distracted by irrelevancies.

And the last thing: an automated centralized locking system that means I can set childproof locks on the rear passenger doors without having to get out of the car; and I can also unset them.

That last one has been the source of heated arguments with my wife who doesn’t understand the Mazda Isamu Genki 1.6 doesn’t come with this (or many) feature.

It’s funny, but two out of these four are things I would never have even known about when purchasing my car… I just wanted a vehicle with a reliable engine, good brakes, and decent MPG.