In 2015, connected cars are all the rage. You only needed to pay cursory attention to this year’s CES conference for this new reality to become clear. Touchscreens, 3G, and now 4G LTE modems are being added to new vehicles by many car makers, eager to replicate the smartphone experience inside our daily drives. For techies wanting to buy new, this is all good news.
General Motors arguably got the ball rolling nearly 20 years ago with the introduction of OnStar, which coupled remote safety monitoring with an on-demand concierge service. More recently the advent of smartphones and cheap, rugged wireless modems has seen more and more OEMs offer connected cars. So equipped, you can use a smartphone app to lock your car or sound the horn, check how much fuel is in the tank, or access deeper diagnostic information about your vehicle (like error codes or upcoming service intervals). They're even providing APIs for third-party developers.
But very few of us can afford to chop and change our vehicles the way we upgrade our phones. In fact, we’re actually changing our cars less frequently than before—on average, Americans will now hold onto a car for 11 years. This might indicate the connected car experience will remain the preserve of the few, but not so fast. Today, almost any car built after 1996 can join the connected car revolution thanks to aftermarket solutions. We've spent the past year or so trying out a couple of such devices, one from Automatic and another from Mojio. Using a 2005 Saab 9-2x Aero as our test vehicle, we set out to discover if it was truly possible to have all the connected luxury of today without shelling out for an entirely new vehicle.
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