This is big! Could be the reason for the pre-market movement.
Friday January 28, 1:06 am Eastern Time
Toyota says to offer GM's OnStar as option
NAGOYA, Jan 28 (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp will offer General Motors' (NYSE:GM - news) OnStar emergency communications service as an option in cars sold in the United States in the future, a top Toyota executive said.
OnStar, introduced three years ago, uses Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite technology to link vehicles to a 24-hour service centre.
The system automatically notifies the centre if airbags are deployed in a crash. OnStar centre operators then send emergency personal to the scene of the accident. Subscribers pay an annual fee, and for an extra charge drivers can call the OnStar Centre to ask for directions or make restaurant reservations.
``If customers want OnStar, we will offer it,' Kosuke Yamamoto, a Toyota executive vice president, told Reuters in an interview. He added that Toyota did not plan to develop a competing service in the United States, the world's largest auto market.
The Onstar system currently has around 100,000 subscribers and GM expects the number to increase 10-fold to one million by the end of 2001.
In Japan, automakers and the government are working on a similar system, which Yamamoto said could start operating in 12 to 18 months.
Separately, Yamamoto also said that between GM and Ford Motor Co (NYSE:F - news), both of which are wooing Toyota to join their proposed global online parts purchasing networks, GM would have a natural edge due to the longer history of cooperation between it and Toyota.
GM, the world's largest automaker, and Toyota, the third largest, have a joint manufacturing venture in California and last year signed a five-year agreement to work on alternative fuel technologies.
Yamamoto reiterated, however, Toyota's stance that the Japanese automaker had only just begun to study the offers and did not know if the schemes would work.
Toyota officials have expressed concern that corporate secrets could be hacked into or deduced from orders and questioned the competitive merits of standardising parts with other automakers. |
