First off, I don't think that's true. I bought a new GM car with on star and I wasn't required to get it. But they did turn it on by default, and it was completely useless. Never used it. Not once. I also asked if it had turn by turn directions with a map and was told, "yes". I ask them to prove it, and we go for a test drive and the map and directions don't work. When told this, the sales person assured me, it would work when I bought the car, because it just doesn't work because the system isn't active yet. All of this was bullshit. I wouldn't have spent the extra money for the screen and backup camera and all that from the dealer if it didn't have the turn by turn with a map. So basically, the free market isn't free, I couldn't know what I was buying, and I was duped by the dealer in a real free market way.

Second, even if true, I'm not sure it is legal? This kind of depends on FTC and anti trust law as well as contract terms. Did you know that onstar has curl in it? If you look in a GM manual, at the back they have all the licenses that contain all the licenses for free software they use. Who knows if they are actually following them. They could be running GPL for all we know and not sharing the code. That happens all the time, every day.

Third, even if it is legal, I'm not sure people will stand for that kind of hidden price increase on a car these days. Every consumer is getting squeezed. They will notice this, and all the other little inflation gotchas that the companies are doing to try to milk the US consumer a little harder. But it's proving that the consumer this time isn't going to do it. And getting shafted to do it for so long tends to lead to regulation, which is the second point again. When the consumer is squeezed, regulation is almost always missing.

From an economics perspective, they have the box in it tracking you the whole time if you buy it or not. So the cost of the box is really baked into the price of the car, not the subscription. If you turn off onstar they don't pull out the box or something. The box also has a sim card that is always active no matter what, so you can activate it again.

So in essence, you've already paid for it in terms of the actual real cost, and now you have to pay a lot more for what amounts to a cell phone that can call 911 itself. The subscription is twice as much as just a normal cell phone. Probably 20x what it honestly needs to be. It really should be included as a normal safety feature of every car. The ability to call 911 after an accident. Same for the ability for the cops to shut down a car remotely. If you think this doesn't happen or can't, you're wrong. It's done already. Cars have governors on the fuel injectors to keep their speed down, but not limit power. It's usually illegal to remove them, because that changes the HP, and usually requires retitling the car. Sometimes this means you get pushed into a different class of car based on the HP which means different taxes.

Now I believe that you should be able to modify your car how you want if you own it. It's yours. But we're heading into the car subscription model, where your car is basically going to cost you a dollar to turn it on soon just because we won't be able to stop it if all the car manufactures do it.

So if we're going with the subscription model, why can't we cancel the criminals subscriptions without needing to chase them down and run them off the road, causing unnecessary road deaths and police deaths?

Well, we just don't like it. Freedom, you know. But we're not free. We never really were. That's an illusion they give you, like a free lunch, where they charge you for the drinks.