AKA, Big Brother
is watching you drag race. When did OnStar, General Motors’ remote diagnostics system, begin their Pre-Crime Unit? They called a specially-tuned Cadillac CTS-V after it pulled .99 g on a drag strip, notes Autoblog.com, complete with video:
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:
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Considering that OnStar is now a subsidiary of Government Motors, that seems more than a little creepy. On the other hand, at least you can still get GM cars capable of such performance. But for how long?










10 years ago, I was part of an opinion survey about sports cars. One of the questions was about the proposed “On Star” service and if I would be interested in such a thing. As a libertarian type, I let them know that I would loath such a thing and gave it the lowest interest rating I could. Obviously, I was in a small minority because “On Star” became a big seller.
Last year, I was cruising the Corvette forums and found that “On Star” was now STANDARD on all Corvettes. I went on the forum and protested that this was an invasion of my, and everybody else’s privacy and freedom and I would not buy a Corvette unless I could disable such a system. The response was basically a beat down from the other “individualist” Corvette folks, throwing around words like “paranoid” and “nut”.
Which tells me that there’s a reason that our privacy and therefore freedoms are under attack, namely because a lot of people continue to be fuzzy on the concept. Unfortunately, I appear to be getting the last laugh.