CEO Club Briefing

The Car as Internet Node

Excerpt from remarks to Boston College’s Chief Executives’ Club of Boston

June 13, 2013

TAKEAWAY: THE CAR AS INTERNET NODE

Because what you do, you can never know where technology is going to go, but one thing you can be assured of, it’s going to take more and more bandwidth. And the auto industry, you know, we’re car guys. They don’t think about—well, I shouldn’t say that—they need to think about what are the buying factors, what are the purchasing factors that are going to lead to success, not in 2013, but in 2023 and beyond?

So, at GM, we don’t know what exactly the future holds. We can’t be precise, but I can tell you, we should prepare for the biggest opportunity that might come before us.

Essentially, we want to turn every car into an Internet node. Every car will come out, and we’re going to roll this out here in Canada and the United States next year, it will have a Wi-Fi hotspot in your car, it will also have 4G LTE in every car, and we’re going to take it global. But we’re first going to strike next year in the U.S. and in Canada.