GM’s updated OnStar system
promises to democratize directions
By Michael Bettencourt

Pulling up to a red light just outside Québec City in an unfamiliar area—it’s the kind of situation in which pricey global positioning satellites are supposed to shine, effortlessly guiding drivers toward their destination. Instead, a female voice emitted from the car’s speakers told me to turn left, while a male voice coming from the exact same speakers immediately advised a right turn. 
    And with that, a symbolic new competitive chapter had begun in the technological race to end the anxiousness of feeling lost. Opposite paths to a common, yet elusive, goal.
    The confusion in that new Buick Lucerne was caused by the unique pairing of both a "regular" screen-based navigation system and GM’s new Turn-by-Turn service, courtesy of its OnStar system. The Turn-by-Turn tour guide became available this spring in the Lucerne and Cadillac DTS, and will be added to other new GM models this year, including more inexpensive Chevrolet and Pontiac products. 
    Most screen-based navigation systems involve a GPS sensor mounted on the roof that plots the car’s progress against digital maps contained on CDs or DVDs. The map moves along your vehicle’s path and can be zoomed in for street names or zoomed out to make sure you’re still heading in the right direction overall. These systems started out in luxury cars and give any ride a techie gee-whiz factor, but they’re now available in some cars that cost less than $30,000. The cost of the systems (currently between $1,600 and $2,500) is still holding back the market, though, along with the fact that less-travelled areas of Canada have not yet been digitally mapped. 
    In contrast, everything about GM’s OnStar system is designed to be inexpensive, easy to use and the opposite of glitzy. For example, OnStar has always employed a call centre staffed by real humans, and this down-home interaction is meant to further OnStar’s appeal. So while luxury automakers like BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi are all moving toward computer mouse-like controllers that can adjust, inflate, rotate, jump up and down, and change more settings in your car than you realized it had, GM is taking the opposite approach: modern technology for technophobes.

Test drive

The turn-by-turn global positioning system embedded in every OnStar-equipped vehicle tells you how to get to where you want to go, and will automatically readjust itself if you get off course.
    So far, this is all standard functionality for any navigation system. Yet GM’s screenless system is easier, even if it doesn’t provide the entertainment value of having a screen to trace your path. 
    The most important difference from a user-friendliness perspective is that it’s much easier to plug in a destination than in many such systems. Press the blue button, which lives just under the rear-view mirror in all OnStar systems, and you’ll be connected to a live OnStar advisor. Once you say where you’re going, either with an address, intersection, hotel or restaurant name, the operator searches for your destination, confirms it’s the one you want and then, using the satellite-based GPS system, downloads directions to the vehicle. The entire process takes a few seconds. 
    "We’ve evolved the business not by doing everything the technology can do," said Chet Huber, president of OnStar, a wholly owned subsidiary of GM. "[Instead], our judgment told us to let our customers tell us what they wanted."
    With most navigation systems, setting a destination involves sitting in your driveway for five minutes or more while entering a street name and number, a seeming eternity when you’re ready to move. Some allow you to just punch in a phone number, which retrieves the location from a database of local numbers. But how many people have their hotel address easily at hand, or a restaurant’s phone number committed to memory? Most often you only know the name of your destination.
    The whole OnStar system looks simple in the car, but technologically it’s not. "We have 300 patents now," Huber said. "We had to invent a lot of stuff to make it work."
    And like many new inventions, there are glitches, as evidenced by the two competing automated directions at that Québec stoplight. The challenge there was trying to figure out which automated voice to trust. Once we did, we were glad one was male and the other was female, so we could tell them apart. The first inclination was to follow the OnStar advice, since there was an actual human behind it. However, communication with the OnStar advisor cut out more than three times, usually in what seemed like unintentional hang-ups, and the wrong directions were downloaded to the car at least once.
    OnStar is currently an optional system on more than 50 GM vehicles, and by the end of 2007 all GM vehicles in Canada will feature it as standard equipment. The hope is that more people will pay the monthly fee to continue the service after the year-long free period on new cars expires. This fee starts at $24.95 per month, but almost doubles to $48.95 per month to get the turn-based navigation.
    The thought of another monthly bill, even after the vehicle is paid off, may not be very appealing. But there is much less upfront cost compared to a factory navigation system, and if you find you don’t use it much, you can just stop paying for it, something you can’t do with the screen-based systems.

Another neat new navigation trick comes courtesy of BMW, which has just introduced real-time traffic routing for 2007 in its GPS navigation system, a feature which tracks traffic flow in 22 major American cities and can automatically change the planned route to the quickest route. This real-time traffic info (RTTI), like the similar AcuraLink navigation system that warns of traffic bottlenecks, is not yet available in Canada, and likely won’t be until at least 2008.
    "Canada just doesn’t have the infrastructure for [AcuraLink]," said Honda Canada spokesman Richard Jacobs. The car company’s upscale system uses an XM satellite radio-based service. 
    BMW’s traffic-avoiding navigation system is based on information gathered from Clear Channel Communications’ Total Traffic Network, which gathers traffic info from local radio stations, embedded road sensors and video monitoring systems. BMW North America product specialist William Scully said the system won’t work in Canada because Clear Channel doesn’t broadcast any traffic data here. "We are evaluating the potential to expand this service into Canada, but have no timeline to offer such a service," he wrote in an e-mail. 
    BMW Group Canada’s product and tech specialist, Rob Dexter, sings a different tune than Honda, saying the necessary traffic flow information sources are available in Canada now, as in the U.S., but what’s missing is the service provider. "The pure technical hurdles in regard to RTTI in Canada are probably a lesser challenge than is the business case for the supporting service provider."

Of course, you don’t have to buy a car to provide high-tech directions. RIM’s BlackBerry Pearl goes on sale this fall with new software called BlackBerry Maps, although the ability to track your location to your hand-held device will likely be a delayed introduction, depending on how quickly Rogers can deploy the feature on its network. These services are already offered on a few select phones in the U.S., but haven’t been widely available in Canada.
    An Ipsos Insight survey of a relatively small sample of tech-savvy American consumers last year found that GPS navigation in cellphones could be the next "breakout" feature, thanks to high consumer interest. Finnish cellphone giant Nokia sold eight million GPS-enabled cellphones in 2005, but expects to sell 15 million this year, and just bought German navigation software company gate5 earlier this year to speed the integration of digital mapping. 
    Yet a much more extensive C.J Driscoll & Associates survey of 5,000 consumers in the United States showed seven out of the 10 top-rated applications on a mobile phone are location-based GPS services (mapping, ‘find me’ functions, etc.), but early adopters of cellphone-based navigation services have found them to be less appealing than navigation systems installed in vehicles or on portable GPS devices. 
    This result suggests that even amongst those comfortable with technology, such navigation services may just work better on a bigger screen than a standard cellphone offers. Whether consumers prefer OnStar’s low-flash personal connection, a pricier and glitzier screen-based system or a more accessible personal device that can be used in any vehicle, one thing’s for sure: many Canadians are likely to be hearing voices in their cars attempting to make their final destinations a little less elusive.