News

• ABI Reports 12% of all new cars will ship with embed­ded telem­at­ics by 2010
• PSA Peu­geot stan­dard­izes Telem­at­ics device
• GAO reports sig­nif­i­cant prob­lems with GPS constellation
• Rental­Re­sult and Hitachi form alliance
• UK Government’s Smart Meter­ing Ini­tia­tive Calls for Advanced M2M Capabilities
• Nation­wide Insur­ance tar­gets dri­vers on iPhone

Insight

All­state to buy OnStar?

Email from PT:

Idea for OnStar devel­oped when mobile phones were the size of a brief case and we paid $100/​month for a few min­utes of ana­log air­time. OnStar’s rev­enue model was always based on get­ting a slice of your mobile bill. The model fell apart when tech­nol­ogy drove those bills from $100/​mo to $30/​mo and cell phones became a per­sonal acces­sory not a vehi­cle accessory.

Prob­lem for most poten­tial pur­chasers would be the age of GM’s tech­nol­ogy. OnStar resisted the move to CDMA/​1X until the FCC pulled the plug on AMPS. It still doesn’t have the abil­ity to sync or use a cus­tomers’ cell­phone using a stan­dard like Blue­tooth, never sim­pli­fied its expen­sive human call cen­ter with in-​​cab or server side speech recog­ni­tion tech­nolo­gies, and never could move its appli­ca­tions beyond ‘Safety and Secu­rity’ to prod­ucts folks would pay a monthly sub­scrip­tion for.

Per­son­ally, when OnStar goes the way of Edsel, MAP, and Sat­urn, it will recon­firm my belief that space aliens placed psy­che­delics in the Auburn Hills water sup­ply some­time back in the 1980s.