The editor of IT Week recently penned a column (From desktops to dashboards, 4 July) touching on IT and the automobile, both of which are subjects close to my heart. He mentioned that fleet managers need to prepare for the high-tech equipment such as PDAs and MP3 players that are likely to be installed as standard equipment in cars in the near future.

Unfortunately, I've got bad news for him and IT Week readers - we're already there, and the resulting problems are every bit as awful as you imagined.

I recently had an email from a distraught reader of Personal Computer World who had just bought a natty Seat Altea partly because it was equipped with a Bluetooth hands-free facility for mobile phones. The idea is that you just get into the car with your Bluetooth-enabled phone, and it automatically connects to the in-car audio system, lets you use the steering-wheel-mounted phone controls and pops up the phone's address book on the dashboard LCD display panel.

Seems like a great idea, as it means you don't have to get your local garage to fit an expensive hands-free kit, and you're not tied to using the same phone for as long as you keep the car.

I think anyone who's used Bluetooth can guess what happens next. His handset, an I-Mate Jam smartphone, refuses to connect to the system. Further investigation revealed that Seat has a list of a couple of dozen compatible phones, and of course this doesn't list the reader's model. In fact only eight of the listed models offer full functionality - the rest only offer audio functions.

What's even worse is that he can't even use a separate Bluetooth headset because every time he gets in the car the phone tries fruitlessly to negotiate a connection with the in-car system. I was not brave enough to ask what happens when he gets other Bluetooth-equipped mates in the car at the same time. Or when someone with a compatible phone happens to be in the car next to you in a traffic jam.

Has Seat not provided a button to turn off the Bluetooth radio? Needless to say, he'd tried calling Seat's customer services for clarification only to be met with long silences. Bluetooth is one of those technologies that everyone's heard of, but very few are able to troubleshoot.

Sadly this is a common story in IT. Wi-Fi certification among wireless LAN vendors is starting to go the same way, with the logo rapidly being tossed aside in order to get products with enhanced capabilities to market quickly.

But at least with Wi-Fi there was a concerted effort at interoperability testing, which has ensured most Wi-Fi devices will talk to each other with no problems. The lesson for other manufacturers is this - if they integrate technologies like Bluetooth to tempt us to buy their products, they should spend some money making sure it works properly.