The plan is to search through the many patents for services that OnStar holds and bring them out to meet customer demand. What other new technologies this means from OnStar and its sibling service, XM satellite radio, remains to be seen, but Huber has long planned to use the telematics system as a portal to various services. For example, he once
described to me in great detail (and with a western accent that mimicked the dealer's) a game that would allow the vehicle's occupants to play cards with a computer back in Detroit. That system hasn't debuted yet, but it might someday soon, given the current popularity of poker in North America.
As consumer-driven as OnStar might be, company executives learned early on that customers would have requests that they could never fulfill. When the system was being tested in the early 1990s, a customer had an idea about how to use the car theft part of the OnStar service. He suggested that a stolen vehicle should automatically turn up the heat to the highest temperature, play rap music at max volume, keep the doors and windows locked, and disable the car until the police arrived.
As it happens, doing that would actually be fairly easy with the right software, but OnStar has so far declined. Who knows what will happen in the future?
It's unlikely, however, that we'll ever see a real world version of another customer's suggestion -- put a shotgun in the steering column and have it go off if someone tried to steal the car.
photo:GM of Canada
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| (Photo: General Motors |
As consumer-driven as OnStar might be, company executives learned early on that customers would have requests that they could never fulfill. When the system was being tested in the early 1990s, a customer had an idea about how to use the car theft part of the OnStar service. He suggested that a stolen vehicle should automatically turn up the heat to the highest temperature, play rap music at max volume, keep the doors and windows locked, and disable the car until the police arrived.
As it happens, doing that would actually be fairly easy with the right software, but OnStar has so far declined. Who knows what will happen in the future?
It's unlikely, however, that we'll ever see a real world version of another customer's suggestion -- put a shotgun in the steering column and have it go off if someone tried to steal the car.
photo:GM of Canada