Detroit Muscle

The two most obvious examples: OnStar's three-button interface and its reliance on voice commands. Using OnStar is as easy as choosing a color-coded button: A blue button activates the main system, a red button activates emergency services, a black button provides access to new services. From the beginning, OnStar unlocked car doors for people who had lost their keys (or locked them in the car). It dispatched help when an airbag deployed. It tracked down cars that had been stolen. The basic insight: To a mainstream customer base, safety and security mattered above all else.

In the past three years, as OnStar's subscriber base has grown from 200,000 to more than 2 million, the service has added an array of features, such as phone calls, its Virtual Advisor service, and remote-engine diagnostics. But Huber and his colleagues have also forced themselves to limit OnStar's features and to roll out new ones slowly. Even as its services expand, OnStar sticks to its second design principle: Voice speaks volumes with a mainstream audience. OnStar Personal Calling provides hands-free service that relies on a robust voice-recognition system (hence Huber's seat on the General Magic board). Utter the words "virtual advisor" in a growing number of OnStar-outfitted cars, and you're connected to real-time traffic and weather, sports, news, or stock quotes that you have preselected from your personal OnStar Web page. That information is delivered to you by voice through the vehicle's audio system.

Such devotion to simplicity means that OnStar has undeniable shortcomings -- flaws that press reviewers rarely fail to point out. For now, though, simplicity trumps virtuosity. Indeed, the defining feature of the OnStar service is its nationwide crew of "live advisors" -- actual human beings who come to the aid of subscribers with a push of OnStar's blue button. To Huber, there is no easier way to grasp OnStar's connection to customers than by visiting the Live Advisor Center in Troy, Michigan, about a half-mile from OnStar headquarters. In huge, cubicle-filled rooms, 500 reps field calls from subscribers. (There's a second large center in Charlotte, North Carolina.) In a typical month, OnStar advisors unlock 15,000 doors, find 375 stolen cars, and monitor 300 airbag deployments.

Critics have pounded OnStar for sticking with its call centers. They're costly, hard to scale, and so, well, undigital. But Huber maintains that they are a killer app. He says that they aren't just a way to deliver service, but also a powerful listening post into what mainstream customers might want next, as opposed to what the techies might want to offer. Matt Handlon, who runs the Michigan center, sits with an advisor at least once a week to listen to the voice of the customer. New OnStar employees visit once a month during their first year. Senior executives come in at least once a quarter. "We can put dancing holograms on the dashboard," says Huber. "We can do things that people haven't even dreamed of. That doesn't mean that our customers want those things."

Nor does it mean that Huber doesn't have far-out dreams of his own. In mid-March, some Michigan homes were outfitted for a project called OnStar@Home. They got "smart" thermostats, electronic doors, and smoke detectors. These in-home devices are linked to OnStar's in-car service as well as to handheld computers outside the vehicle. The goal? "To see what happens when you put this stuff together," says Ron Bellow, the GM executive overseeing the project. For example, if you say "welcome home" as you pull into your garage, OnStar could disarm your home-security system, unlock the door, turn on the lights, and even crank up the heat on a cold winter evening.

Huber and his team have traveled a long distance in seven years. OnStar has gone from being a pilot project to having more than 2 million customers, from being a working group to being a fast-growing business unit with 400 full-time employees, plus a cast of more than 1,000 call-center operators. But the next big challenge is to handle the pressures of fast growth, to add even more discipline to OnStar's operations without introducing bureaucracy and rigidity.

"We've got to put more structure behind the vision," says Don Butler, one of Huber's recruits from GM. Butler, a former GM brand manager, started out as executive director of OnStar's Virtual Advisor service. Now he is head of commercial development, a post left vacant after the retirement of OnStar pioneer Fred Cooke. At the same time, Butler adds, OnStar can't let the vision get fuzzy: "In the early days, it was easy to stick to the vision, because everyone was in on it."

That's less true today, which is why Huber works to maintain the feel of a small operation, even as OnStar gets huge. At his monthly staff meetings, Huber makes it a point to read favorite letters and emails from OnStar customers. Then there are the "Chat with Chet" sessions, informal gatherings where Huber takes the pulse of OnStar as well as the pulse of GM. In March, he invited GM's new head of North American operations, Gary Cowger, to his chat.