Been seeing the ad lately with the cops pursuing a vehicle. After they run the plates they find out the car is stolen, it’s armed the OnStar system, and OnStar remotely kills power to the vehicle and it has to roll to a stop.
Does the owner of the vehicle have to give permission to OnStar to do this? What if it’s the owner running away? Can the cops still run the plates, get the vin#, contact OnStar and activate the kill switch?
Most new cars have OnStar or something similar built in even if most people never pay for a subscription. It would seem to be a handy crime fighting tool for the police to be able to cut power to any vehicle they were pursuing even if it was the owner’s.
I have no first hand or professional experience with OnStar but I just poked around on the internet because I was curious too.
It seems like OnStar will effectively disable the car or “activate Stolen Vehicle Slowdown” if the owner has reported it stolen. The user can either report the car stolen to OnStar or the police can tell OnStar it is stolen, in which case OnStar will confirm the stolen vehicle report.
OnStar will also locate a vehicle in missing persons cases. The person must be reported missing and law enforcement officers must confirm that the missing person is not being sought for any other purpose (presumably that the person is not also wanted by the police). If the person is sought by law enforcement for any other purpose, OnStar requires a court order to provide the location data.
In turn, the privacy statement allows GM to use the data it collects for, among other purposes, “[to] protect the safety of you or others,” and “[a]s required or permitted by law, such as in conjunction with a subpoena, government inquiry, litigation, dispute resolution, or similar legal process, when we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights, your safety, or the safety of others, to detect, investigate and prevent fraud, or to conduct screening to ensure you are not on any government list of restricted parties.”
This seems to allow GM to provide information about the OnStar account and its user but it doesn’t explicitly authorize activating Stolen Vehicle Slowdown even in the case of a court order. I’m still betting that if the police got a court order instructing OnStar to disable or slow down the car, OnStar would comply. Still, a court order would usually take longer than a police chase lasts.
These agreements are subject to change and I’m not an expert in them, so don’t this description as gospel.
Details are sparse, but here is a case I found where it seems OnStar may have slowed down a person’s car without the person’s authority or any apparent court order even though the car wasn’t reported stolen. The news reported that OnStar apparently called the police to alert them that the car’s driver had cut himself with a razor.* The person was driving the car at high speed and the police requested that OnStar slow the car, which it did. Good thing in this case. The person was a felon wanted for beating his fiancee to death.
It’s unclear from the story how OnStar knew about any razor cut. OnStar routinely calls drivers when an airbag deploys or there are other signs of an accident. Perhaps OnStar called this guy after such an incident and asked if he needed help. This story says the driver reported the injury to OnStar, which OnStar then reported to police as a person needing assistance.