How connected cars are turning into revenue-generating machines

Just saw a Buick commercial touting their in-car wifi and my first thought was, why is this something I want to pay extra for? Whatever crappy mobile network device it has is already older than my iPhone/Hotspot and I'm tied to whoever their provider is for however much they want to charge.

Let me run it in reverse. Let my connect my phone using my frequently updated hardware and the network that I want to use. I've got power so I don't care about the battery drain, and I gaurantee I will have a better speed/data cap/price relationship than whatever tiers they will have.

Better yet, instead of the crappy infotainment system make it Android and/or AirPlay capable and let the phone run the head unit and you just have a dumb display.

This article was really hard to read. Here's my attempt at a summary:

* The author expects new cars to be networked and to have beefy CPUs.

* There are lots of cars, and each car will use lots of data. To network all these cars, you'll need investment from telecom companies like carriers.

* Today the car's systems don't talk to each other, or the internet that much. Once you network them, it'll be good for companies who make cars to see how their product is used in the wild.

* Now that you have smart cars, people can write apps for them. The author thinks this will be a large market with a few killer apps.

* Car's are really complex, and were not designed to be networked. You should expect a lot of security issues during this transition.

I feel like such a luddite for saying this, but this article makes me want to go torch a car dealership just to sabotage the idea of connected cars. This just sounds like marketers looking for new ways to shove ads where they don't belong.

Even well-established connected car technology like built-in navigation still sucks. I know people with built-in nav, but they all use google maps on their phones instead, because it works better and is more up-to-date. What does that say, if car companies haven't even gotten navigation systems right yet?

If you think of it from an old-school, consumer viewpoint, "connected cars" are a solution looking for a problem.

This seems unusual, since automakers will eagerly save <$5/unit to place a deadly Takata airbag or that faulty GM ignition switch in a car. Why spend $50 to give me some shitty functionality that I don't need?

So obviously these investments are being made to address some tangible problem -- and "let's make more money" is a problem that everyone has.

That saying about how if you're not paying for the product, then you are the product bothers me. Because it implies that if you do pay for the product, you somehow get to avoid being the product.

That article lacks any useful ideas on how to generate revenue with a connected car. It's suggested that payment at gas stations could be automated, but that was first deployed in 1997 as Mobil Speedpass, and still has only about 3 million users.

Ads on the dashboard maps are likely, but you can get a map overlay with fast food restaurants now.

Monetizing tracking data on where the car goes seems almost inevitable. GM has such data from Onstar, but they're hesitant to do it. "If we can monetize that connection at some point then there is revenue potential, but selling a $20,000 or $30,000 vehicle, that’s where the value to GM is" - GM exec. They don't want to jeopardize the car business by trying to get a little extra revenue by selling tracking data.

The last American Airlines flight I took, the plane had no built-in screens at all. No TV, no movie, nothing. It was great. I think they realized that sinking money into their screens was just dumb - everyone who wanted to watch a movie or TV just their own device, etc.

The idea of cars using more and more realistic to bombard their users with "infotainment" is just awful. I want a car to tells me less and less because it needs to tell me less and less. Speed and maybe which lights are on and maybe fuel/energy gauge. I shouldn't need rpms or fuel mileage or whatever because the car should take care of this normally - emergency information is a different matter but the car should avoid emergencies.

This is going to work only if we change cars every two or three years, like phones. Otherwise the (probably) immutable hw in the car will soon be unable to interact with newer phones and services. And the builtin services will soon look old and uninteresting.

So, is long term rental and automatic new car after two years going to be the new normal for car "ownership"?

Great article. This makes a few assumptions about the future, but I can really see the potential here for media in cars that the author is getting at:

- Once the driver is no longer driving, they're going to pretty bored

- As the need for windows becomes less important, this area can be used for displays instead

- These lead to the potential for passengers to do something else with their time, such as watching videos, doing work, playing games, etc. like they would on a flight

- It's likely consumers may expect this experience without it coming from the data of their smartphones (less setup, better connectivity, not dependent on a phone)

- The new media systems and potential data subscriptions opens the door for lots of new revenue streams

Does it speak TCP/IP? Someone is figuring out a way to use it to sell you to advertisers.

I'm a little surprised that "smart" TVs aren't mentioned; the situations seem very similar, and major brands (Panasonic and Samsung at least) have put ads in their smart TV interfaces. Maybe this is too much of a puff piece to mention such a disliked point of comparison (the author all but admits to being in the tank for "connected" cars)?

I guess if nothing else it ought to be possible to buy retired fleet vehicles without this crap.

I just read a bunch of reasons to learn proper auto-maintenance to keep my current vehicles running for as long as possible.

I imagine a time in the future (months from now) when we will summon an Uber and it will list all of the stops it has to make along the way to deliver/pick-up packages.

We'll be able to sort our autonomous ride options by lowest number of stops.

This is going to be a dumpster fire, at least for a while until the best overtakes the best-funded and marketed.