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New navigation system shows off OnStar's direction

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Alex Law
CHICAGO, ILL: After a decade on the market, the most important feature of GM's OnStar safety/security service is still the one that the luckiest customers will never get to use -- the crash-notification system that sends help to your vehicle's precise location even if you're unable to call yourself because of injuries or whatever.

(Image: General Motors
But that's never been the whole story about the system that combines GPS tracking technology and a signal five times stronger than a regular cell phone's with talk-to-a-person service in English, French or Spanish available 24/7/365.

Indeed, when GM launched OnStar in 1996, the safety and security aspect of the system was just another member of the cast, not the star. Route guidance and a concierge service that helped you find hotels, restaurants, parking lots and anything else in the vast computer-based data bank was the sexiest feature.

To test that service, I used to bother OnStar advisors all the time from various parts of the continent with silly requests and I never stumped them. I called from The Valley of The Gods (near Mexican Hat, Utah) which had no roads and they guided me out. On the way to Vegas from LA I asked them to find me a laundromat in Barstow, California, and make me a reservation in a nearby motel and they called back in two minutes to say they'd found a motel with laundry facilities on site.

This kind of help is still available from the Directions package of the OnStar offerings, but now the service is adding a new kind of route guidance system that has charms of its own.

(Photo: General Motors
With the current system, you have to get an advisor on the phone and she or he turns on the GPS system to find our your precise location. You then give a destination address and the advisor reads you directions, which you can memorize, write down, or record, and then you hang up.

With the new system, OnStar Turn-By-Turn Navigation, you still have to talk to an advisor who looks up your location and asks you where you're going, but then you're connected to the computer. It's the computer that keeps an eye on your GPS-created location and reads you turn-by-turn directions to where you're going, using the sound system in your vehicle. If you make a wrong turn the computer simply takes your new location into consideration and reads you corrected directions.

You can be the most clueless driver in the world and the computer will feed you instructions to your destination for as long as it takes, and will never mention it to your friends or your spouse so they can make fun of you later.

Not only does OnStar Turn-By-Turn Navigation save you embarrassment, it also saves you the time and the gasoline it takes to drive around looking for something. With gasoline prices where they are, it won't take many calls to OnStar to recover whatever cost OnStar charges for this navigation system, though details on that have not been worked out by GM in Oshawa.

2006 Cadillac DTS (Photo: General Motors)
Turn-By-Turn Navigation launches first on Buick Lucerne and Cadillac DTS and STS this winter before rolling out across the entire GM lineup over the next couple of years. Which means it won't work in any existing OnStar-equipped cars, which is a pain.

Along with directions to laundromats and what have you, Turn-By-Turn Navigation also points the way toward future offerings from OnStar. At the debut of this new service at the auto show here, company president Chet Huber said "The keys to our progress and growth have been to focus on services that matter to real customers, not just early adopters, and to make them very easy to understand and use. With OnStar Turn-by-Turn Navigation, we're demystifying navigation technology to bring safe, simple GPS-based routing to the mass market at a fraction of the cost of competitive alternatives."
Alex Law
Alex Law
Automotive expert