Chevrolet owners are positively plowing through 4G LTE data
Owners went through 4 petabytes (yes, petabytes) in 2016.
If your car had a 4G LTE Wi-Fi hotspot, you'd probably use the hell out of it, right? That appears to be the case with Chevrolet owners.
In 2016, Chevrolet owners in the US used over 4,000,000 gigabytes (4,000 terabytes, 4 petabytes, for those of you not on the metric system). That's a year-over-year increase of almost 200 percent. The largest usage increases were seen with owners of Chevrolet's full-size SUVs, Tahoe and Suburban. Their year-over-year data usage increased more than threefold.
What accounts for the big jump entering Q3 2016? Is that when owners finally figured out how to get their Wi-Fi hotspots working?
One of the interesting points here is just how extreme data usage ramped up. From Q4 2015 to Q2 2016, data use increased at about the same rate. Then, data usage went through the roof in Q3 2016, jumping from under 900 terabytes to nearly 1,300 terabytes. It held about even again in Q4 2016.
The information leaves some unanswered questions. A 200-percent jump in data usage is impressive, but it's unclear what the take rate is on 4G LTE-equipped Chevrolet vehicles. If the number of vehicles sold with this capability went up 500 percent, then double the data isn't nearly as impressive. Chevrolet didn't furnish an average data usage figure per car, either.
There's also the matter of the free trial that comes ahead of the subscription plan. For the first three months, buyers are privy to 3 gigabytes of free data. Chevrolet did not specify how much of the data consumed was done without paying, or how many users have been added to the subscription base.
I brought up these questions to General Motors , and I'm waiting for the company to get back to me, as I was told these numbers required a bit of digging. Nevertheless, think of what you could do with 4 petabytes of data in a year. Imagine all the binge watching that would follow!
