The nightmare of a long drive jammed in a car with all your nearest and dearest could soon be over. In just a few years, family road trips may seem vastly different: Passengers will be able to have their own devices to play a game, stream a movie, or get work done on a computer.
That's because General Motors is working to turn cars into roving Wi-Fi hotspots for up to seven devices, introducing high-speed connectivity into more than 30 of its 2015 models. I had a chance to drive a 2015 Buick Regal with 4G LTE from Boston to New York last week, and it was superconvenient to use my favorite navigation app, Waze, while hooked up to the in-car Wi-Fi. The in-car mobile plans also come with enhanced OnStar, a service that offers emergency response, connectivity to real people, diagnostics and turn-by-turn navigation.
Pretty soon, every car buyer is going to demand this feature, and every manufacturer is going to supply it.
And that means wireless carriers are going to have yet another way to profit from our increased connectivity. Expect more carriers to get into the game, and hopefully pricing to go down as a result — because this could get expensive fast.
GM's plan offers customers either three months or 3 gigabytes of data in a free trial with the option to continue with plans that range between $5 and $50 per month. AT&T customers can add a car plan to their mobile share plan for as little as $10 per month for 200 MB of data.
That's enough to stream more than 6.5 hours of music, surf the Web for 13 hours, or send more than 10,000 emails, according to GM. But think about that for a second: If you have a car full of seven people plugging away on smartphones and tablets, that data gets eaten up pretty fast.
Securing this deal with GM was a major coup for AT&T as competition among potential in-car entertainment providers heats up. Apple and Google are already in the mix, with software that allows an increasing number of apps on your iPhone or Android to be accessed via your car computer. But with the merger of DirecTV and AT&T purportedly close to being finalized, it seems like that's the company with the clear mechanism and pipeline of multimedia content for vehicles.
Then again, there is another way to get Wi-Fi in your car: It's called a portable mobile hotspot, and the beauty of this is that you can take it in your car for family trips. The 4G LTE Verizon Jetpack is available for $129.98 with a two-year agreement on top of a monthly fee. You won't get the enhanced OnStar service, but you will be able to grab it from the car and bring it to your hotel to avoid those awful Wi-Fi fees everyone seems to be charging these days.
So the traditional American hell of forced family interaction, ad nauseam, in close quarters en route to a summer vacation destination is about to be replaced by the serenity of detachment, with each passenger happily distracted. Whether that's a good thing or not is for each family to decide.
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