One CES announcement that caught my attention this year was related to the in-car gadget known as OnStar. It’s basically a cellular data and voice connection for your car that has been around since 1997. What’s new is that GM, the parent company of OnStar, is looking for developers with big ideas to create apps for the OnStar system. If trusted, the developer will gain access to the OnStar API for app development.
Think: your car’s information, available everywhere. And not just on a mobile app, like what is currently available for locking and unlocking doors, but also on the web. What kind of information you ask? I’d really like to get my hands on the API to know for sure, but from what I know there is all kinds of juicy information to mine from a vehicle diagnostic system. Tire pressure, drivetrain performance, GPS information, and fuel economy are just a few. Today’s cars are full of all types of sensor information that could be re-purposed for something else. It’s very common for cars to have sensors like ambient temperature, pressure, light, even oxygen.
Here’s a couple app ideas that come to mind:
- Measure mpg over different terrain, routes, and times of year for maximizing MPG.
- Current weather information aggregator.
- Low tire pressure warning email.
Or how about your car’s own web page, like a “mycar.com”, where it can post pictures of where it’s been and brag about that premium fuel you’ve been filling it up with. As funny as that sounds, much more nonsensical things have gone on to become a hit, or at least a fad.
Vehicle history, like a carfax report but more detailed, could be gathered over the life of a car in a totally automatic way. That would be trusted by potential used car buyers. I would be very interested in having quick access to the maintenance and performance history of the used cars I’m browsing for online.
OnStar is essentially a low bandwidth data connection to your car. Currently a lot of engineering effort is needed to coordinate the way individual electronic devices share and store diagnostic information. Freeing this data could lead to shifts in the way automotive electronics store and use data. Exporting the processing and storage of such information to the cloud could allow new applications that haven’t been thought of to develop in the future.
Do you have any ideas? Write them in the comments below.
6 Comments
Insurance claims ? Lots of data available as to what you were doing just before a smash – as well as data for the other cars involved…
I’d like to see a location based reminder service based. It would have to integrate with another service, like the reminders app on the iPhone (or similar service). But it would be cool to get a voice alert that says, “Don’t forget to pick up the milk”, or some such.
Also, there is the Ford SYNC API (Ford/Microsoft version of On*): http://www.syncmyride.com/developer
Would be interested in seeing how difficult it would be to provide two similar app experiences on the different platforms (much like the challenges we see in making Android/iOS app experiences similar).
Aside from that, I would be interested in seeing more safety features being built into apps for cars; not just data collection and reporting. With around 40,000 fatal motor vehicle crashes in the US each year, any effort you could make to reduce that would be amazing! Of course I guess this would depend on what type of sensor info you have access to in the API. Maybe you could augment the sensor info with a mobile phone sensors.
How about if the car detects that it’s driver may have fallen asleep, like when the steering wheel and accelerator stop changing position, have the cell phone basically go into alarm mode and ring and vibrate. That might have come in real handy for a certain lieutenant governor recently.
That’d be great! Then with many phones having front and back cameras, maybe mount the phone on the dash and use both cameras for some computer vision application to detect possible collision or if the driver isn’t looking at the road. Not sure what kind of processing power these devices (SYNC & On*) have on them, as to where you would want to do a majority of your processing…
You should checkout mobileye. They are doing some very impressive things with machine vision. There’s a cellbots app known as cellJoust that exports a video feed from an Android phone. It’s something I’ve been interested in for offloading image processing.