To view our videos, you need to
enable JavaScript. Learn how.
install Adobe Flash 9 or above. Install now.

Then come back here and refresh the page.

High-tech devices grow new functionality every year. Take radar detectors for example. Not only are they linking to smartphones, but now both iCobra's iRadar and Escort's Live communities are using it to link to connect drivers so they can warn each other where police officers are.

“Any time that your detector gets shot with laser, you're going to get an alert. So, you get the alert in your vehicle and then it's going to pass up to the network and everyone else in the Escort Live Nation is going to get the same alert,” Escort’s Ron Gividen said.

Cars are also, like phones, adding functionality through apps. Joining companies like Ford with its SYNC technology, Mercedes-Benz's mbrace2 adds social networking to the car—things like Twitter and Facebook to go along with music and informational apps.

Mercedes is also showing off a way to interact with all the information you get in your car in a sort of “Minority Report” style—you can touch it, grab it, flick it.

“The DICE is Dynamic and Intuitive Control Experience and you'll get a feel for how consumers in the automobile will interact with different obstacles in the car, different information through gesture rather than knobs and controls and staring at a screen,” Kaity Aurillo of Mercedes-Benz USA said.

Ford is looking to push health and wellness in the car. Among the projects it’s working on is an allergy alert system.

“The idea there, allowing users to get allergen information about where they are: allergen, ultraviolet, flu, the whole bit—ideally pollution at some point. Future places to go with that are predicting when you're entering areas like that or if you're planning a route, to route around them so that asthmatics can avoid situations where they might have an attack,” David Melcher of Ford said.

Ford is also trying to work into the system a way to warn diabetics when to grab a bite because it might be unsafe to drive. That would be based on blood sugar readings and logbooks the driver creates throughout the day.