Attention, tourists: Forget about stumbling on cobblestone and fumbling through guide books in stifling heat. Entrepreneurs in the Spanish city of Cordoba have devised battery-powered sightseeing cars with computers that talk.
The vehicles boast Global Positioning Satellite technology that provides passengers with their location and explains attractions with its tactile screen or audio recordings.
A memory card stuck into a USB port provides information in Spanish, French or English on more than 150 attractions.
A trio of entrepreneurs launched the business, called Blobject, in May after concluding that monument-rich Cordoba, featuring an exquisite old quarter and a Moorish mosque with a Catholic cathedral built around it, often got overlooked by tourists lured to other southern Spanish cities, such as Seville or Granada.
"Cordoba's marketing was very poor," said co-founder Alfredo Romeo.
The project joins GPS tourism efforts in places like Montgomery, Ala., where IntelliTours LLC offers audio tours of Civil War and civil-rights sites using similar technology.
So far, Romeo's firm touts a fleet of ten cars, which plod quietly at either 15 or 25 miles per hour and can seat two or four people apiece, depending on the model.
Renting a two-seater for three hours costs appx $50.
The white, green and blue buggies themselves, which look like fat, round golf carts, are built in the United States by a subsidiary of Daimler-Chrysler.
One key to the project, Romeo said, was using the free, open-source Linux operating system.
"Cordoba is not on the cutting edge, so to speak, economically or technologically speaking. But the society we live in is the information society, which offers free technologies," Romeo said. "You can create whatever is inside your head."
