On the afternoon of July 9, 2005, driving home from Somewhere, I was listening to a story, "Turning Cars into Havens of Entertainment, Comfort," by Celeste Headlee, on KRPS (National Public Radio), that caught my attention and prompted some flights of fancy. The story, coming out of Detroit, at the North American International Auto Show, told of the possible -- no, probable -- future of the American automobile. As a result of Americans' continued flight to the suburbs, and, thus, the suburbs' increasing distance from our cities, each of us is spending more and more time traveling to and from our place of work. In fact, each of us, claims Headlee, now spends an average of 100 hours per year traveling to our workplace (and logically, another 100 hours on the return trip, although the story didn't say.)

You've got to be able to do something besides simply stare blankly, monotonously, at the road ahead of you on such an unconscionably boring stretch of time. Hypnotize yourself that way and suddenly you're toast!

It was 1929 when the first radios were installed in the dashboards of American cars. Why that particular year? Maybe 1929 was the first year radio parts could be made small enough to fit into an auto dashboard. Or maybe the god-awful stock-market crash in late 1929 spurred the desirability and thus the development of car radios, which allowed listeners to escape their Wall Street-induced woes, if only momentarily, with baseball or football games or with their choice of music.

In time, there were better radios, 8-track tape decks, stereos, DVD's, and who knows what else is in store? The more amenities Detroit offers, the more we drivers/passengers want.

The one feeds off the other. Celeste Headley claimed some people now have better sound systems in their cars than they have in their houses. Indeed, I, for one, was pleasantly surprised by the high quality of the radio in our new (2003) Japanese Subaru. It's at least as good as the quality of the stereo in my living room system.

My generation, and those of my father and grandfather, were interested in the masculine realm of horsepower and the neutral realm of overall design.

By contrast, today's generation of young drivers seems to take horsepower for granted, and, writes Elliott Scheiner of Ford Motor Company, mainly wants a car as "something to hang our electronics on."

The first "concept car" was the 1939 Buick Y-Job, equipped with pop-up headlights and moveable top.

GM toured some "dream cars" after World War II, but the term "concept car" took hold only in the late 1970s. And the rest, as they say, is history.

This year's "concept' car is comforting, soft white, like a comfortable womb. The ideal car interior is sleep-inducing. It's not my idea of a safe interior, but, then, I'm not the designer of tomorrow's automobiles.

The year 2005 introduced a bumper crop of innovations. At the New York Auto Show, GM introduced the Sequel, a car that gets 300 miles to a supply of hydrogen, and can accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour in less than 10 seconds (that'll wake the driver up).

Part of the new-car market in America consists of adults who went through the 9/11 trauma, and would just as soon not repeat the experience. For them, Ford's "SYNus" (pronounced "sin-u-ous," not, as you'd think, "sy-nus") car, not yet marketed but very seriously considered, was designed. A self-sufficient living system, complete with bullet-proof steel panels that slide down from the roof to cover the whole car and protect your home-on-wheels from an attack by enemies from across town or from outer space, it's the family car as a Swiss Army knife, the only tool you'll ever need. The car as the ultimate safe haven, a car for the severest hypochondriac. Even the back looks more like a bank vault than a rear window (wasn't this car a working feature of a 20-year-old James Bond movie, when Sean Connery was still black-haired and beardless? Leave it to the movies to outrun reality). This car is, in the words of one automotive designer, a "rolling urban command center,"with a 45-inch flat screen TV in back, where all but the driver can feel free to watch TV in the back of the front seats and listen to a radio that has eight speakers. You can pretend you're in the front row of the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall while they're playing an ear-shattering ditty by Richard Wagner.

Pretend you're in the first circle of Dante's hell.

Not content to wait for the next electronic miracle from the Detroit auto makers, some individual electronics whiz-kids have jumped the gun and made their own miracles. Some, for instance, have removed the passenger side air-bags and installed in its place a TV monitor. Others have installed a little movie screen in the circular center of the steering wheel. But what safety belt is going to save a driver whose attention is fixed on an X-rated movie unwinding on the little screen directly in front of him while he toodles at 75 miles per hour or faster down U.S. 95?

The trends in travel are predictable. Loaded up with enough movies and tapes, a traveling family with kids doesn't have to take side trips or stop at a motel for the night.That complete self-sufficiency may be some parents' idea of heaven. It's my idea of hell on wheels.

Lest you think Detroit's designers have lost sight of power in their thirst for gimmicks, let me put your mind at rest. "The Jeep Hurricane," continues this story, "has two 5.7 -liter Hemi engines, one in the front and one in the back, producing a total of 670 horsepower and 740 pounds per foot of torque."

The Hurricane also features a turn radius of absolutely zero, because both front and rear tires can turn inward." Hurricane ... that's no exaggeration. Start up that puppy, and I'll bet the noise is absolutely deafening.

What's in store for the well-heeled American driver? Earlier this year, when Ginny and I were sailing down the Mississippi, Snake and Columbia Rivers on a series of elaborate leisure craft, I began to hear stories of elderly tourists who had retired from their jobs, sold their immovable houses and abandoned their weekly responsibilities for mowing their front and back yards, and moved permanently onto a series of tourist boats, where they are waited on hand and foot, for about the same amount they paid as home-owners. Can you see the time when wealthy folk will sell their houses and move permanently into their cars? There's already talk about freezer chests, bunk beds, weight training machines. If the dreamers have advanced that far, can automotive basketball courts and Olympic-size swimming pools be far behind?

Slide-out cup holders all by themselves aren't enough any more ... unless you're sipping something much stronger than coffee in the passenger seat of your car that is parked in a public park.