Farm-fresh tech

Milas R. lives in San Diego, but it’s where he works that steered him to buy his GMC Yukon with hands-free driver assistance technology from OnStar. He’s a fourth-generation melon farmer, and the family business isn’t a small operation. Their melons can be found in all 50 states, Canada and Asia.

As managing director, he regularly makes the drive to Arizona and elsewhere in California where hot days, cool nights and a long growing season make for optimal farming conditions. “Most farms are about 150 miles away,” Milas says. “I get out to the ranch, walk the fields, check the fields that are coming up in production.”

"The first thing I tell people now is you have to go look at Super Cruise" Milas says. "It is the easiest way to make the driving experience more enjoyable."

Doing that puts around 50,000 miles a year on his vehicle. “I pretty much live in my car,” he says. “When you’re traveling as much as I do and you’re doing as much freeway driving as I do, having any type of assistance really makes the drive more comfortable.”

That was the help he was looking for last year when he began shopping for a new vehicle. Milas did a lot of research, watching videos and reading reviews of assorted driver-assistance features. He kept coming back to Super Cruise^®.

"Super Cruise has changed my day to day drastically. With Super Cruise, I feel like I can work a little bit more, or I have the energy to be with my family. I have the energy to go get a dinner with my wife."                              - Milas R. | OnStar Member

"How to check a melon for ripeness is an age-old concern," Milas says. "You'll see people, if you go to a melon stand, you'll see people knocking it. That doesn't really check it. The thing that you have to do is you have to go through the field, you have to look at the color and other harvest indicators to make sure that you have a melon that's ready to go"

“When I first looked into it and I saw the videos, I thought to myself, there’s no way that it’s this easy to activate it and get going,” Milas says.

He put it to the test and discovered activating and using Super Cruise was indeed pretty easy, and it worked great. “It’s keeping good speed,” he says. “It’s keeping a safe distance from the car in front of you.”

Because the Super Cruise network currently stretches to 585,000 miles of compatible roads in North America, his routes to the farms are mostly covered. His drives changed.

“Before I had Super Cruise, I would get home and I’d be exhausted, fighting traffic, doing all that freeway driving,” Milas says. “I’d come home, and I’d just feel like I needed to rest.”

Now, he feels better when he arrives at the fields. When he gets home, he has the energy to maybe get a little more work done or go out to dinner with his wife and spend more time with his family.

“Super Cruise,” he says, “has been a game changer.”