I daresay those features remain "active" even if you don't have an OnStar subscription active.

I’m adjusting my tinfoil hat as I type this, but can you even buy a recent non-commercial passenger vehicle without some data connection in hardware? Shoot, some even have WiFi hotspots now.

And for those that don’t, there’s probably one or more cell phones in the cab. Probably some open airdrops even. So many e-flys down.

The mandatory subscription doesn’t seem that shocking - that’s just a different flavor of hiding the total price. Wouldn’t be buying a car without that. (Should be.)

The hardware though, this mandatory subscription just puts it in bold. Plenty of makes and models have the (sort of) hardware by default, you can take or leave the subscription and associated benefits. Please take it of course, but that hardware connection is installed either way. In case you change your mind!

BMW is already trying to charge for warm butts. Gotta make that easy to toggle. Taking it to a shop for that “upgrade” is silly compared to OTA.

It’s all silly, and far worse.

If I ran a fleet of work trucks I think that I'd want this if I could locate where my vehicles were. If it was a personal vehicle, I would not want it at all.

The tracking is independent of the subscription, though. GM could always track vehicles with OnStar, whether or not the owner was paying for a subscription. And you can rip the OnStar module out of your vehicle and it will still work, even with the new mandatory subscription.