Verizon's Hum gives your old car a new brain - Digital Trends
Verizon wants to breathe new smarts into America’s dumb fleet of cars, adding electronic brains to any 1996-or-newer vehicles for just $15 a month. Dubbed Hum, the little gizmo with the friendly name brings the safety and diagnostic capabilities of a brand-new car to models that have already been on the road for nearly two decades. Hum plugs into a car’s ODB-II port, the same connector used by a service technician when you come in complaining that the check-engine light is on. While many gizmos have offered to read codes from the ODB port in the past (just search for them on... The Hum device consists of two parts: a dongle to connect to your ODB port, which includes a cellular antenna and a GPS chip, and a clip-on visor module that looks not unlike an old-school radar detector. It also ties directly into Verizon’s new call center: Push its blue, customer-service button for roadside assistance and diagnostic help from ASE-Certified mechanics trained to tell you what those obscure codes actually mean. Instead I met Michael Maddux, Director of Product for Verizon Telematics, at the Classic Car Club in Manhattan for a rolling tour. Instead we tested it in a vehicle more representative of where the Hum will actually serve its tour of duty: a somewhat battered Jeep. From the back seat, Maddux showed me where it connects and where to place the visor module in place. Source: www.digitaltrends.com
