The Machine to Machine communications market (aka M2M) is relatively new but has major potential as stated by Rob Conway, CEO of the GSM Association during the Mobile World Congress. As mobile markets go beyond full penetration in many countries and with IMS research estimating connected devices to hit 22 billion by 2020, its clear that M2M offers the next wave of mobile growth.
This type of communication is used for a lot of applications from remote health monitoring to power grid management, the automotive market seems to be taking the lead. If we look at figures from Berg Insight the automotive segment will increase from 14m in 2010 to 43,5m in 2015.
Today Deutsche Telekom and Gemalto announce that all BMW cars are embedding the eCall solution, an automatic emergency call system which is triggered when crash sensors detect that a vehicle has been involved in an accident, to directly make the link with the BMW call centre platform and provides all detailed information about the accident. See the whole announcement
As the EU regulations state that an emergency call solution will be mandatory in all new cars from late 2013, the industry is looking at the current compliant solutions to be integrated into their future models.
Until recently, such services were only available on a standard SIM which was not designed to fit the specific robust constraints of automotive environment. The MIM (Machine Identification Module) is designed to respond to the specific needs of automotive environment (highest resistance to vibrations, temperature and corrosion) as it gets pretty hot and bumpy next to a car engine on the Autobahn, even in a BMW 😉 
In case of emergency the assistance center warned will send the necessary help to the exact location that has been reported by the sensors.
