Off the Dash and Into the Cloud

Her: “Welcome to OnStar, Mr. Beaman. I’m Tracey, your navigation advisor. Where can I take you today?”

Me: “Los Angeles—Cole’s restaurant and bar.”

Her: “Certainly. I will now download directions to your nav screen.”

Me: “Dang!”

That was a great experience. No fiddling with the nav touch screen—just a quick conversation and I’m on my way to a French dip and refreshing beverage. There’s a lot that isn’t technologically great in my car. There are at least four different female voices involved in setting the car’s preferences (five, including my wife’s). The voice commands are painfully inaccurate. Setting up a Bluetooth device without any screen input is a fail. But asking for directions and getting them sent to the nav screen is fantastic.

The OnStar experience works because it doesn’t rely too heavily on the car’s computer’s having to be great. It is a service. It can be upgraded without touching the car’s technology. GM can tweak OnStar’s back end as much as it wants and then deliver the service when it’s tested and ready. A car’s computer, on the other hand, is essentially obsolete the minute it boots up. There are no upgrades, no cracking it open to add more RAM. Seven years down the line, the dashboard touch screen’s icon for the iPod will still have a click wheel on it.

External services such as OnStar have a much longer shelf life and are more satisfying for consumers. As connectivity to networks becomes more ubiquitous, automakers increasingly are going to shift services into the cloud. And we’re not talking only about new flavors of OnStar.

Google has an autonomous car that has been driving around California for weeks now. The car has been using a series of cloud-based data sets, radar sensors, and video cameras to direct itself down Lombard Street in San Francisco and along the Pacific Coast Highway. Google believes that the self-driving car will be available to consumers in eight years. Core pieces of car functionality are not only being taken off the dashboard, they’re being taken out of our hands entirely. That’s going to require a huge shift for the auto industry—and a fundamental change in the way we live. I, for one, can’t wait for OnStar to take the wheel.