You could barely recognize to-day’s vehicle telematics compared to what arrived two decades ago when General Motors sold the first OnStar vehicles. Originally, On-Star telematics was pitched as a

lifesaving device via automatic crash notification, plus remote door unlock when you locked your keys inside. Telematics has evolved to a flower of many petals now that cellular coverage is wide-spread and data is (relatively) cheap.

Telematics has gone from analog cellular to digital to 3G and now 4G LTE cellular. The fast-er pipe for information matters more for stream-ing video to the back seat or music to the front, far less for uploading an engine fault code. Along the way, automakers realized the value of infor-mation to be gleaned when the majority of their vehicles on the road could talk back. Now it’s possible to learn of impending faults and take ac-tion before a relatively minor problem becomes a more involved repair.

Few car buyers will choose one brand over the other just because it has telematics, or more comprehensive telematics. They may also be confused about what the features mean. They

may know that a POI search helps find you a Greek restaurant within 20 miles, but they may not know whether the address can be automat-ically transferred into the navigation system, which beats stopping and keying in the address manually.

As the cost of embedding on-board telematics modules drops, more automakers are installing them. Analysts estimate an adequate system—meaning 3G, not 4G LTE—has a parts cost of less than $100. Even when the cost of 4G is more than double, the effective cost may be zero or negative. Here’s why: When a vehicle is under warranty, automakers receive notice of impend-ing issues before they’re bigger, costlier problems that may include towing and a free loaner. Often the owner can set up a service appointment via the vehicle, for a date that gives the dealer a chance to make sure all repair parts are in stock. The same system tracks routine maintenance, es-pecially oil life, and can urge the owner to come in for that work. When the vehicle is out of war-ranty and something starts to fail, the owner has a smaller repair bill.

Automakers have the opportunity to set up reminder screens, urging owners to schedule maintenance they really shouldn’t ignore. Own-ers need to know that timing belts should be replaced every 60,000 to 100,000 miles; that’s vitally important. A reminder to replace wiper blades is important at a lower level, and might be annoying if the warning pops up with every engine start.

There will be an ongoing discussion of who has access to what information and of what spec-ificity. A “check engine, please contact us” notice works for many owners; they just want reassur-ance the vehicle won’t break down on the spot. Others would like a hint about the issue, and DIYers might want to know the specific problem being reported. Independent shops would like to know the diagnosis with as much specificity as the automaker and dealer get.

Meanwhile, the number of vehicles with on-board telematics increases. General Motors for

BillHoward

By 2025, nine of 10 new vehicles will offer integrated telematics.

This means early warning of developing vehicle problems, remote

fixes and the possible introduction of malware or viruses.

bhoward@motor.com

Eye On Electronics

16 November 2016

OnStar remote diagnostics let users with smartphones lock/unlock the vehicle, re-mote start/stop and flash the lights and sound the horn via MyLink. They also can check tire pressure and review stored results from the most recent trip.

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several years has equipped virtually every car, SUV and pickup truck with OnStar, other than a few fleet orders. Premium brands are equipping the ma-jority of their vehicles as well—Audi with Audi Connect, BMW with BMW Assist, Infiniti with Connection Plus or InTouch, Lexus with Enform and Mer-cedes-Benz with Mbrace. The premi-um brands may include several years of service in a new vehicle’s purchase price.

The trend to telematics with an on-board cellular modem got a boost with Ford this year beginning to shift its fleet from Ford Sync, which since 2008 provided smartphone-based services (including automat-ic crash notification), to Sync Connect, which embeds a telematics module, cellular modem and external antenna in the vehicle. Sync Connect is on the 2017 Ford Escape and Ford Fusion, with the rest of the fleet to follow.

The list of features on-board telematics brings is quite lengthy: automatic crash notification (ACN), concierge services (reservations, tickets), customer relations and vehicle information, direct contact with dealers, destination download for navigation, emergency services other than ACN (ambulance, fire), fuel price finder, lo-cation sharing (useful while convoying), local search, news-sports-weather, POI search and POI transfer to the nav sys-tem, remote door unlock, remote horn and lights, roadside assistance, stolen vehicle tracking and slowdown, text messaging (spoken texts, occasionally onscreen texts), voice calling (in case you forget your phone or charger) and vehicle diagnostics.

For parents concerned about their children, there is geofencing (alerts when the car goes more than X miles from home), time-of-day warnings and speed limit notification. This is still ru-dimentary. You set a maximum speed that’s the same for local roads and high-ways; as navigation data includes posted speed limits, you can set the telltale for, say, 5 mph over the limit for more than 3 seconds.

When parents and kids drive togeth-er, a 4G cellular modem provides mul-tiple video streams. I recently drove a Cadillac CT6 sedan with dual 10-in. rear screens and, in the middle of the rear seat, an AC adapter, four USB jacks and an HDMI video connector (in the fold-down armrest and under the seat cushion). Plug in a streaming media stick or player such as Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV or Google Chromecast, connect it to the in-vehicle

Wi-Fi hotspot and you can stream hun-dreds of TV shows, movies and videos. A 4G modem to Wi-Fi to streaming device to the HDMI jack sends info-tainment to the front-seatback displays. Cadillac and AT&T even offer an un-limited data plan.

Telematics is a given on electric ve-hicles and plug-in hybrids. The driver wants to know his vehicle is plugged in at night and confirm in the morning that it’s fully charged. Via a smartphone he can order the interior warmed up while the EV is still connected to AC power.

Insurance companies like vehicles with telematics. Then they can offer lower-cost insurance if the driver agrees to have his driving monitored. (In vehi-cles without telematics, an OBD II plug does much the same thing.) You give up some privacy and freedom to, say, drive 10 mph over the limit or drive a lot on Friday and Saturday evenings, in ex-change for lower rates. Some research suggests that drivers facing higher rates do modify their behavior. Monitored driving may also be the only way some bad drivers can get insurance at all.

If you want to imagine the possibil-ities for telematics on the commercial side, look to what United Parcel Service does with its fleet. More than 25,000 delivery trucks are outfitted with more than 200-plus sensors. Some keep track of engine and drivetrain components that soon may need maintenance, something that’s now happening in pas-senger cars. They track vehicle speed and acceleration, of course, along with a number of other events: when the

seat belt is buckled and un-buckled; how often, how fast and for how long the truck backs up; when the doors are opened and closed; and when they make left turns (increases idling time and is marginal-ly less safe) rather than driv-ing the route to increase right turns. All that information is gathered on board and at day’s end uploaded to a UPS data center in Paramus, NJ.

There’s real-time tracking, too. A transponder tells UPS where the truck is. The De-livery Information Acquisition

Device (DIAD) hand-held computer updates instantly, which is why you can get a text at work within minutes of the package being left at your door at home. UPS’ computers figure out the best route for each driver for each day, depending on his or her package load. They also figure out the order to load the truck in sync with the projected route. It also avoids one of the driver’s biggest fears—the undelivered package at day’s end that has to be dropped off at the other end of the route.

According to UPS, if each driv-er saves a minute a day, that increases UPS’ revenue by $15 million. The ef-ficiency allows many drivers to deliver a third more packages a day. Depend-ing on the density of the route, a driv-er can deliver 150 packages in a day. In exchange for providing measurably more productivity via telematics, say both UPS and the Teamsters union rep-resenting drivers, the wages and bene-fits for UPS drivers have doubled since the 1990s. Some veteran drivers make $75,000 a year. If this is Big Brother, there are benefits.

18 November 2016

Eye On Electronics

Ford is shifting from phone-based Sync to Sync Connect with an in-tegrated cellular modem. The first models to get Sync Connect are the 2017 Ford Fusion (shown here) and Ford Escape.

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