OnStar is watching
Mentioned earlier how it was handy that Onstar stopped a stolen car and car chase. But this is creepy:
On its way to doing the 1/4-mile in 11.07 seconds at 128 mph, a Hennessy-tuned 700-horsepower Cadillac CTS-V hit .99 longitudinal G as it left the start line. By the end of the run the phone inside the car was ringing, and it was your friendly neighborhood OnStar representative wondering “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Ok, not quite… but they did have some questions.
Via Glenn.
October 26th, 2009 at 10:16 am
One of my hobbies is SCCA autocross. I’ve heard of several instances where onstar called during a run and asked if there had been an accident. This was back when onstar first started appearing on GM cars. Apparently big, wide, sticky race tires brought the g-forces up beyond the onstar threshold. They must have changed their lateral g thresholds because I haven’t heard of it happening in a long time. I can see how a 1 g launch would look like you’d been rear-ended by a semi.
October 26th, 2009 at 10:18 am
The really scary thing is that techincally, OnStar representatives are Government Employees.
October 26th, 2009 at 10:55 am
I’ll never, ever have a car with On Star or any other system like that.
If the government wants to spy on me they’ll have to do it the old fashioned way – implant a chip in me while I sleep.
October 26th, 2009 at 11:15 am
Occam’s coming into play here. The accelerometer in the car is probably set to dial OnStar for an accident call anytime lateral or forward G exceeds ~1G or braking G exceeds… some arbitrary number.
Whever is doing the tuning probably just needs to hunt through the accessory ECU code and find where those constants are defined and change them… provided it’s not built into the OnStar module itself.
I’ve had my own experiences with automotive G-activated devices behaving badly, but not like that. A couple hard launches in my old T-bird (which was no screamer, but had plenty of torque and would launch with a surprising jump before the converter stalled and you ambled your way to a ~9 second, first gear all the way 0-60 time) and the fuel pump safety cutoff would kick out. That’s supposed to only engage in an accident… of course, it was also ~16 years old and 150,000 miles by then, and the only things that broke on that car were the unusual items.
Well, except for water pumps and a completely lunched thrust bearing in the tranny from a swelled TC on a bad rebuild. The pumps… not the pump’s fault, the “unusual” there was the perfectly straight yet somehow out of balance engine fan.
October 26th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
Yeah, I’ve bought my last new car. Next time, I’m looking for a late-’60s/ early-’70s Mopar, I think.