UK's best digital car revealed

Posted on 26 May 2008 at 01:23

Forget the Monaco Grand Prix - the real car event this weekend was held in Lincolnshire, a few miles outside of Sleaford, when the owners of the UK's best "digital cars" gathered in a field for judgement time.

Digital cars are essentially those that have been customised with a fully functioning computer. This tends to run Windows, with a Flash front-end to access your GPS system, music and video collection, and even let you hack into your car's built-in diagnostics.

Six prizes were up for grabs: Best Overall, Best PC, Best Dash, Best Gadget, Most Stealth and Most Ghetto.

Read Tim Danton's reflections on the event over on the PC Pro blogs.

Best Overall went to Dave Grimmer, who certainly didn't have the fastest system - it's powered by a lowly 1.5GHz VIA Eden CPU backed up by 512MB of RAM - but did have one of the neatest fits. His Vauxhall Astra would be unrecognisable from the car that rolled off the production floor, with a dash dominated by an 8in touchscreen.

"The actual components came to around £500 or £600 a year ago, and the custom work was my own time... I'm very chuffed to have won it, very chuffed."

At the other end of the spectrum was the "Most Ghetto" car, a well-weathered Volvo 480 Turbo built by Lee Hodgkins. At 5.30pm on Friday evening it had only just passed its MOT and had no PC installed, with Lee unsurprisingly doubting whether or not he'd even have time to get the job finished before the event.

"I bought this car 12 months ago, it hadn't run for 12 months before that," he explained. In that time he's had to replace bodywork and the entire dash, so it's no surprise that the judges were forgiving when it came to a few wires here and there.

Other cars at the event included Ed Cornish's Land Rover that had travelled to Morocco, Kevin Salt's BMW - complete with a wooden dash that would make BMW's engineers proud - and a "Ferrari" kit car complete with Mac mini inside.

The other winners were, using their forum names, Rustyboxx for Best PC, Enak for Best Dash, Griff1 for Best Gadget and leeharper1 for Most Stealth.

But for anyone undecided whether all this is a good idea or not, we'll leave the last word to the overall winner, Dave Grimmer: "I love cars. I love computers. Why not merge them?"