No Star 4 OnStar

It’s a four-day fourth-of-July weekend ahead for many Americans. AAA, the largest U.S. auto club, has forecast a “record-breaking 44.2M Americans will travel 50 miles or more away from home, taking to roads, skies, rails and waterways.” Approximately 37.5M of those travelers will be driving cars, a 2.9% increase compared to 2016. Several million of those cars will be General Motors vehicles. The question in my mind: Where’s OnStar?

https://tinyurl.com/yc3b8bjv - AAA: This Independence Day Will be Historic, More Americans to Travel than Ever Before

Those 37.5M drivers will be looking for traffic and weather reports. They’ll turn to Waze and Weather.com and their local TV and radio stations as they plan their journeys. Sadly, they will not be turning to OnStar. This is odd, because OnStar operates the largest mobile terrestrial sensor network on the planet with upwards of 10M connected cars gathering data on precipitation, visibility, potholes, traffic light timing, construction, slippery conditions and crashes and roadside breakdowns.

How is it that after 20 years of operation, General Motors has failed to find a way to leverage the mightiest telematics platform in the world to redefine car-based crowd-sourcing of data impacting the safe operation of motor vehicles in the U.S. or anywhere else it is operating – including Brazil, China and much of Europe? It’s true that nothing is free where cellular communication is involved and gathering data in real-time might be prohibitively expensive – but is that really true?

On an annual basis OnStar is pulling in well over $1B in revenue primarily from subscriptions, but the costs of operating the service are high. It is estimated that just the annual cost of sending SMS messages for remote door unlock and remote engine start requests, popular OnStar applications, are as much as $30M for the wireless transmission alone.

It may be no secret that call centers, too, are expensive, giving OnStar ample incentive to either actively discourage callers from calling or to find alternative means of delivering equivalent service via digital assistants and voice recognition systems. In other words, OnStar wants you to subscribe but doesn’t want you to use the service. The bottom line: delivering wireless service to vehicles lacking unlimited data plans is costly.

But there are work arounds. Tesla Motors (which does not operate an OnStar like call center) encourages its owners to get their vehicles to a Wi-Fi connection when it’s time for a software update. Much of the data that cars soak up is either not time critical and can be delivered at a later date or, if it is time critical does not require large amounts of expensive bandwidth.

Traffic information in the form of probe data ought not to require heavy bandwidth use and can be initiated from either the vehicle – when a back-up is detected – or from the server – when a back-up is suspected or reported. In other words, if an unreported crash or construction crops up on the road, the car could communicate a small payload of info with the appropriate information – remaining dormant otherwise during normal traffic conditions.

If there is a report of a troublesome traffic condition, a data request could be sent from the server – again, for a small payload of data to be sent from vehicles in the vicinity of the reported or anticipated event. The expense ought not and need not be onerous.

More importantly, the ability to gather data in this manner would be sufficiently valuable to traffic authorities and law enforcement that they’d be willing to pay for it. Similarly, there is a well-defined market for hyper-local weather information. Vehicles are constantly gathering data on precipitation, roadway conditions and visibility. Creating an automated or poll-able sensor network based on OnStar-equipped vehicles would be both revolutionary and valuable to traffic authorities, private businesses and media operations.

Many years ago, when The Weather Channel was first engaging with OnStar to get an icon on the MyLink dashboard screen I suggested that they (The Weather Channel) ought to integrate local weather data from the vehicles involved. The Weather Channel people looked at me with bemusement. By the time I arrived they had already invested more than a million dollars in developing a solution to GM specifications for which there would be no crowd-sourcing. GM simply wanted The Weather Channel icon on the dash – for which The Weather Channel would pay - and GM would take it from there – thank you very much.

The marketing value of an OnStar-defined value proposition for GM vehicles is worth millions of dollars in advertising. GM could tout in its messaging that its cars were not only the "most awarded" cars in the industry - as the company does today - but also the most intelligent!

Given the massive commercial market for hyper-local weather information the magnitude of GM/OnStar myopia is truly mind-boggling. So this Fourth of July we won’t be looking to OnStar for live traffic reports, local weather insights, beach-bound and baseball-related traffic back-ups (Daytona anyone?) and route recommendations.

We also won’t be looking to OnStar, if we are GM supplier partners, for component performance and usage reports or alerts. That’s right, the OnStar platform ought to allow suppliers to gain real-time insights as to the functioning and usage of their systems during the life of the vehicle – no such luck outside of simplistic vehicle health reports.

I still hold out hope that one day OnStar will chuck its subscription model in favor of a data monetization scheme that will allow all OnStar users to participate in the system at no cost. Perhaps that is the long-term plan at BMW where the company is introducing data visibility to BMW Assist users while also giving them opt-in control of their data.

https://tinyurl.com/ybebmnxe - BMW - Your Vehicle Data. Permanently under Your Control

Maybe next year we will all be celebrating the Fourth of July and the liberation of General Motors/OnStar vehicle data for the greater good of the driving public. It's time.

Roger C. Lanctot is Director, Automotive Connected Mobility in the Global Automotive Practice at Strategy Analytics. More details about Strategy Analytics can be found here: https://www.strategyanalytics.com/access-services/automotive#.VuGdXfkrKUk