System potentially can steer drivers in the right direction

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Jan 11, 2004 | by Francine Brevetti, BUSINESS WRITER

In five years, 50 percent of new autos will be equipped with GPS navigational systems, according to Peter Kastner, analyst with Aberdeen Research.

Besides new vehicles, you can today buy a GPS navigational accessory for your 3-year-old Honda. And the competitors for this market are growing.

Other prognosticators are more hesitant to pinpoint when GPS will become standard equipment like seat belts, but the trend is obvious.

"People will pay for it," said Jupiter Research analyst Julie Ask. "They'll want it just like air bags."

Detroit-based Onstar has drawn much attention for its installation of GPS systems into 50 of General Motor's 57 model lines. GM is only one of several manufacturers Onstar supports, including the Honda Acura line, Volkswagen, Audi, Saab, Isuzu, Lexis and the Subaru Outback.

Bruce Radloff, Onstar's chief technical officer said GPS navigation capabilities were never the company's main goal.

"GPS was a means to an end. Onstar started and still has as the core of its product offerings the safety and security of drivers," he said.

The company's subscription service aids drivers in difficulty.Among its abilities: If an air bag deploys, the car's Onstar system with GPS automatically calls for help. The GPS system's ability to identify the driver's location to Onstar gets the driver help more quickly.

In addition, such a vehicle helps the driver route his car and anticipate traffic. If you want to map out a path to a destination, you can push the virtual adviser button and capture your vehicle's position.

"We do a five-mile search around the vehicle or look at routes based on your entry point. We help you navigate a way to that destination," Radloff said.

In the future, the consumer is going to see more "location-based services," he said.

"If the network knows Starbucks is your favorite coffee house, as I'm going by Starbucks sends me news of a deal," he said by way of example. However, such services are currently the subject of debate in his industry, Radloff said. "We don't want to distract the driver."

"We put out 1.8 million vehicles this last year (2003) and more next year. We see a tremendous ramp up in volume" he said.

But Onstar's powers are embedded in the car and interact with the individual vehicle's electrical system. So its services cannot be added after manufacture.

If you buy a vehicle equipped with Onstar, the first year of service is included in the sticker price. Renewal costs between $200 and $400 a year, depending on the service plan you pick.

A customer can order a new vehicle that does not normally come with Onstar loaded. This will cost $700 for the first year of service. After that, renewal costs range from $200 to $400.

For portable GPS services, providers such as Pharos and Magellan offer devices to guide your trajectory over country roads or city streets.

Magellan offers RoadMate 500 ($1,000) and 700 ($1,300), which has additional mounting options.

The handheld RoadMate presents a street or road map on its display and directs your route. The 700 model's built-in 10 gigabyte hard disk offers a street map of the entire country.

"You can plan a route from San Diego to Massachusetts without changing anything," said Christian Bubenheim, Magellan's product manager.

Through Magellan's cooperation with Hertz Rent-a-Car, "four million people have used these systems," Bubenheim said.

Mobile work forces such as delivery vans and freight forwarders often have GPS-enabled vans, he said.

"There's been no major deployment yet, but it's easy to envision a FedEx delivery driver being able to document when and where he got a signature," thanks to his GPS system, the Magellan product manager said.

Jupiter's Ask foresees fleet managers using GPS to keep tabs on their personnel and their moving assets.

"Taxi dispatchers could track all their taxis in a city. UPS and FedEx can know where their drivers are," she said.

And if drivers can be tracked, so can their driving behavior -- something that has raised privacy concerns.

"Usage-based insurance is being tried in the United Kingdom," according to Ask.

A GPS-enabled vehicle will be able to report how many miles and at what speeds vehicle travel. It wouldn't be hard, theoretically, to combine this information with records of traffic violations.

In 2001, a customer sued Acme Rent-a-Car in Connecticut, which had installed GPS in its vehicles. The GPS system detected that he had been speeding three times and fined him $450.

Richard Smith of the Privacy Foundation echoed the fears of many by saying that traffic violations were the purview of the police force, not private industry.