GM Turns to LG for Smartphone-Centric Infotainment System in Scaled-Back Spark Car

General Motors is taking a segmented approach to the connected car, Sara LeBlanc, GM’s global infotainment program manager, told Consumer Electronics Daily during a press tour to promote the new Chevrolet Spark Tuesday evening in Manhattan. The radio in the downsized Spark, targeted to young, urban drivers, banks off the brains and connectivity of the smartphone, LeBlanc said.

GM chose LG’s MyLink radio for the Spark, along with its Chevrolet Sonic model, because more than 90 percent of targeted Spark and Sonic customers own a smartphone, she said. It made sense to give the driving segment with the highest percentage of smartphone ownership a radio that was “dependent on the smartphone,” she said. A consumer doesn’t have to have a smartphone to use the radio, but “the best features” take advantage of a phone’s data connectivity, she said, including Pandora, Stitcher, Sirius/XM and the BringGo navigation feature. Regarding expansion for the MyLink radio line to other GM cars, LeBlanc hopes the company sees that MyLink “makes sense for a lot of our other vehicles."

GM offers consumers a range of navigation options including turn-by-turn directions via OnStar, embedded navigation systems and MyLink, LeBlanc said. As the infotainment space is growing, “we're trying to figure out what our customers want,” she said. “We have some customers that only want OnStar,” she said, and others say, “I want to be in control.” While the market sorts itself out, “We're going to let our customers tell us what they want” and then offer various alternatives, she said.

The scaled-back MyLink is at the other end of the spectrum from the high-end, haptics-based CUE (Cadillac User Experience) system that GM showed in Manhattan earlier this summer (CED June 22 p6), which is based on an 8-inch capacitive-touch display that works with a smartphone or tablet. The CUE system integrates voice recognition for extensive control down to song selection, compared with the Spark’s voice option that taps into the voice capabilities of a phone. Using the voice technology in the phone keeps costs down on the vehicle side and allows car owners to keep up with technology, LeBlanc said. The target customer buys a new smartphone every 12-18 months, she said, and every time they upgrade, “the voice rec technology improves.” Other GM systems with voice recognition in the radio become “outdated and you quit using it,” she said.

The CUE and MyLink systems are decidedly smartphone-centric, a way to pass off the costs of hardware and connectivity to the consumer’s phone. That’s a different approach from what Harman CEO Dinesh Paliwal outlined earlier this month when trumpeting Harman’s first OEM agreement with GM (CED Aug 13 p1), a contract valued at $900 million. Paliwal spoke of Harman’s connected car strategy that is not dependent on a smartphone but an embedded Sprint 3G modem. Paliwal said the Harman universal approach to the connected car -- integrating technology from Apple, Google, Microsoft and other partners -- focused on “active safety integration.” Harman provides a software backbone comprising 3 million to 3.5 million lines of code that work with a vehicle’s sensors and subsystems with an “advanced level of processing that couldn’t be done effectively on a smartphone,” Paliwal said, because a smartphone wouldn’t have access to a vehicle’s computer system. He didn’t say which GM vehicles would incorporate Harman systems, but said development was “well under way” and that the technology would first appear in 2014 models.

The Spark’s MyLink radio was supplied by LG, that company’s first factory-installed radio, according to LeBlanc, who said LG had been involved in aftermarket car products in Korea and they “wanted to bridge over to production.” The unit offers AM, FM and Sirius/XM radio along with apps from Pandora and Stitcher. LeBlanc said “there’s plenty of room” for additional apps on the 7-inch LED, which can also be used to view video from a USB drive when the car is in park. There’s no CD player because the target market “hardly knows what a CD is,” Chris Winn, lead development engineer for Spark, told us. The radio is Bluetooth-enabled and works with iPhone and Android phones.

Navigation is optional on the Spark. Customer research showed that people want navigation but don’t want to pay $2,000 for it, especially in a $15,000 vehicle, she said. They also didn’t want to “burn up their data” plan using a smartphone navigation app, she said. GM adopted BringGo, which turns a smartphone into a “Garmin,” she said. Consumers load map data to a smartphone, which uses its own GPS locator information, she said, and the app provides suggested routes, points of interest and real-time traffic. BringGo will be available in Q4, for a one-time $50 fee, including Navteq map updates, she said.