At the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, just-auto’s Cat Dow caught up with GM’s Chief Infotainment Office Philip Abram to learn more about the OEM’s plans for connected vehicles.
j-a: What is the current landscape for infotainment for GM within the huge GM product range?
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PA: We announced early 2014 at the Geneva Auto Show that we would be bringing OnStar to the European market in 2015. GM plans to overtime actively connect all of our vehicles on a global basis and so we’re marking it to that strategy in that direction. So, if you look at different markets in different states, there are different states of execution of that strategy borne from some of our capabilities or by the market readiness for example what is the status of the old GLC network in various parts of the world. GM is committed to creating a great customer experience for people. And it’s all these things that are going into our global rollout plan.
j-a: Distracted driving is a big problem. We all want to keep using our mobile phones. Is the solution to make the car a ‘mobile’ phone?
PA: No, I would disagree there. All of the experiences on for example a mobile phone or a website has one objective in mind and that is to totally capture your attention and not let your eyes wander off because that is how they monetise it by offering services so they really want you drawn into the experience. The experience and the car is the exact opposite – it’s 180 degrees from that. You don’t want people drawn into centre stack (centre console).You want them to keep their eyes on the road and the hands of the wheel so in creating an experience in the car, very much at the full front of that is ‘what is the driver distraction’?’, how do you do this activity in two seconds or less? How do you make the eye glances off the road as short as you can? You make the buttons really large because you are in a moving vehicle and you’re going over bumps and you’re trying to land a finger on a screen when you are tapping while you are looking away, etc. Therefore, the vehicle is a very different experience and this should be a very different experience from the other platforms.
j-a: The status of the 4G network across different parts of the world is actually a key ingredient of getting user activity into second or less, isn’t it?
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By GlobalDataAbsolutely I agree and that’s why the 4G network and regulatory environment in the United States pretty favourable and stable and broadly deployed network. In Europe, you know, where you have a patchwork of regulatory bodies that within each country, you’ve got to build consortiums of carriers in order to make a regular and meaningful for cars that can drive all over Europe. So some of the workings of the activities that we are undertaking now.
j-a: You wanted to use this interview opportunity to clarify the statement made in September. What exactly was that?
There wasn’t an announcement in September. There was an interview between the president of our global connected consumer organisation and a reporter from GigaOM. We had earlier announced that we were going to have an application framework inside the car and deliver applications that are relevant to the car experience and the vehicles. The question came up about the status of that and Mary at the time said, “We delayed the introduction of the application framework because we didn’t think the customer experience was quite where we wanted it to be”. We won’t release capability unless it meets our own, rather high, standards for customer experience. And it got misrepresented as it into a change of strategy or changing direction and that is not the case at all. We remain committed to bringing our applications that are relevant to the new car experience we just won’t do in the model that we initially set.
j-a: Therefore, it is not so much a change in strategy, more a review. Is that fair?
PA: Well, it was a delay in execution.
j-a: In bringing that application framework out, you’ll have that framework available but then there will also will be other companies, such as Apple and Google, that you’re prepared to work with, correct?
PA: Yes.
j-a: How will that technically work inside the car?
PA: What we announced with Apple and Google — and this was announced before we made changes to our application framework — we were one of the founding members of Google’s OAA looking at bringing Android into the vehicle. We’ve been working with Apple for a number of years. We were the first company to have Siri enabled in the car, so we’ve been partnered with those two companies for quite some time. [Carplay and Android Auto] essentially do the same thing, which is allow the customer to bring their phone whether Apple or Android into the vehicle and have it work with that vehicle’s centre stack screen in a way that is appropriate for a vehicle. It’s really about delivering four key applications: navigation, media, messaging and phone capabilities. It’s touchscreen and it’s really changing the user experience for those applications to be relevant and appropriate in a vehicle. That doesn’t mean we’re replacing what’s inside the car with Apple or Google. It means a single car has both capabilities.
j-a: In terms of the roll out of these systems, do you have a date for when that will happen?
PA: We’ve made no announcements on either the app framework or specific dates for support for the Apple or Google capabilities.
j-a: Are there any examples you can provide of the challenges GM has faced bringing heavier connectivity into the market and how you’ve overcome these challenges?
PA: I’d say we’ve solved a lot of them, as we have 30 models in the United States with high speed 4G/LTE connectivity and we’ve got a car park of 7 million customers that are paying us on a monthly basis for that service. I think most OEMs would have a very long list but GM’s list is a lot shorter because we’ve solved most of them. There are real ones. One of the biggest obstacles other OEMs will face is learning how to integrate deeply connectivity with the rest of the vehicle operation. It’s one thing to integrate a mobile to provide some superficial services but it’s another to deeply integrate. That requires a lot of expertise that we fortunately have the capacity over the years. I think in going forward for everyone is finding a way to have the pace of innovation in this area match the release, cadence or pace of global. Right now, there’s a mismatch, but we’re doing a lot of work to abstract the electronics part of the experience from the vehicle so we can innovate and integrate at the appropriate pace.
