
GM puts an e-commerce marketplace in the dashboard - hownottowrite
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-gm-tech/gm-puts-an-e-commerce-marketplace-in-the-dashboard-idUSKBN1DZ0DX
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adjagu
So at launch this will only have Shell, Exxon Mobil, TGI Fridays, Starbucks
and Dunkin' Donuts. None of those are even within twenty miles of me. I can
imagine the usefulness now...

Driving past Speedway and get bombarded with an advertisement for Shell and
Exxon Mobil.

Drive past McDonald's, KFC, Taco Bell, Arby's, Waffle House and Wendy's (all
in my town) and get blasted with advertisements for TGI Fridays who closed the
only one near me last year leaving the closest location 40+ miles away.

Drive past the local Coffee/Donut Shop (which are great and cheap) and get
advertisements for Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts.

How freaking useful. /s

Other than learning how to disable this, just like with OnStar, this provides
absolutely zero benefit for me and people I know.

~~~
flyinghamster
OnStar was the single biggest reason by far that my most recent car purchase
was a Honda instead of a GM product. Now GM is adding spam to the mix? They
seem hell-bent on pushing me away from their products.

~~~
cft
They should also play ads on the dash screen. I have already encountered it in
Delta airlines, in the screen in the back of the seat in front.

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api
I'm thinking the economy car market is going to head the way of the economy
PC/laptop market and the low cost inkjet printer market. Every manufacturer
will converge on a model where crap devices are sold with no margin and all
the money is made via after-market schemes. With PCs/laptops this was pre-
loading malware and other "foistware." Same happens with lower-end Android
phones. With printers it was expensive ink. With cars it will be ads and
surveillance.

This is the dark side of competition and is what happens when all margin on
the actual product is crushed out of an industry. It's known as a deflationary
race to the bottom. Product quality goes to hell and greasy "monetization"
schemes replace simple sales at a profit as the primary source of revenue.

Another place you can see this effect of deflationary race to the bottom very
clearly is media, where click bait and filler and various forms of tabloid and
"fake news" is now the norm. Good editorial writing and real investigative
journalism costs money, so it's dead. The model now is to churn out absolutely
vapid "content" as a vehicle to carry ads and get clicks/impressions.

In the future you'll have to buy a luxury car if you want a car that is of
decent quality and doesn't spy on you or constantly pester you with ads. Same
is true today for PCs and laptops. You have to buy premium (Apple, high-end
Dell, etc.) to get a laptop that doesn't come pre-loaded with malware and that
has anything like a decent build quality.

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mikestew
“Financed by the merchants...” I’m trying to think of a scenario where this
ends well. I apparently lack imagination. I mean, Apple tries very hard to
discourage me from using my phone while driving (I have to push a button that
say, “I’m a shithead who thinks he’s the exception that can drive while
looking at a phone”). How hard do you think those “financing merchants” are
going to try?

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segmondy
This is just ahead of the curve, self driving cars are coming /s

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yndoendo
Augmented Reality seems to be the only answer to useless and invasive
technology and excessive advertising. I foresee uBlock and Ad-Block will most
likely be working with AR in the future.

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Tiktaalik
In my province there are now more traffic deaths related to distracted driving
than impaired driving, and yet new cars are featuring ever more and more ways
to distract the driver.

Is it time for government regulators to step in?

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zitterbewegung
On Subaru’s they disable functionality related to Bluetooth pairing when you
are driving . This would be a good solution for things like these.

On the other hand touch screens don’t let you have tactile or muscle memory
which is probably a big part which would add to distractions . And your point
about that these should be regulated I agree with .

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randomdata
_> On Subaru’s they disable functionality related to Bluetooth pairing when
you are driving_

I have always felt that ends up incentivizing simply using the device itself,
which seems to be less safe than letting the car take control and using the
functions that are designed to be used while driving.

Ideally people wouldn't feel the need to use their phone while driving at all,
but the world is far from ideal.

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mikestew
_Ideally people wouldn 't feel the need to use their phone while driving at
all_

I understand what you’re saying, and agree, but I just want to play some
tunes. On our Nissan Leaf, it takes seven taps on the screen to get BT to
connect to my phone, because my phone isn’t the “default”. Seven, and plenty
of opportunity to make a wrong choice along the way. And I have to do this
every time the car restarts, and it can only be done while the car’s not
moving. The car has a list of known devices, it just refuses to iterate
through them. Real incentive to use the safer option, that is.

New rule at our house: car either has CarPlay, dash unit can be swapped for
something with CarPlay, or it doesn’t come home.

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205guy
I drove a Leaf for a while, and while I do agree the center console had its
share of UX issues, I think you are being a bit too demanding. For the default
paired phone, the Leaf will re-connect with zero taps, just do it
automatically. So you're probably in a shared car--yay, single electric car
households are the future--and since you say you only want music, the solution
is to leave a USB cable in the car. I was in exactly the same situation: my
wife's phone was the default because she used it to make hands-free calls
while driving. When I used the car and listen to music, I just plug in, and
get my phone charged as a bonus. Do other cars/manufacturers handle multiple
paired phones better?

By the way, beyond all the branding and advertising in the video, the gassing
up was another huge "do not want" for me. It's like people are ignoring that
cars of the future will be electric.

~~~
mikestew
_I think you are being a bit too demanding._

Had I not previously written code that handles this exact scenario, I might
agree. Hell, my iPhone does this exact thing to determine whether or not I'm
driving. "Are we driving? I dunno, let's go iterate through all of the
automotive BT IDs that I know about. Whoop, I see the Leaf's BT, I guess we're
driving." I see no reason that the Leaf can't go, "hmm, I don't see the wife's
phone. But I do see mikestew's phone, and that's in my list of known devices.
I'll throw a prompt asking, or maybe that's too intrusive so I'll put a one-
touch button on the screen to connect. But what I absolutely, positively won't
do is make the driver push seven goddamned buttons to connect to a device I
already know about."

I know this can be done because when I did work for a major athletic shoe
maker, they put incredibly low-powered and incredibly dumb BT pucks in their
shoes. In an amazing show of optimism, what if the customer bought _two_ pairs
of these over-priced shoes? And the implementation I wrote eight years ago did
not involve seven taps. (IIRC, it was along the lines of "I don't see your
usual basketball shoes, but I see the running shoes. Wanna use those?")

 _That 's_ why this annoys me more than it should.

 _Do other cars /manufacturers handle multiple paired phones better?_

The single-DIN, $89 head unit in our old VW does this better. You push a
single button. (The downside is that it only pairs with two phones and an
audio device.) It connects to the last thing it saw by default. The $700
Pioneer (would have to look up the model #) that replaced our Scion OEM unit
connects to the last device it saw, and if that doesn't do it, three taps to
connect (Settings/BT Connect/Device). Oh, that reminds me of another annoyance
with the Leaf: one of those seven button taps is to decide between "Hands-
free" or "audio device". <AverageUser>Well, how the fuck should I know? No
other thing I own asks this question.</AverageUser> Because the Pioneer and
the skeezy $89 Kenwood both say, "meh, don't worry about it, I'll load the
appropriate profile depending on what you want to do. I mean, hell, it's
pretty stupid to put a CPU in here if I can't even figure out that simple
task, amirite? LOL!"

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mapleoin
i.e. You don't own your car. GM owns ad space inside your car.

~~~
ateesdalejr
Exactly, this also goes for amazon as well. Because GM is their partner in
this.

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0care
Sadly it is becoming difficult to get a nice car without all these extra(and
unwanted) features....

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ISL
With proper right-to-repair documentation, one could remove unwanted software
from the car.

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sailfast
Well, so much for buying a GM Vehicle any time in the future.

Unless this significantly drops the price of their cars vs. their competition
(it won't) I'm not sure how this benefits drivers / consumers. For that reason
alone I imagine this is not a good idea.

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alexasmyths
Not only will it be a disastrously bad shopping experience, it will cause
death and carnage.

This is exactly the kind of ridiculously crazy stuff they come up with with
board rooms when the sycophants don't have enough balls to tell their leaders
they are nuts.

It's good to be ambitious, this is just stupid.

Now - if they could make it so you could get your car filled up and 'pay with
your car' i.e. no credit cards, buttons or transactions - that would be a
great convenience, and surely people in colder countries would use it.

Fix the 'getting gas' paint point which is huge.

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205guy
That's fixed already: it's called an electric car. Get in your car in the
morning and it is charged up and pre-warmed. Drive sportily but quietly and
without pollution to your destination. If it's far away, plug in while eating
and/or shopping. No need to stop anywhere with carcinogenic fumes and dirty
pumps to pay for conflict-gasoline.

~~~
alexasmyths
It's not remotely fixed yet, the amount of electricity needed + infrastructure
is massive + the electricity we generate is not exactly clean.

And once this is common - you will not be 'shopping' \- you will be 'working'.

I worked for BlackBerry and watched the world transform to 'off time is now on
time'.

Basically - 'after hours' became accessible to managers - now commute times
will be as well.

It will be good for skilled labour/trades. They will still get paid by the
hour ... while white collar workers will now be putting in an extra 50 mins a
day on average, no extra comp :)

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205guy
I'm not sure which ax you need to grind here, but electric cars surely solve
the pump-gas-in-the-cold-problem you brought up (not to mention a whole lot of
other gasoline-related problems).

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maxxxxx
Soon you'll get 30 day trials of virus checkers preinstalled.

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Angostura
I imagine quite a few GM customers use CarPlay or Android Connect. This sounds
like a move designed to ensure that even more use them. If there's anything in
it, I fully expect Apple and Google to develop something better for their
platform that is better - would GM disable it?

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wehadfun
So how does this interact with the current in car experience? If I am playing
music will it show me the song or the nearest starbucks?

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ryankozak
The plan for this is likely that it really takes off once self driving cars
become the norm. When people are no longer required to pay attention to the
road during their commute, they've got much more time to become consumers. GM
wants to profit from this consumerist time as much as they can by having an in
car marketplace to compete with you phones/tablets.

This doesn't make much sense for cars that aren't self driving, it's just
about getting it to market asap.

