Engadget - While visiting the Innovation Showcase at CTIA 2012, we ran into Nick Pudar -- OnStar's VP of Business Development -- who was kind enough to give us a few minutes of his time. We sat in the LTE Skype-enabled Chevy Volt on display and discussed such topics as OnStar FMV, RelayRides and smart grids -- wherein power utilities can (with the customer's consent) send a signal to a vehicle to control when it charges.
Maximum PC: Beginning next month, OnStar will make available 4G LTE data plans in the 2015 Chevrolet Malibu, followed by 30 other Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac vehicles by the end of the year. New car buyers will receive a trial period that runs three months or three gigabytes, whichever comes first. After that, plans start as little as $5 per month ($10 for non-OnStar subscribers) for 200MB of data, which OnStar says is enough to stream more than 6.5 hours of music, surf the web for 13 hours, or send more than 10,000 emails without attachments.
TechCrunch: "Last week, OnStar made some changes to its terms of service which were almost universally recognized as being overreaching and unnecessary. The two primary changes were, first, that OnStar would continue to track subscribers who had terminated their service. They could ask to have their data connection severed in addition to unsubscribing, but why should they have to? Second, OnStar gave itself the ability to share or sell anonymized driving data to “any third party,” “for any purpose, at any time.”
Faced with a flurry of criticism from users, sites like this one, and even Congress, OnStar has gone back on at least one of the changes."
