GM Adding Wall Street Journal Content To OnStar
Staff -- TWICE, 5/7/2001
TROY, MICH. — General Motors announced it will offer Wall Street Journal content on the new Virtual Advisor option to its OnStar service starting in May.
Virtual Advisor is offered to OnStar subscribers who have 2001 vehicles. It delivers email, sports, weather, news and information to the driver by speech and will now offer customers the Wall Street Journal. Drivers may choose which sections of the Wall Street Journal they would like hear via the OnStar Web site and then that information is delivered by speech from their cars.
At present, both Virtual Advisor and the OnStar Personal Calling service — which offers customers hands-free cellular phone access — is available in about 50 percent of the country with nationwide coverage expected by the end of the second quarter, a spokesman said.
Personal Calling currently has 60,000 subscribers and some of those are also Virtual Advisor subscribers, said a spokesman, noting that once the service goes nationwide, GM will begin an advertising campaign that is expected to boost subscriptions. OnStar says it is adding subscribers to its general OnStar in-vehicle emergency and communication service at a rate of approximately 5,000 a day and that it reached the 1 million subscriber mark in April.
