Culture|Garage

It used to be on any given day, one could flip on the local news and watch some criminal in a stolen car careen around a freeway from the view of a helicopter. While the highlights of these escapades give us great shows such as “World’s Wildest Police Videos,” we can all agree that high speed chases aren’t a good thing.

Earlier this week GM invited culture|garage to a demonstration of their newest OnStar technology. Dubbed Stolen Vehicle Slowdown, or SVS, this feature allows OnStar (coupled with local law enforcement) to kill the engine power of a stolen vehicle.

I was able to get behind the wheel of a new Tahoe with this feature enabled. Inside the car was an OnStar rep explaining how everything works, as well as a police dispatcher on the phone with the OnStar command center (which by the name I can only assume is buried deep within a Nevada mountain range). They assured me the police dispatcher would probably not be in the suspect’s car in a real-life scenario.

Anyway, after tooling around the cone-marked course (the Tahoe isn’t much of an autox machine out of the box, FYI) I was told to floor it. After a questioning glance at the police officer in my backseat, I hit it. She asked the voice on the other end of her phone to kill the car, and sure enough, I lost all ability to accelerate. An ominous “Engine Power is Reduced” message popped up on my dash.

Now my main concern was whether the power brakes and steering would be cut out as well. As anyone who has ruptured a power steering hose knows, that would be cause for even more of an accident. Luckily the feature is installed within the OnStar module connected to the ECU, so it can cut only the signal from the accelerator pedal. I tried restarting the car, as well as shifting gears around, but to no avail.

OnStar assured me that this feature was secure enough to where theives and hackers can’t come up with a device to randomly shut off cars on the freeway, and also that law enforcement would only use this when they are in clear line of sight with the vehicle. SVS will be a standard OnStar feature on the 2009 Silverado, Tahoe, Suburban, Avalanche, Impala, SRX, Escalade (normal, EXT, ESV), DTS, Lucerne, Sierra, Denali (normal and XL), Yukon (normal and XL), Vue, and both Hummer H2 models.

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