Thursday, January 6, 2011

Is GM Onstar answer to foreign auto maker?

For lower and mid range car very first thing everyone wants in a car is reliability and then comes all other features like opening car from phone and other cool features which Onstar package provides. Safety is one the big factor in selection of car, and GM onstar provides reactive answer to that, but other companies are developing proactive accident avoidance technologies. So which car will you buy -the one which is reliable and doesn’t break after 50,000 miles and which can help you to avoid accident or the one which breaks after 50K miles and provide reactive support.
Onstar doesn’t come cheap – it’s approx. $20 without turn by turn direction and $30 with GPS functionality. Can GM lower price? My answer is no. U.S. 911 operates at capacity utilization of 16% to provide under 30 second response time, I think GM has to provide similar within 30 second response time to Onstar users, that means more number of people on node will not help company. Can they outsource it to countries like India/China? My guess is not.
I feel Onstar provides value proposition for higher model car. Question is how much time will it take to provide Onstar kind of service on Mercedes / Lexus / BMW/ Acura/ Infinity etc.

No comments:

Post a Comment