NEW YORK—We may not be first, so we want to be best. That was the message from Panasonic at the Tuesday unveiling of its Strada in-dash navigation system, which runs off a 30GB hard disk drive.

"Close to last" would be a more apt description of this latecomer to the U.S. navigation market, the in-dash portion of which is dominated by Pioneer. The first in the line of Panasonic products bearing the Strada name (Italian for "street") is rich with features and carries a correspondingly rich price: $1,799 for the base unit (CN-NVD905U), which provides radio, CD, and DVD player functionality as well. Add accessories such as an iPod video adapter (yes, video) and dealer installation, and you're looking at $2,500-plus.

Is Panasonic crazy to do this, at a time when good portable navigation devices sell for less than $500 and cheap ones go for under $200? Rob Lopez, Panasonic's national marketing manager, says Strada is positioned as an essential business tool for the road warrior who spends much of the week traveling by car. Being late for an appointment because of bad directions or a traffic tie-up isn't an option, so price may be a secondary consideration.

With the Strada, you get a a 7-inch touchscreen LCD on a double-DIN in-dash unit, meaning one that fits in many car and SUV dashboards where the opening is about 4 by 7 inches (HW). A 30GB hard drive stores the Navteq mapping data, which comes preinstalled, and takes up about 23GB of memory (that's a lot of data). The rest is for system use, not for ripping music. An SD slot facilitates upgrades, but doesn't let you play music. The optical drive plays CDs, DVDs, and DVD-audio discs; it reads music, video, and MP3/WMA files. The iPod adapter plays both music and iPod videos (the latter only when the car is stopped).

The navigation section has a customizable touchscreen display, and when the main menu comes up, the Navigation button is larger than the others. In a brief demo, we found it easy to enter addresses, but other things were confusing: Once the address is entered and confirmed, there's no Go or Start Trip button. Instead, you press the New button, then declare this to be your entire route or one of four waypoints on an existing route. After that you can get going. We'll be testing a Strada unit in detail to see how it functions in daily driving.

You can connect one accessory device to the unit, and for more devices you add the $129 CY-EM100U expansion hub (Panasonic ads that talk about networking mean the hub). Accessories include Sirius or XM satellite radio receivers, $50 each; an iPod adapter, $50; a Bluetooth adapter, $200; and a backup camera, about $250. Figure about $200 for installation, too. With the Sirius adapter (but not with XM), you can get traffic-congestion information overlaid on your route maps.

Panasonic, which claims it's the world's largest supplier of built-in car audio systems and the number-one supplier of car navigation in Japan, says this is the first in a line of Strada products that will likely include handheld navigation devices.

For our most recent review of a car navigation device, click here.