> Industrial News > News   Automaker-Initiated TSP first Appears in China; Onstar Enters Chinese Market   General Motors, Saic Motor, and Shanghai GM announced yesterday to jointly establish Shanghai OnStar Telematics Co., the eighth joint venture between GM and Saic Motor and the first Onstar service provider beyond the North America market. With the total investment of US $46 million from the three parties, the new company will provide extensive car safety information services, including automatic collision notification, road assistance, remote unlock, hand-free phone, remote diagnosis, and direction-by-direction road navigation. These services will be initially used in 2009 on main car models under Shanghai GM. Comment: The world’s largest TSP is entering the China market. Compared with the G-Book service of Toyota, the OnStar service of GM has much larger scale and a strong Chinese partner, Saic Group. Maybe Toyota is in a dilemma of selecting Saic Group or Guangzhou Automobile Industry Group (GAIG) as its partner, so it finally decides to act all by itself. Though the OnStar service in the U.S. has 5 million subscribers, much more than G-Book subscribers, the navigation service of GM is far behind that of Japanese automakers. What Chinese users expect and require is just the navigation service and its using frequency is much higher than E-call and B-call. In the next year, GM and Toyota will have a severe competition not only for the world’s largest automaker but also for the telematics king in the China market. The navigation service with wonderful experience would be the key to determine the final winner.   Time:2008-02-05 Source:NaviForum Shanghai News Center Relative