Slashdot Mirror
OnStar Gives Volt Owners What They Want: Their Data, In the Cloud
Volt owners will be able to brag about their mileage more easily now thanks to OnStar. "GM rushed work on a new API to get a popular Volt owner site back on road. You probably don't think of your car as a developer platform, but Mike Rosack did. A few days after buying his Chevy Volt, Rosack started slowly mining his driving data. But he eventually revved up his efforts and created a community platform for drivers to track their own efficiency. Today more than 1,800 Volt owners compare stats with each other, jockeying for position on Rosack's Volt Stats leader board."
Sadly, you might soon have to, in the sense that you'll need to [pdf] keep your security patches up to date...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
how do we monetize this?
even the KKK has more twitter presence.
Yet another reason i'll never buy an onstar equipped car. Hands too much control to people you already paid once...
They can pull the plug on this at any time. or start charging for the data. or anything else scummy you can think of.. and you can do nothing about it.
I like computers. i really do. but i really dont want them in my car... or connected to the 'cloud'. it's stupid. If you're going that far where you need updates and connectivity for your car and official updates the dealer must install. (prius)
You're better off just renting a car. You're going to be paying forever to drive. They might as well be responsible for way more crap than what they are now.
Nissan has a stats site for Leaf owners that compiles stats, ranks efficiencies, etc., for those who opt in. It's fairly interesting, and it does provide some motivation for driving more efficiently, which isn't a bad thing. The top drivers must only drive downhill, though. They get 22+ miles per kWh, which is insanely good.
The Nissan site is provided and operated by Nissan, though, rather than a fan.
There are a lot of cool things that can be done with a highly-computerized car that has its own 3G Internet connection and GPS. They're barely scratching the surface. It really makes me want to hack my car, but I don't want to void the warranty.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
hope they don't bill for data roaming when you drive out side of the USA.
It's amazing how "cloud" is now anything you transfer through the Internet.
But I'd like to make sure there is an opt-out (or better yet an opt-in) for this "service". I don't want my stats and/or whereabouts transmitted to anyone without my explicit knowledge/agreement.
Can anyone who may have one of these things confirm that this private data is something I don't have to be transmitting to some random company? I noticed the word "privacy" was mentioned 2x in the article, but both times it seemed to be to satisfy OnStar's requirements.
What's the scoop on this? It's been a while since I've bought a new car. Is this like, standard now?
But they get their own 'facebook/twitter' page. A first step to mandatory black boxes. Aren't you excited? They'll "dance to anything"..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Too many bad things can come from it. Stealing your data is bad enough. But imagine someone spoofing a cellphone tower similar to what the police have already done (illegally) and use that to fake OnStar singles to your car to unlock the door or worse imagine some little hacker who figures out how to get access to the cars onboard systems and starts having fun by remapping the break to the gas pedal on them when they start the auto-driving cars.
Let alone when money gets involved and they are trying to target a particular person.
Words cannot express how sick I am of idiots in a Prius
( or a Volt, or any other car which is embraced by idiots who
are delusional enough to imagine their car will save the planet )
going slowly in the fast lane on the Interstate ( which
by the way is ILLEGAL thanks to the law which requires
slower traffic to keep right ).
These thoughtless twits make driving more dangerous
for everyone when they impede the flow of traffic by refusing
to pull into the slower lanes.
If you are a Prius driver and you worship your fuel economy meter,
that's fine, but YOU DO NOT have the right to impede traffic on the
Interstate. Get the fuck out of the left lane.
TFA says they use CDMA 1x, aren't those networks being shutdown around the world, since they're getting quite old. New Zealand and Australia have already shut theirs down, replaced by WCDMA.
How long till USA follows suite? This website says it's starting in 2015.
Is this going to make every single OnStar system useless without a hardware upgrade?
enviromental friendliness...who cares ;-)
saving the earth...yeah whatever
nerd bragging rights and a leaderboard with a technocar----yeah baby.
Oh please store my data for me! Here are my tax documents, and my children's birthdays. Here is where I will be at every second in my life.
Drink the kool-aid and join the cloud!
What'cha gonna do when they come for you?
Why play in the clowds with the clowns?
Easily done.
I have an OnStar equipped car. They called me like 5 times to try to get me to pay, including once in my car (only call I ever got in the car as I didn't use the service). I didn't pay. And then it was shut off. I was even in an accident since and no phone calls or anything.
So why worry about them pulling the plug? You'll only lose service you already have said you don't want to use anyway.
As to updates for your cars, every car has updates now. Heck, I have a rental Ford right now due to the accident I was in and I managed to crash/corrupt Sync in it. The voice recognition system is permanently crashed, and there's no apparent way to reboot it.
So if you really are not going to own a car with updates, you'll simply have no real options left in a decade or so.
You get a discount for sharing it
This is a 3rd party service and they cannot access your data without you authenticating to GM. So don't go to the site, don't log in and they don't get any data.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I see what you did there. Ho, ho.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
This is not an attempt at being noble or supportive of the developer community or their customers. What the article doesn't mention is that they did so after a massive public and media backlash after they took legal action against a number of 3rd party applications their customers were using.
GM and OnStar aren't the good guys here.
In some ways the Volt is GM's flagship car so they've been very careful to make sure it works for them instead of ending up with a disaster. I suspect their support of an enthusiast interface is to encourage that goodwill continues. They have an amazingly long warranty service and free 3 years on OnStar which for the regular consumer is something very desirable. It's helped them improve their product as well as their 2013 model battery improvements were partially based on the fact that the battery pack was degrading less than they had thought. Mind you I don't see this as a privacy disaster either. VoltStats site notes they don't have free access to air pressure and a few other stats that they use to use. I'm going to be a Volt owner soon and to be honest, I'm not worried about GM collecting data on my car. It looks like it'll lead to improvements for everyone down the road. If you're wondering why you'd want one, well it's a really nice electric car and while yes I could get a Leaf, it's my only car and without a gas engine you're going to freeze in some of the -20C sub zero temperatures in Canada. It's only downside is yes, it costs a lot of money to get one. But as a nice luxury sedan which is what I see it as, it's nice.
So you can't pull the SIM card. It uses CDMA, not GSM.
You can pull the fuse if you want.
AC asked about this service. I answered about this service.
I don't think GM is calling my car to get data from it and frankly I would be all that concerned if they did. License plate scanners are going to be so cheap and available within a year or two that you won't be able to go anywhere in a car without a dozen companies knowing where you went and unlike GM, you can't retaliate against them by changing car brands if they send out your data.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
See another car:
http://www.voltstats.net/Stats/Details/771
Those are user comments, not generated by the site. If the owner was worried him from his white diamond description on the net, he wouldn't have entered that in the user comments.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
But these cars use Verizon, not MetroPCS. Verizon is not going to shut down CDMA 1x for a while as right now it is their only way of making calls (you cannot make calls on 3G or 4G LTE on Verizon right now).
OnStar hardware became obsolete before, my understanding is the new system uses a plug-in radio so the cars can be upgraded. Yes, it will require upgrades. Presumably if you are a continuing customer they will give you the upgrade for free.
OnStar already has versions on deck that use 3G and 4G (not sure which 4G, they didn't say), so by the time the switchover happens, many cars will already be capable, older ones still active on OnStar will have to be upgraded though.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
You're saying they'll charge me more for not getting it, then say I'll pay to comply. Sounds like I pay to not comply.
You make no sense.
This is bigger than OnStar, Progressive already has Snapshot. They don't need OnStar to do what you fear.