DETROIT – While they don’t have a sexy name for it – Stolen Vehicle Slowdown – what OnStar does have is the future eradication of an entire subset of social misbehavior. Vehicle theft in our country is so rampant that it is celebrated by popular video games like Grand Theft Auto. But that dark side of American culture is about to come to an electronic end. Demoed at the GM Proving Grounds in Milford Friday, the new technology built into 1.7 million 2009 vehicles will make it possible for law enforcement officials to work with OnStar support to first locate, then safely stop any vehicle equipped with their vehicle locator.

Chet Huber, president of OnStar, says:”From its inception, the motivation behind OnStar has been the safety and security of our subscribers and others on the road.” High speed car chases and their often fatal results have brought the issues regarding police attempts to stop vehicles involved in crimes, reported as stolen, or car-jacked to the public eye frequently in the last year. Ed Peper, general manager, Chevrolet adds,”Stolen Vehicle Slowdown will not only benefit GM and Chevy customers, but virtually everyone on the road.”

Chevrolet is the trail blazer for this new technology, producing more than 60 percent of the total vehicles equipped with this new technology. OnStar’s newest generation of hardware (Generation 8) will provide this new capability on specific model year 2009 vehicles. Since not all 2009’s will be equipped with this, you need to make sure you confirm it is onboard before you get too serious about your next car purchase.

The technology is not entirely automatic however. In order to take advantage of it, you first have to know your vehicle is stolen. So if you have your car stolen while out of town, you can’t utilize this new technology until you return and find the empty slot where your car used to be. Then however, you can take out your OnStar account card, dial the number, and report your vehicle missing.

Why call OnStar before the police? Because OnStar can work with the police, telling them where they can find the vehicle after locating it with a GPS device onboard. The police then go to the location identified by OnStar, and if the vehicle is in motion, the next part of OnStar’s technology comes into play. This is where the new technology, Stolen Vehicle Slowdown occurs. In a normal situation, the police would turn on their siren and lights and direct the car to pull over. The driver, realizing that the police know the car is stolen, decides that he would rather run for it than go to jail. The police are then left with a difficult decision: risk innocent lives to pursue and possibly catch the thief, or lose the criminal and the stolen vehicle.

Now, law enforcement has a third option – contact OnStar and verify they have a clear line of site on the vehicle, then request OnStar to slow it down remotely. OnStar then sends a remote signal to the vehicle that interacts with the Powertrain system to reduce engine power, slowing the vehicle gradually.

For those few confused individuals that don’t find this an advantage, there is always the option to opt-out of the service, which would mean that when the police call for the slowdown, the OnStar operator says,”Sorry, I can’t help you – good luck.” They assure me that they will also double check to make sure they don’t slow down the vehicle right beside the bad guy by mistake.

The demonstration at the GM Proving Grounds convinced me that I didn’t want to be on the wrong side of this technology. Starting out in a new Chevy Tahoe, I was able to get up to 60 miles an hour on one of GM’s test tracks before getting the whammy put on me. My co-pilot, Christine, put in the call to the engineer to activate the slowdown, and while I kept pressing on the pedal, the car acted like it was running out of gas, gradually slowing to a halt. Only after asking the engineer to restart the system was I able to drive away. The interesting thing to me was the audio cues that were provided to the driver. The car started talking to me – “This vehicle is being slowed at the request of a law enforcement agency. Safely steer the vehicle to the side of the road and park. Law enforcement will soon arrive. For your safety, please remain inside the vehicle.”

So if your car starts talking to you like that, chances are it is a Chevy, it is a 2009 model year, and it isn’t really your car. Chances are also good that you will be seeing the inside of a detention facility soon. If you are a car thief reading this, you want to make sure to avoid OnStar equipped products in the future. And if you don’t own an OnStar equipped device, your chances of being the target of an auto theft will be rising in 2009. If you want the live experience, I recorded it here.

This column was written by Hans Erickson, CIO of the Detroit Regional Chamber. If you have a story idea, email it to [email protected]

a>>