OnStar announced that it just sent its 100,000,000th Vehicle Diagnostics e-mail, an alert that lets subscribers know maintenance information for their cars or trucks. (Who knew GM was one of the world’s leading sources of spam?)
Joking aside, the alerts include service notifications, oil status, and tire pressure, and also include messages about subsystems in the car that may be in trouble. The oil life monitoring is particularly interesting to me, just because there’s always a lot of debate about that (i.e. are oil changes every 3K miles necessary or just a waste and indicative of marketing by Jiffy Lube and other overly aggressive service providers).
OnStar Vehicle Diagnostics became available in 2005 and currently has more than 3.5 million subscribers, according to the company. Over the years, OnStar has been adding additional services, such as Ignition Block for aiding stolen vehicle recovery, and Injury Severity Prediction, which helps emergency first responders determine the level of care needed at an accident site before they even get there–important stuff, indeed.
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