Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. and Chrysler LLC have extended their relationship through September 2017.

Sirius is currently available in most Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge models. This agreement targets a factory-installed penetration rate of more than 70% of Chrysler vehicles.

"Sirius is proud to extend our exclusive relationship with Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge," said Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin. "Chrysler will be selling millions of vehicles with Sirius and we look forward to a very significant number of Chrysler customers becoming part of our already very satisfied Sirius family of more than 8.3 million subscribers."

It looks like a touchscreen display, similar to the one we saw at CES this year, will be rolling out to the general public as part of the new 2009 Hyundai Sonata.

The brand-new high-resolution touch-screen display was (you guessed it) unveiled today at the Chicago Auto Show in the 2009 Hyundai Sonata.

It will feature sophisticated graphics - which XM says will make it "easy to glance at the XM channel name" - as well as the song title, artist name, and category to select music, sports, talk, news, comedy or traffic and weather.

I love this approach personally. The better the consumers' experience, the more likely you are to convert them to a full-time subscriber. That's just pure Marketing 101 right there. When someone buys a new car, they're looking to be "WOW'd" by that vehicle, and a slick touchscreen interface will do just that. It encourages folks to interact with the service. And, as we all know, the more you experience satellite radio, the more you love it.

This sort of interface (finally) makes XM less like "radio" and more like "entertainment" - and that's something we desperately need.