This paper focuses on the evolving demands for speech recognition in the car and its corresponding impact on algorithmic and technological development. Till today the major demand for speech recognition in the car was related to hands free operation of the telephone. This functionality could be provided in a satisfactory way with a word based system, at the same time allowing for more simplistic noise suppression algorithms. Fully new speech recognition systems are required today to be able to cope with the demands for voice control of car navigation systems. These systems require noise robust phoneme based large vocabulary recognition systems and a much more advanced user interface. The very large perplexity of a car navigation task requires inherent embodiment of a spelling recognizer. Hardware and software design for this new application must also be tackled from the point of view that it will be one, though central part of a fully integrated speech control inside the car.