We shoulda never left for Plymouth Rock!

How dare they have an election system that lets them elect politicians that are actually doing what the people want instead of having to choose between bad and worse! It must be some forbidden knowledge for sure.

Personally I’d call that a safety issue. A few years ago my wife and I were driving a rental car that was rear ended on the highway by a drunk driver. The impact caved in the left rear wheel and spun us 360 degrees across 3 lanes of the highway. Within a few seconds of coming to a stop an OnStar person was talking to us, asking if we were ok and confirming our location.

We had no clue ahead of time that the rental car had one of these services, but at that moment we were very happy it did. I honestly have no idea about the privacy ramifications, etc. but having been through that experience I’d think long and hard about disabling it outright. I do take my privacy seriously, but I’d have to weigh that against the safety of me & my family in that kind of situation and disable it only as an absolutely last resort… Just my own personal $0.02 on the matter.

My car microphone stopped working

If only I knew where.

I don’t trust that they won’t save the data and upload it during a servicing.

its* own switch.

For phones, Pinephone is very nearly this. The only thing is that GPS and cell service are on the same switch (because they’re handled by the same chip on the board)

Weird, I guess this title I registered at the dmv isn’t real.

I’m sure it only has one. And I’m not sure you know how ownership works. It’s privacy I’m more concerned about.

Oh, good idea.

People take their cars to dealership garages? Fuck that noise lmao

I guess when/if I buy another car, I’ll look into gov’t fleet auctions.

Or at this point, the one whose tracking is easiest and safest to avoid or circumvent.

The only car makers that give data deletion options are Dacia Renault:

Only two - Renault and Dacia, which are not sold in North America - offer drivers the option to have their data deleted

Source: euronews.com/…/wiretaps-on-wheels-drivers-warned-…

back in my day Spock had small hair

✅ well paying job

✅ Dropped out of college and went full time

I have a college education and a well paying job the monthly payment on a new car has doubled since I bought my last one in 2020. No way am I buying a new car at these prices/rates.

With my last raise I’m over 130k a year and I still don’t buy new cars. My 2010 Audi is still running just fine.

For most, they can afford to finance them, but the rates aren’t looking too good lately

www.statista.com/…/auto-loan-rates-usa/

Mostly social signalling

2 - 3 year old model is effectively brand new but a lot cheaper.

I’ve always heard this, but where is this actually true? When I bought a Camry like a decade ago, I could get a brand new one for $19.5k or used ones with 50k miles on them for…$18k. so yeah I paid the extra 1.5k to not have to deal with potential random shit.

When my wife bought her car a few years ago it was a similar situation. The only used cars that were “a lot cheaper” had like 100k miles.

All newer cars are smart cars

It’s been happening for a long time, even some cars is far back as 2012 have a supposed lifetime fluid. Although they at least still have the drain bolt so that you can say yeah that’s cute and do it anyway. But lately the drain bolt has gone away and they are completely sealed meaning you can’t change it even if you want to

I believe Honda started this in the early 2000s because they found that transmissions were compromised at earlier mileages at a much more frequent rate from leaks, bad fluid changes, or missing the intervals, than were actually failing from use. So they designed the cars for how they were actually being used and maintained. It’s kind of a non-issue unless you’ve got 300k+ miles on your transmission, at which point you’d expect to potentially replace it anyway.

One can hope, right. I just stumbled across an article in local magazine about this same issue. Have to read it and report back.

LOLWUT, I only buy cars that old or older. Why would I spend an absolute fortune on a new-ish car that I barely use anyway when I can get a perfectly reliable older car fir a fraction of the price?

My current car doesn’t have an infotainment system or any kind of connectivity. It has a 6 slot CD changer.

Good troll.

Who wants to buy / drive a 10 yo car though…

I do. Less built-in obsolescence, let spyware, less vendor lock-in. More durability. Ain’t ditching my '97 Fiat anytime soon.

Dude im driving a 33 year old car as my daily. Sub 100 thousand miles and gets better mileage than quite a few modern cars, gotta love government fleet cars. Anyways take your classist shit and shove it, just cause you can and your ilk can buy a new car every other year doesn’t mean most people can, will, or want to.

"Americans are keeping their vehicles longer than ever. According to new data from S&P Global Mobility, the average age of cars and light trucks on U.S. roads is a record 12.5 years this year. That's up three months over the 2022 analysis.May 18, 2023"

Haven’t seen a new car that can play tapes in nearly 20 years. Got bad news, boss.

I replaced my car’s stereo with one that had an auxiliary 1/8" stereo jack.

What happens when all new cars do this and the older used cars dry up? We need laws to prevent this, but i just don’t feel like that’s going to happen unless China is the one doing the data collection.

Playing MP3’s off of a USB stick is literally all I do with my car’s stereo, and in fact all I want it to do.

I liked my recently departed 2012 chrysler infotainment system quite a bit. The sirius/xm radio kept 50 favorite artist and 50 favorite song alerts, had 300gb of storage for mp3s and the DVD system with headphones for the kiddos while we could listen to something else. No newer car I’ve driven, borrowed, or owned had the favorite alerts, and I’m going to miss the hell out of that feature.

Oh, it did have an aux jack and USB input as well. It was the cat’s ass. For a grocery-go-getter, it rocked

You made the mistake of believing TikTok was anything more than a paid hit by other Social Media corporations.

Well you are voting with your wallet, the only problem is you’ve been out voted. Honda makes good automotives and part of the “price” now is people giving them their data. People just don’t understand/care enough to not want to buy a Honda. If this were really a big deal to people it would open a place in the market for new automotive companies like Rivian, Lucid, or Polestar to gain massive ground by not doing this.

This is an education issue. We need to inform people about the dangers of a lack of data privacy. If they still don’t care, then so be it.

Even if you get 100 people to boycott a company, would 100 out of millions of consumers really make a difference?

There’s definitely an economic impact to a vehicle looking or driving like shit. And I’m sure you’ll see some amount of consumer migration higher than 0.01% of the retail base.

But there’s also a lot of obfuscation, deception, and outright lying in the automotive sales industry. So its less a question of “Will consumers reject this feature?” and more “Will consumers even be aware of this feature?”

Capitalism should be predicated on companies offering the best product

What happens when the retail customers have be commodified? What happens when the product is Surveillance and the real big money clients are state actors and private mega-businesses that benefit from tracking rented vehicles?

As we move closer to a full Service Contract economic model - one in which individuals don’t really own anything and have to continuously pay to access even basic features of their home devices - I can see a lot of financial incentives in the system that preclude car dealers from leaving these features out.

Imagine a bank that simply won’t finance vehicles that can’t be tracked. Or a rental company that won’t add vehicles to their fleet without these always-on internet features. Or a car lot that uses continuous tracking to manage its inventory.

Very quickly, the individual consumer becomes a secondary concern relative to these economies of scale.

A system with the goal being best or even optimal for all involved would never be called capitalism, even if capitalism didn’t exist.

yOu ALwAyS HaVe A cHOiCe, sO It’S oKaY!

In the USA, that boat sailed long ago… most cities are too spread out to pedal anywhere

I mean, if we are imagining government doing it’s actual job, isn’t it easier to pass regulations then to change how North American cities work?

Like I support walkable cities, I’m just convinced (majority of) regular people don’t actually want it.

Then your E-Bike is going to require an online sign in every time you want to use it.

I’m all for reducing the number of cars on the road but IMO this is a poor attitude to have to a problem that exists right now and is ballooning out of control, but has a very easy solution.

Moving away from cars will take a long, long time. Infrastructure doesn’t come from nowhere, and some places are so sparsely populated that public transport can be a very difficult proposition, or even an impossibility. Those places in particular will be stuck with cars for a while. Banning predatory data gathering on cars can happen right now if there is the political will to do so.

I know it’s easy for some to say “well I don’t care, fuck anybody who drives a car, they’re evil and I don’t like them. Why don’t they simply be rich and buy a house in a city where public transport is usable?”, but I think everybody has a right to privacy, and the default shouldn’t be for our tools to spy on us and report it back to the OEMs. Particularly when a lot of car drivers don’t have any choice but to drive!

You can work on strengthening public transport while at the same time improving privacy laws for cars. It’s not one or the other.

Cars are far from the only product that is actively destroying individual privacy in the name of corporate profits

Reducing the number of cars doesn’t fix the root problem.

Ahhh… gross.

Thanks.

It’s already happening anyways on non ev cars and has been for years. They all have monitors and tech in there.

I suspect that it’s because they are marketed to be as much of a tech gadget as transportation. An iPad on wheels. So they figure that they can slip in this crap.

I mean they use the data to decide what actions are high risk. Someone tailgating and tapping their brakes constantly is inherently less safe than someone leaving proper distance.

Privacy theft, I get it. An opt out should always be available and easy to use.

If you truly have an issue with insurance deciding what is or isn’t safe there are organizations that can take over that such as ASTM or NFPA.

can you going to mcdonalds twice a day be shared with your health insurer?

You think this data isn’t already shared?

Basic traffic liability insurance sorta makes sense - it’d suck you had your car wrecked by someone broke and were SOL.

I’m super not okay with a government (which we have) gaining free access to that information for anything they want (which they would)

I fully believe they already have it.

Without absolute transparency and total accountability it’s going to be abused, but we already live in a surveillance dystopia. Have you ever seen what happens to whistle blowers today?