Fortune:
Wireless Internet—and the desire for it—has become an integral part of many consumers daily lives. And the appetite for Wi-Fi doesn’t subside out once they’re in a car.
General Motors has tried to respond to the demand by adding in-vehicle OnStar 4G LTE Wi-FI hotspot to its new vehicles. Starting Friday, the automaker is giving owners access to unlimited data for $20 per month.
GM released a few statistics last month that shows just how much data its customers use while in the car. Chevrolet owners used more than 4.2 million gigabytes (4.2 petabytes) of data in 2016—a 200% from the previous year. To put this data usage in perspective, Chevrolet owners and their passengers streamed the equivalent of more than 17.5 million hours of video in 2016.
As a motorcyclist, that “17.5 million hours” number terrifies me. I understand this particular genie has been let out of the bottle but I’m constitutionally against anything that decreases the amount of time the driver spends focused on driving and looking at and through the “dumb glass” of his windshield and rearview mirrors.
Be interesting to know a) how much of that data use was drivers vs passengers and b) how much was navigation which is mostly passive.
This won’t affect how much (little) I use my iPhone in the car, but it would let my son watch video.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. Right now if my iPhone doesn’t have a song it won’t download it (there’s a setting for this). This way it would. But I always ask, so it isn’t a big difference. The difference is only that it would work.
Exactly.
That 175.MHrs of video is being watched by kids in the back seats, not drivers.
Assumes facts not in evidence. The story does not say who in the car is watching video. The problem is, you know some (not small) percentage of drivers are using the net in some way while driving. 🙁
That’s absolutely true. Some of them are. I’m not sure the percentage will change if they have LTE to WiFi bridged vs. just LTE.
As a daily cyclist this is on my radar too.
What we do know is that distracted driving is now the number one cause of accidents. Here are a few stats…from 2014 (it’s got to be much worse now):
“In 2014, 3,179 people were killed, and 431,000 were injured in motor vehicle crashes involving distracted drivers.
https://www.distraction.gov/stats-research-laws/facts-and-statistics.html
You’re also assuming facts not in evidence. The article says GM car owners “streamed” the equivalent of 17.5 million hours of video, not that they actually did stream 17.5 million hours of video. If you read another Fortune article about the GM data which is linked from your article, it says that the “713,669 gigabytes of data” used just by Tahoe and Suburban owners “is equivalent to 3 million hours of streaming standard video, GM says.” 4.2 million GB (all GM vehicles)/.7 million GB (Tahoe and Suburban) = ~6, and 17.5 million hours/3 million hours = ~6 as well.
They are converting the really big numbers into something a regular person could visualize. They’re not saying that there was literally 17.5 million hours of video streamed in 2016 in GM cars. Again, if they were, the word “equivalent” wouldn’t be used, as streaming video is not the equivalent of streaming video.
Nothing in either article says how much of the data used was actually streaming video, nor how much was from the driver’s device (the latter of which, at least, they would have no way of knowing…the former could be estimated through deep packet inspection if they really wanted to).
Does this mean I could use a new GM car as a wireless hotspot for my apartment?