General Motors Car Starter

Starting some time next year, GM will have a car starter that keeps track of gas, whether the engine is running, your tire pressure, and your current mileage. It also can tell you if you locked the doors and has a radio pre-sets on it. Wow! The only thing it does not tell you (maybe GM will add this later on. Something the engineers will have to work on.) is whether you need to change the oil or not. All this info is displayed on a LCD screen.

Do you really need a car starter to keep track of gas? If you are not looking at the gas gage every now and then while you are driving then a car starter is not going to be of much use to you unless it beeps a sound to let you know you are low on gas. Then of course if it does that it's almost too late for you to fill the car up with gas. As for letting you know your engine is running or not, surely a driver would remember if (s)he turned off the engine or not? If a person cannot remember turning the engine on or off, then (s)he has got bigger problems--loosing his/her short term memory.

As for the rest of the information on the car starter is not too bad. Having the car starter keep track of tire pressure is nice because it saves you time in checking all four tires. If they can get it check the oil and the air filter that would be helpful too. As for it allowing you to change radio pre-sets, I don't know. It seems to me you can do that in the car. That almost seems like some engineer was thinking, "Oh, you know what would be really cool to add as an option to the car starter..."

If you did not already know, GM already has part of their OnStar program, a car diagonistics email it can send out to the owners. The car basically does a "health" check of itself then emails a report to the owner.