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OnStars motto; “You get to make the payments, but WE decide if, when, whether and how you get to drive it.” Sweet.
You just KNOW the Chinese communist government has to be lovin this.
The repo guys have it made now.
Let’s hope that no OnStar employees have any mental problems.
So if the satellite system has a glitch or gets hacked, not that such things could ever happen to GM mind you, what with GM being infinitely savvy and a financial stalwart, might untold vehicles suddenly stop at once?
When deadbeats miss GMAC payments, does the vehicle’s ignition system “magically” become disabled?
Funny how it’s not Big Brother when it’s BMW doing it:
http://www.bmwusa.com/Standard/Content/Owner/BMWAssist/SafetyPlan/Services.aspx?enc=CWW5l4oMAwatEhx7ykIB5g==
Oh, I forgot…it’s only bad if it’s GM doing it.
So, reporting your vehicle stolen just to keep your wife from going shopping is probably a no-no?
$0.30 of tin foil over the antenna will render the system useless. Or If you have jacked the car just cut the wire from the roof.
If you are paranoid or live in a metro with high car theft just get a lo-jack.
This says the ignition won’t work “the next time” the ignition is tried. How does that avoid the high-speed chase for a stolen vehicle that’s already running? How long before carjackers realize that they just shouldn’t shut off a stolen GM car that has Onstar? Why not just have the engine shut down as soon as it’s reported stolen? Or shut down with 10-second’s warning so they can pull to the side of the road without coming to a sudden stop in the middle of the fast lane.
@Bearadise: Just very bad video editing. The system is also able to cripple (but not completely disable) the ignition system while the vehicle is moving (i.e. to slow the vehicle to a crawl during a high-speed chase).
@FreedMike: Let me know when BMW is owned by the German government.
Also let me know when the systems are comparable; the BMW feature can’t shut down the car, it can only locate it. That’s my understanding from that website, in any case.
Aloysius Vampa :
July 30th, 2009 at 12:07 am
@FreedMike: Let me know when BMW is owned by the German government.
The gummint doesn’t need On Star to track you down if they want to. And who’s to say that BMW isn’t secretly owned by a bunch of second-gen Nazis? :)
Lug Nuts :
July 29th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
When deadbeats miss GMAC payments, does the vehicle’s ignition system “magically” become disabled?
There actually is a car loan outfit that does this. If you don’t pay, they send out a remote signal and disble the ignition. Doesn’t seem like the smartest collection strategy to me – how’s the debtor going to pay the loan if he can’t get to work?
loysius Vampa :
July 30th, 2009 at 12:07 am
@FreedMike: Let me know when BMW is owned by the German government.
The gummint doesn’t need On Star to track you down if they want to. And who’s to say that BMW isn’t secretly owned by a bunch of second-gen Nazis? :)
Uh, Godwin invoked.
Freedmike:
The loan company isn’t interested in keeping you from going to work (if you are, you really shouldn’t be behind on your payments). They just want to make sure they can take the car back if you skip payments (and convince you not to skip town with the colateral).
This is wonderful. Our benevolent government can simply shutdown cars during declared environmental emergencies, or any other routine cause. Think of all the piggyback reasons they can come up with for “Dad” to take your ride away. Too bad the ability to move about the country in a car is no where near a right but a privilege.
The antenna connection is easy to find. Might take a pro a bit longer to steal a GM car but since the steering column is a snap to get past it all comes out equal. The bigger question is why? When the most stolen cars are Hondas and Acura legends from 1998 who wants a gas hog Yukon?
@Carzzi:
You could invoke Godwin if I was making an analogy, instead of a smarta** comment… :)
And besides, shouldn’t there be a Godwin’s law for ANY argument that implies that ANYTHING that has to do with the government must necessarily involve some puke tracking our every move?
FreedMike, you’re probably right about a possible redefinition of Godwin’s rule. I’ve been hanging out with one of my really paranoid “The Government’s Always Watching Me” friends lately.
And the point isn’t that you could be tracked down. That’s easy. The point is your vehicle could be severely crippled from a remote location (potentially).
LugNutz: What I am waiting for is the Chinese (so-called “Patriotic Hackers”) or Russian hackers to stop all GM cars dead in their tracks one day. (Same day, and for the same reason they disable at least parts of the national electric distribution grid or the FAA ATC system.
FreedMike: “The gummint doesn’t need On Star to track you down if they want to. And who’s to say that BMW isn’t secretly owned by a bunch of second-gen Nazis? :)”
But as said in german: “Die Familie hat Dreck am stecken” (the family has skeletons in the closet):
From the Spiegel article about the Quandt Pater Familias:
“Only after the Nazis won the elections in March 1933 did Quandt support the Nazi Party (NSDAP). He joined the party a few weeks later and bnefited directly from this opportunistic move.”
“One of the prosecutors in the Nuremberg trials, Benjamin Ferencz, now says that if today’s evidence against Günther Quandt had been presented to the court at the time, “Quandt would have been charged with the same offences as (German industrialists) Flick, Krupp and the directors of IG Farben.”
This is not proof that his progny are later-day Nazis, only that he and his industrial enterprises were tight with the man in the brown shirt back in the day.
AloysiusVampa: If that friend displays that paranoia when he’s cooking his latest batch of meth, it might be time to, uh, get out!
“ What’s Wrong With This Picture: Big Brother Central Casting Edition ”
They didn’t want to piss off any Black people.
I like the “cheap sunglasses and knit cap” on the car thief. The way he extends his arms out the window … “Cuff me for I have done wrong and I am powerless against the might of General Motors and my local fuzz!” rather than make a break for it. Very nice touch.
Pretty redhead young lady at the OnStar call center. You can’t get much whiter than red-heads, so this is to reaffirm to you, the potential OnStar customer that you’re not calling India or BlondeStar.
I also like the casting of the blonde-cougar-type who appears to be the owner of the car. Kudos to GM for taking the high-road on this and not turning it into one of those other “cougar” films.
Just one question…how did Mr. Knit Cap get the car? It appears that he stole the keys from the cougar. So, how’d the cougar lose the keys? She appears to be talking to the nice young police occifer in a parking lot, rather than her home. So Mr. Knit Cap didn’t steal the keys from her home. It was probably the parking lot of a bar.
So the good news here is that the drunken cougar didn’t get behind the wheel of a large and dangerous Climate Warming, dangerous to get hit by SUV. Would OnStar prevent that?
I’m actually relived that the perp in this scenario is Mr. “cheap sunglasses and knit cap.” Nearly ALL identity theft ads of late depict the scumbag as a fairly fit middle-aged white male with a shaved head…which hits a little close to home for my taste. At this point, I’ve moved past being sensitive about it and have grown irritated at the lack of imagination, particularly since these types of crimes are often committed by people in faraway banana republics, and relatively affluent college geeks who “just never quite fit in.”
That’s about as PC as it gets. I suppose the usual “we must include persons of color in our ads” got skipped here because it involves a crime.
I like how the OnStar guy sez: “We’re in the OnStar Development Lab down here…”
Down where? Florida? Your Mom’s basement? A secret bunker immune from EMP?
Chubby White Geeks saving our bacon… again.
So, because of OS, the next installment of that Nicolas Cage movie will be called “Gone in 70 seconds”?
Stuff like this has a potential of being misused by the dodos that want to control people. How many freedom-limitting things have started as a “good” idea? I wouldn’t buy a car with this kind of techno-bull regardless of the maker and the price. There are other ways of reducing or eliminating the chance of a vehicle being stolen that are much better and freedom friendly.
Lojack was recently used to catch two criminals who broke into my neighbor’s home and stole his laptop.
They were driving a stolen vehicle. Lojack was activated when the car was reported stolen, and the cops picked up the signal at a local pawn shop.
Both of them were bagged; one was armed. I heard that one was 16 or 17. They resisted but were not shot by the police, so they are probably out of jail by now; maybe headed for YOUR neighborhood with new guns…
To be clear, I’m not opposed to having the ability to remotely disable a car’s ignition, even if it can be used against me for not making my loan payments. I already have a LoJack in my Prius. If I were a bank, I might insist on having such a device installed, particularly for people with bad credit and/or a history of loan defaults.
I am opposed to the GM government bailout, and I believe that giving GM (or GMAC) the ability to block the ignition is akin to giving the government the ability to shut off your car. Under normal circumstances, that would be unconstitutional…but these are not normal circumstances. We voted for the government we have, so we have given tacit permission and consent for them to do anything they want.
This could expand beyond mere law-enforcement, you know. I wonder if they could pass a law someday restricting the hours of operation for cars, or maybe just for certain cars. Prevent Japanese, German, or Swedish cars from operating to enforce a “buy American” sentiment. Prevent SUV’s from running if there are less than four people inside. Limit the distance large vehicles are allowed to travel in a week. Or on the overkill side, just shut off all vehicles belonging to people who are in the “bad” industry of the week (this week, banking; next week, doctors), or maybe based on one political party or another, or your lack of political contributions. Maybe on election day…
Am I paranoid? No. But the possibilities abound.
@ Lug Nuts:
The only satellite system in play is GPS. Marginal Bond films notwithstanding, the chances of that system being compromised are rather on the slim side.
All the “satellite” component does is tell the OnStar computer where the car is. All of the communication data is sent over a cellular channel. That means that if the vehicle is taken into an area with little or no cellular coverage, or an enterprising thief brings a small cellular jammer with him, the whole thing stops working. And I don’t just mean the ignition disabling feature, I mean the whole thing. The box still might know where it is, but the people at OnStar won’t.
Also, snipping or disconnecting the satellite antenna on the roof isn’t all one needs to do to disable the system. There are two antennas, one for the satellite, and one for the cellular channel. That one is often hidden in the bowels of the dash or in an A pillar or something.
None of this stuff is in any way new or magical. Various aftermarket alarm manufacturers, like Clifford / Viper / DEI, have had similar GPS systems on the market for years that function in exactly the same way. The difference being, with those systems, the owner of the vehicle controls the system. What a thought.
Next steps: Obese? Ignition won’t work. Gone over your monthly mileage allotment? Ignition won’t work. Dispute with the IRS? Ignition won’t work. Haven’t fulfilled your Federally mandated community service obligation this month? Ignition won’t work. Own a registered handgun? Ignition permanently disabled.
Nice thief uniform. Every month I get a OnStar report on my Z06’s health. One month I located and pulled the fuse. Between scrolling through the various parameters on the DIC, and not seeing any fault codes, I was able to see everything that the OnStar email would tell me. Once I reinstalled the fuse, my faithful OnStar told me what I already knew. It seems like a well educated thief would be smart enough to know the OnStar fuse’s location and pull it as the first step in his/her car stealing process.
At $18.95 a month, OnStar is expensive and I imagine lots of people let it lapse after the free subscription is up. So unless the system allows one way communication to cars owned by people that refuse to pay for OnStar, the hype about OnStar seems to outweigh its real world value. At any rate, all education courses evolve and I’m sure Car Thievery 101 already includes a process to disable OnStar when stealing GM cars.
@Robert.Walter:
Nope, just when he’s setting up routers or making pizzas.