Plans for Automotive Web, E-mail Stall

New car buyers can get zero percent financing, but they shouldnt expect e-mail or dashboard-delivered stock quotes in their new vehicles anytime in the near future, according to a new, global study of 103 executives at automotive manufacturers and suppliers conducted by KPMG LLP, in Detroit.

Of the executives surveyed, 71 percent said that the highest priority for telematics use over the next five years will be for emergency notification. Sixty-eight percent said diagnostics and repair tools will be the most important use of the technology, followed by navigation (66 percent) and traffic management (60 percent). Messaging scored a low 33 percent, while accessing content such as stock quotes or sports scores was at the bottom of the list, at 19 percent.

Indeed telematics as a whole ranked fourth, at 41 percent, when executives were asked to identify the most important innovations to come in the next five years. It was outranked by safety innovations (68 percent), fuel-cell technology (64 percent) and drive-by-wire electronics (50 percent).

Contributing to telematics fading from the technology scene may be that a full 33 percent of those surveyed didnt know what the term meant. Brian Ambrose, national industry director of KPMGs Industrial and Automotive practices, thinks that none of this is good news for the industry or the technology. “This doesnt bode well for an industry trying to sell these new technologies,” he said in a statement. “What consumers want is value and safety. In fact, safety has been the sole driver of the penetration of telematics around the globe to date.”