New standards for telematics that promise to bring new electronics into cars faster and more cheaply were announced Jan. 22 by an industry group. The Automotive Multimedia Interface Collaboration (AMIC), formed by major auto manufacturers, agrees on a first set of standards that will allow such electronic modules as voice recognition and mobile telephones to work with each other, regardless of which supplier they come from or what car they are installed in. The idea is similar to the electrical standards that exist for a house. Anybody's freezer, for instance, can be plugged in at anyone's house, because the plugs and electricity are standard. The first set of standards specifies a few details, including how to handle noncritical information, such as the radio station being listened to. With this information, a supplier of mirrors could, for example, design a rearview mirror that displays the radio station, and it would work with any manufacturer's car. During the next two years, more detailed standards are expected to be released involving such things as personal data assistants (PDAs), mobile telephones and the critical information on the car's internal high-speed computer network. The standards don't create new technologies, but they enable the implementation of existing technologies by raising the potential market size, according Michael Noblett, the AMIC program manager. Production of cars with electronic networks designed to the industry standards is expected to begin in 2003, according to a story by William Diem of the Detroit Free Press.