GM Targeting Broad Swath of Drivers For 4G LTE Connected Car

GM’s program to offer 4G LTE data plans across a broad swath of vehicles -- with data plans starting at $5 per month -- is part of a strategy to reach the millennial car buyer who demands a connected environment, said Tim Nixon, chief technology officer, Global Connected Consumer.

Many of GM’s competitors decided to make connectivity “a luxury item,” Nixon told us Tuesday at an off-site CE Week roundtable, “but we don’t see data that way because it has broad appeal.” GM is targeting an eclectic group of drivers including small-business owners, soccer moms and millennials with plans available in a range of packages in vehicles ranging from the $12,000 Chevy Spark to the $66,000 Escalade ESV.

The 4G LTE vehicles have begun rolling out, led by the 2015 Chevy Malibu, with plans calling for 4G LTE in 30 Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC models in 2014, Nixon said. Nixon wouldn’t nail down a date by which GM hopes to have most of its fleet connected, but he said the determining factor for embedding a 4G LTE hotspot is a vehicle’s model refresh cycle and not wanting to add engineering costs to existing models before their transition year.

Despite the service’s name, OnStar with 4G LTE, consumers don’t have to buy into OnStar to get data service, which non-Onstar subscribers can buy on a per-day rate of $5 for 250 MB of data or a monthly starting rate of $10 (200 MB). OnStar customers’ starting rate is halved to $5 with monthly plans going up to $50 for 5 GB of data for OnStar and non-OnStar subscribers. AT&T Wireless customers can add a vehicle to an existing data plan for $10 a month. GM chose AT&T as its 4G LTE partner for the service, which supports up to seven devices in a vehicle, because it’s a “compelling, capable network,” Nixon said. The earlier generation of OnStar service used the Verizon network, he noted.

Nixon mused on several ways wireless connectivity in a vehicle could change the consumer driving experience in the future. Rather than paying a motel’s Wi-Fi fee, a consumer whose car were parked close enough to the motel room could theoretically use the vehicle for data in accessory mode, and could use a vehicle’s connectivity in a blackout assuming cell towers were working, he noted.

Combining data connectivity with the “several hundred” sensors in a vehicle is likely to yield many use cases not possible in nonconnected vehicles, Nixon said. A backup camera could capture details about a car that bumped a GM owner’s car, although legal and privacy questions for such applications could come into play, he said.

GM has demonstrated the pairing of a watch with a connected car. GM wrote an app for the Samsung Gear 2 smart watch, giving the device remote start capability using 4G LTE. “We're watching the space,” Nixon said of wearable technology. GM hasn’t announced a date for the Samsung app, which will be released as part of a “broader message around other things we're doing,” he said.

Along with more reliable connectivity, 4G LTE delivers an average 100 times performance boost over the previous 2G network, Nixon said, giving GM a “richer ability to mine data” from the vehicle. “You go from sub-hundred kilobits per second to 4, 6, 8 megabits per second, it’s pretty substantial,” he said. He noted a Google Glass concept demo with a Corvette at CES where a Google Glass wearer could see data over Wi-Fi from the car’s instrument cluster. “The richness of being able to pull data from the vehicle and interact at high speeds with a large amount of data -- and varied data -- is going to be the next frontier we really want to explore,” Nixon said. “The promise of where we can go with data over time is big.”