I recently took a family vacation to Washington DC. The trip was a result of the need to go to the Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity. On the way there I got to thinking about the integrated on star function in most cars nowadays. I soon came to the realization that on star does not actually give a damn about the safety of it's customers and I will explain why.
The service as it is setup currently is that the customer pay a fee every month after they initialized the service. Now this is clearly a type of insurance plan for the passengers and driver of the vehicle of which only works if the fee is paid every month. So if one is not a customer of this service then they will not have immediate emergency response if something were to go wrong.
The way it should be is this. The service is paid for when purchasing the vehicle. The feature should be a premium feature paid in full upon acquiring the vehicle for the first time. Once the car is started for the very first time the on star function should initiate on it's own. So the second the car is driven off the lot by the owner they are "insured" with the functionality of on the spot response to whatever may happen. No monthly payments and no subscription. If that is not entirely viable as a product then the most it should ever be is a pay to use service. Where upon using the service for an emergency response the customer is charged a fee, but that should be a last resort.
The reason I got to thinking about this is if we were to have gotten in an accident on our trip, even though our vehicle was equipped with the hardware required for then onstar service it would have been useless since we do not pay for the service. So my question is, why do they automatically put it in vehicles if it will go unused? And why make a clearly innovative safety feature just another money ploy.
It should be an automatically initiated response service meant to keep people safe. Instead it is just another way in order for GM to make some quick cash. They should Stop making it a product to make money off of and make it a standard safety feature across the board.
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