OnStar in brief
- Vauxhall OnStar to launch in the UK this year
- Wi-Fi hotspot for up to seven devices
- Emergency response notification if airbags deploy
- Stolen vehicle tracker technology to assist Police
- 24/7 European service centre based in Luton, Beds
- Free trial period: no charge for OnStar and WiFi for 12 months
VAUXHALL’s pioneering personal service assistant, OnStar, launches in the UK later this year. This ground-breaking, people-friendly technology is designed to put customers in touch with an individual not a machine.
We thought you’d be interested to find out more about OnStar, its services and how it will benefit SME company car buyers. So we spoke to Sara Nicholson, Product Manager and asked for her thoughts.
“OnStar supports eight languages that are selected via your infotainment system. It means that if I configure a car to English, wherever I go in Europe it’s going to be English.
“So if I go to Germany, I don’t have to worry about speaking German. The same with French, Italian or anything else – which is really handy for someone like me that doesn’t speak any languages!
“OnStar will be available in 13 markets, with 8 languages and available from the middle of this year, although UK vehicles will come in October.
“It will be available across all passenger cars, but what’s interesting is that normally you’d put new technology across your premium models, then gradually roll it down the range. Instead, we’re putting it in all of them.
“We’re going to standardise it on quite a number of trims and then it will be optional on the others. However, each of the markets are still determining what the strategy will be, but it’s going to be across a significant number of models.
“You can access OnStar services from three places. The first is via the only thing you’ll see in the cabin of a car fitted with OnStar – the roof-mounted buttons. There’s loads of telematics going on in the vehicle – you’ve got a telematics box, sim card, different wiring harnesses, plus you have a much bigger aerial – which is what you need to get a good signal. From a customer perspective, all you’ll see are the buttons.
“All the customer needs to do is activate their services and you need to go online to activate those. This is all about data privacy, if you have an accident and OnStar calls into the car but haven’t accepted that you have contact – then it’s a data privacy issue. So you have to sign up to the services, which is fine and a very simple process to do.
