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
You get a discount for sharing it with your insurance company.
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.
You mean a surcharge for not sharing it with your insurance company.
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?
EXACTLY.
I am quite pleased and proud that none of my vehicles share information with ANYONE in the "Cloud." Just because something CAN be done [that is "kewl"], doesn't necessarily make it a great idea.
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?
That's today. Tomorrow there will be an additional charge for NOT sharing. Next year there will be a law that makes it illegal not to share.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
enviromental friendliness...who cares ;-)
saving the earth...yeah whatever
nerd bragging rights and a leaderboard with a technocar----yeah baby.
The difference between a discount for sharing and an additional charge for not sharing is purely semantics. Both just mean that you'll pay more if you don't share. The only difference is which price you declare as base one. If you declare the lower price as standard, the higher means an additional charge, while if you declare the higher price as standard, the lower one means a discharge. Which one you declare as base price depends only on your marketing strategy. If you think you can better compete by making your base price as low as possible, you'll take the lower price as base price and hide the extra charges for not sharing in the fine print. If you think you can better compete by giving discounts, you declare the higher price as base price and market the savings possible when sharing as loudly as possible.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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
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.