Has anyone heard anything definitive about the Leaf's proposed entertainment system? I have my own portable GPS system and don't want to have to pay for that, but the gal at the Leaf exhibit in San Jose said it will be integrated in whether we want it or not. I also like to listen to audiobooks from the library, and my own music mixes, which means it MUST be able to play CD's.

I'm sure it will support CDs. I can't think of a new car that doesn't. It will probably also support mp3 players and have a hard drive, but I really don't think they'd eliminate the ubiquitous CD player. EVERYONE has CDs.

It's hard to say. The prototype LEAF on tour has speakers in the doors, but no sign of a CD player and there are no audio controls on the dashboard. There is a space on the center panel that is large enough for a CD player.

It's fairly obvious that the LEAF GPS will be built in and not optional. The main GPS function is to help you manage driving range given the state of charge, and show the location of the nearest charging station. Your average Garmin won't do either of those things.

That's a good point about the range indicator, but I wouldn't trust it for that anyway. I doubt I'd take it anywhere more than 20 miles from home anyway. The locations of charging stations might eventually come in handy, though, and of course those will be on the display and updated constantly and automatically according to the publicity. I feel it necessary to ask about the CD player because I am also on the list for an Aptera and they are touting an entertainment system that is all solid state, i.e. no moving parts like a CD. I could put my music on a flash drive and plug that into a USB port, I suppose, although that would be a lot of work, but I'm not going to put all my library audiobooks onto flashdrives. For one thing there can be 20 disks and some publishers split up the audio into as many as 99 tracks, named Track1 through Track99 on every disk. Unless I were to put on one disk worth, then manually rename each track D1T1, D1T2, etc. then do the same for D2T1, D2T2, etc. for all 20 disks (up to 1,980 renaming operations) I would end up with a drive where every file had 19 others with the same name. The system would not be able to play them in order. It's too much work anyway, even if the files were already correctly named in order. Also, I am not so sure that by 2011 there will still be CD players in all cars. My current CD player is broken so now I'm listening to cassette tape audiobooks, and it is hard to find a car that has a tape player now. We were able to get one only by special order (losing a storage bin in the dash) when we bought my wife's car in 2005, and only on certain models. It'll be the same for CDs soon.