OnStar Stolen Vehicle Slowdown: ACATT Tries to Get Away With a Tahoe

I just tried to steal a car…Er, well, I just tried to steal a car that GM told me to steal. My dreams of a new Tahoe were quickly dashed when the truck’s lights flashed and the Chevy started to slow down. Pretty soon I was revving the engine within an inch of its life and I wasn’t getting anywhere. Grrr.

This demonstration on a closed course was put on by OnStar to demonstrate its new Stolen Vehicle Slowdown (SVS) service that will be coming to select 2009 GM Vehicles (I have a list of vehicles below). Once an OnStar subscriber reports a vehicle as stolen to OnStar and the Police, OnStar will assist law enforcement in locating the vehicle. When the vehicle is in sight, the officer following the vehicle will get in touch with OnStar’s communication center and confirm that the vehicle has been located. OnStar will flash the vehicle’s lights to make doubly sure that the proper vehicle has been identified as a candidate for slowdown. The officer confirms that the lights are flashing and then once he or she has made the determination that conditions are safe, OnStar will begin to slow the vehicle down. As far as the thief is concerned, there is little notification. There is no voice of Hal from 2001 saying “I’m sorry Dave, but I am taking over control.” Instead, the thief may notice the flashing lights or the “Engine Power Reduced” on the driver information display, but that’s it (except for the lifeless accelerator). The slowdown does allow the vehicle to coast along, so it’s not going to bring the car to a complete stop in the fast lane of the freeway.

The service worked as advertised. I think it’s definitely another wrench in the toolkit for law enforcement and a feather in the cap for OnStar. Adding features like this to OnStar are critically important as it prepares to do battle with Ford/Microsoft’s Sync service. There will undoubtedly be other competitors coming down the road as well, such as the forthcoming offering from Hughes Telematics. My primary grump is that most of the major advancements that OnStar offers are hardware based and are not backwards compatible. Microsoft’s Sync is software based and allows the customer to return to the dealership for a software upgrade to add new features. Of course, Sync doesn’t offer anything like SVS yet but I do like the upgrade model that they offer. Even if OnStar could offer a motherboard swap for a few hundred dollars or so it would be a nice feature. I’ve had several conversations with OnStar about upgradeability and my impression is that the likelihood of this ever happening is pretty slim.

Overall SVS is a feel good feature. Subscribers can opt out of the service if they wish to do so, but if you are already subscribing to OnStar you’re probably not a member of the foil hat club. SVS does add a nice layer security not only for the vehicle’s owner, but more importantly for other drivers out on the road. My mother’s best friend from college was killed by a vehicle fleeing from police. If a senseless death of a woman driving to visit with her grandchildren can be prevented, then the value of SVS is really made clear.

For 2009, the lucky GM vehicles receiving SVS are (as of April 2008)… Silverado, Tahoe, Suburban, Avalanche, Impala, SRX, Escalade, Escalade EXT, Escalade ESV, DTS, Lucerne, Sierra, Denali, Denali XL, Yukon, Yukon XL, Vue, H2 and H2 SUT. After the first year, OnStar Stolen Vehicle Slowdown will be available for $199 a year as a part of OnStar’s base package and includes other services like remote door unlock and OnStar Vehicle Diagnostics. You can read more about SVS by clicking here.

On a completely different note…Currently OnStar offers a monthly report showing things like vehicle diagnostics and charts for miles driven and oil life left. How about a monthly chart showing average fuel economy? It might be helpful to compare the car’s fuel economy month over month, season to season, year to year. This might assist drivers in improving their driving habits and would highlight any sudden changes in fuel economy that could hint at a problem. Just my two cents.