My MP3 solution is a Rio Car Empeg indash, which has a 30 gig hard drive built in and holds many hundreds of hours of music internally. The unit is a pull-out car stereo, so to download music onto it you bring it inside and hook it to your computer via USB. The nice thing about this is that I can fit more music than I could possibly need right inside the unit - no CD's, tapes, or any sort of external device or media to carry around. I also put additional docking cages in my other cars (Mini Cooper, Fiat 500L microcar, and Fiat Spider), so I can just move the whole unit from car to car, complete with its entire music library inside, simply by pulling it out of the dash of one car and pushing it into another.

This is a more expensive solution than some, and is for someone who is really into music. These are serious "audiophile" units, with front and rear line outs (no built in power) and onboard fully-adjustable parametric equalizer. They also are hackable/upgradeable, with a large and very fervent online user community. While they were originally around $1000-$2000 (available in 10 thru 60 gig configurations; all expandable by installing a larger laptop hard drive), they had been reduced to as low as $200-500 when Rio discontinued them late last year (having decided to license out the technology from now on instead of making their own units). Now Rio has sold them all, and the best source is the "for sale" forum at the Empeg bbs, http://empeg.comms.net (or of course ebay), typically for the $400-600 range depending on hd size (cheaper on the bbs than on ebay, of course). One downside is that the tuner is an add-on module, currently out of production and selling for several hundred dollars when you can find one due to its scarcity, although plans are supposedly in the works to build more for around $150. I was lucky enough to get one for about $75 before Rio ran out of them. (Another option is to keep another indash in the car, or even a radio walkman, and feed it into the Rio's line-in jack to act as a tuner.)

Another add-on that I have for my Vanagon is a Rand McNally GPS unit that plugs into my laptop (actually a touch-screen tablet PC, to be precise), and sits on the dash, providing real-time directions, mapping, etc. (Incidentally, I have one of these for sale, for $75 complete, if anyone's interested, still in the box. It works with pretty much any Windows 95/98 laptop, and includes all of the maps on 2 CD-ROMs.) Comes in useful if you get stuck in a traffic jam and want a quick alternate route (or just get totally lost somewhere). I also have an interface cable between my laptop and my cell phone so I can get online and access the internet wirelessly while on the road.

- Ron Salmon The Bus Depot, Inc. (215) 234-VWVW www.busdepot.com

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