Fight the Power

Imagine that it’s the year 2050 or so and you’re stuck in traffic. Your ad-supported midsized SUV just used its driver attention monitoring system to notice that your eyes lingered on a McDonald’s billboard for an extra few seconds and now your premium music service is telling you that there’s a new coupon code being pushed to your phone for a discount hamburger.

Your driving progress slows to a crawl as an influx of robo-taxis pour onto the interstate, each trying to help their owners afford their lease payments. (Joke’s on you, AI. You, too, need a side hustle to survive.)

It’ll be enough to drive a person mad on a good day, so imagine the annoyance when you plop down in the driver’s seat and find that your Apple-Google-Samsung-Meta-Whatever phone/car integration isn’t connecting properly and you have to sit there and manually jiggle the cord or turn Bluetooth on and off or who knows what else. You’ll long for when you could just plug in the aux cord and be on your way.

Well whether your car is new enough to have USB ports that for some reason make it start intrusively scanning your phone contacts and photo rolls or old enough that it doesn’t have USB ports at all, today’s deal can help you better manage the awkward fusion between vehicle and phone. Basically, it’ll give you a couple of QuickCharge ports that, mercifully, will power your devices without attempting any other technological shenanigans.

You won’t be automatically connected to your in-car audio and you won’t override your GPS and you won’t suddenly activate the terribly ham-handed in-car voice control features that feel like they were designed in 2003. None of that. Just power.

From there, once the juice is flowing, you can obviously choose to connect via Bluetooth or listen to FM radio or justify buying a new car just for a fresh free year of satellite radio. But the point here is that as far as your car is concerned, you’re just plugging in a direct-current juicer or curling iron or something.

Anyway, each of these ports gives you two USB outlets, and today’s two-pack means that you can either outfit two vehicles or maybe even take advantage of some of those additional round ports scattered throughout cars sometimes.

So yeah. You don’t have to turn your phone over to our interconnected automotive overlords—at least not yet.