July 9, 2025 - Stellantis Gets Aggressive With Connected Services

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily for July 9, 2025, and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, VP of Market Research for Telemetry.

Next year marks the 30th anniversary of the launch of General Motors' OnStar, the first connected vehicle service. Connected services have become increasingly important to automakers over the past several years as they attempt to add new revenue incremental streams and enable software-defined vehicles, including over-the-air or OTA software updates. From the beginning, GM and other automakers have provided a complimentary trial period for the services that for many years was 3 months, although in recent years that has grown to 1-3 years on many new vehicles. If the customer chose not to subscribe to a paid plan after the trial period, the automaker would lose contact with that vehicle, eliminating the possibility of providing OTA updates as well as gathering telemetry data from vehicles that could feed into future product development or be monetized in other ways through third-party partnerships, such as usage-based insurance. 

In an increasingly challenging economic environment where consumers are bombarded with subscription charges from all directions, many are realizing they already have in-vehicle data connections with their phones and opting out of paying for another data plan for the car. Stellantis is trying to overcome this by simplifying its connected service offerings down to two. The Connect ONE package will be complimentary for 10 years from the date of purchase of the vehicle and include OTA updates, vehicle health reports, automatic SOS calls in the event of a crash, remote locking/unlocking, digital key, basic navigation and EV charging management. That's a huge deal and will keep most customers connected for a decade, allowing Stellantis to save money by enabling OTA updates that would otherwise require a service visit. The other services use only minimal data but provide value to vehicle owners. 

The Connect Wi-Fi Plus plan adds wifi hotspot capability in the car, more advanced remote operations, stolen vehicle tracking, drive alerts, connected voice assistant, navigation and Amazon Alexa. Customers will get a 3-month trial, and then it's only $18/month, substantially less than similar competing services. While data privacy concerns will persist for many customers, these plans set a new bar for the industry in North America, and it will be interesting to see how other automakers respond. 

Thanks for listening.