While buying a new tape deck for my car this week (a silly-looking device with ergonomically-designed buttons and flashing neon lights that looks ridiculous in my aged yet beautiful car, like Sophia Loren wandering around with pink dreadlocks and pierced eyebrows), I noticed something very worrying. A portable video screen for car dashboards, writes Kilian Doyle.
Now, I know these are reasonably commonplace in rear headrests these days. Apparently, they're a good way of keeping kids calm, and certainly easier than feeding them gin and methadone - or, God forbid, actually talking to them.
But this was different. With an attachment that slid into the slot of the CD player, it had a 10-inch screen that sat plum in the middle of the dashboard. I've seen one before, ironically enough, on TV, but had previously thought they were the sole preserve of Humvee-driving bling-bling US rappers and basketball players. But now, like so many vile fads invented by our American chums, they're over here.
Admittedly, at €1,200 a pop, they're a pretty pricey new toy, but, as with all technology, that price will doubtless plummet within months. Then they'll all have them. Lord have mercy on us.
According to US law, in-dash monitors are to be used for navigational or off-road purposes only. It's illegal to use them for video purposes when visible by the driver, and it's illegal to have video in view of a driver of a moving vehicle. Any device is supposed to be fitted with a lock that means it can only show DVDs or live TV pictures when the parking brake interlock is activated.
Being a proud Luddite, I have absolutely no idea how a "parking brake interlock" works. But I'd bet my pants on some Irish boyracer being able to work out how to deactivate one within seconds.
The fact that use of these screens is - presumably - illegal in Ireland is hardly going to deter them. Have you noticed any particular drop-off in the number of eejits using mobile phones behind the wheel since the threat of five penalty points was dangled over their heads? Me neither.
And where does that leave us? Scores of maniacs driving around watching DVDs of World's Scariest Police Chases XII or The Fast and the Furious and walloping into walls after trying to emulate their heroes.
Thankfully, Irish TV stations aren't rich enough yet to have their own helicopters following police chases and beaming live footage to TV screens, but it won't be long. Then we'll have joyriders robbing cars, whacking one of these screens in the CD slot and watching themselves as they tear along with Garda Sean Bawn O'Loodramawn tearing along behind them in his squad car, enjoying the programme just as much as his quarry.
And there's another, sleazier, use for these screens. Some dimwit in New York was arrested last month after cruising past police with a DVD called Chocolate Foam playing on the passenger-side sun visor in his Merc. It was also showing on screens set into the car's headrests. It wasn't an instructional video in how to make the perfect milkshake.
Clever chap. He may as well have waved his manhood at the cops as he passed. He got busted on two counts - one for watching the movie while driving, and another for exposing everyone else he drove past in traffic to it as well.
You may accuse me of overreacting, but ask yourself this: do you want to be subjected to a home video of some bumfluffed boyracer getting it on with his podgy girlfriend while you're stuck in traffic? Thought not.