this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
493 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
86682 readers
3308 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Buy any of the other vehicles out there that don't pull that bullshit?
Lol it wasn't a choice between that car and walking. That's a massive false equivalency.
Basically every new vehicle made in the last 5 years has connected features. That's why I said "not buy a vehicle" I was using hyperbole to point out that the options are limited if you want a new vehicle without connected features. Options are even slimmer if you have specific requirements for a vehicle outside of basic transportation.
The point is that you shouldn't buy a new vehicle. Buy used.
Works until it doesn't. Connected cars go back almost 20 years now. better to research the car and ways to remove telemetry. Base model cars tend to have less telemetry, or none at all.
Those are separate, but equally concerning, things. Connected features are what this article is about, but telemetry is a different issue. On a new vehicle, you might disable the modem but lose several "features," perhaps ones that you effectively have to have.
On somewhat older vehicles that don't rely on connectivity to the same degree, disabling the modem only prevents telemetry data being sent to wherever-it-is that that data goes. That seems to be the sweet spot for me.
The people who buy new vehicles usually do it for the warranty that lasts several years so the cost structure of ownership is entirely predictable.
You can also buy a 25 year old Volkswagen 1.9 tdi. Some years your cost of ownership will be fuel and oil changes (and those cars basically take no fuel), but at some point you'll need new unit injectors costing 2-3x the car's value for a set. Will it be the month after you buy the car, or will it be in 5 years? It's a lottery and you're better off replacing all 4 when it comes to that, rather than doing one at a time.
Cars in the range of 5-15 years of age are even worse because they're more complex and some of the parts are super expensive. And it takes around ~10-15 years to know if an engine or transmission design is truly reliable (if it has big problems, we might find out sooner).
I'm going to use German cars as an example again because those are the ones I know best, but for example when BMW had the M57 diesel, that was basically the best modern diesel engine. 500k km? 700k km? No problem whatsoever. Only real issues would be the occasional injectors, turbo and maybe some coolant hoses, but those usually started surfacing after 300k or 400k km, at which point you expect SOME issues.
Then N57 came out as its replacement and a few years later we knew about the potential chain and valvetrain issues. Kinda sucks, because they'd also moved the chain to the rear of the engine, but you can get it done for a few hundred euros yourself, or somewhere between 1500-3000€ at a shop. But it took nearly a decade before we knew about the crankshaft issues and those are an engine killer. I'm talking a full rebuild of the bottom end with a NEW, not re-ground crankshaft since these have a special coating from the factory IIRC. Prepare around 10000€, which incidentally could be more than the car is worth by the time you find yourself doing this work.
Now that engine's replacement, the B57, has been out for 8 or 9 years and as far as is currently known, it has nearly no typical issues beyond some plastic coolant pipes that get brittle over time. But we don't know what other common issues might start surfacing as more and more of those engines reach high mileages.
Now if what you're thinking is "just buy a Toyota and you'll have no trouble", well, Toyota has made absolutely horrible engines in the past, for example the 2.2 diesel. Head gasket failure was notoriously common. Again, something that you wouldn't necessarily know when you're buying a 5 year old car because the issues haven't started surfacing en masse yet.
Almost 400k kilometres and no signs of dying
Painted the bonnet myself
Owned it for three years and have added almost 100k myself
Service it myself except brakes and steering for obvious reasons
Paid $1900 AUD and put about a grand into it, including everything
Does every single thing I want it to and should do for another four years
I have my eye on a new (to me) vehicle in the next couple of years. I'd gone from planning on buying new but have now settled on the lowest mileage 2019 I can find. New enough to be nice and safe and have physical buttons, old enough not to have all these objectionable "features."
I refer the newest style of vehicles as "spaceships." Call me old fashioned and old guy yelling at clouds, but I want my next vehicle to be, you know, a vehicle.
There's a difference between "has connected features" and "REQUIRES connected features" though. Again, you're making a false equivalency.
Yes, pretty much every new vehicle has some sort of connectivity, and almost all have some sort of paid subscription to use those connected features in the app.
That's entirely different than requiring you to have a subscription and use the app. Most new cars do NOT do that. They still have all the basic functionality without using the connected features, and the features are literally extra features so you can do things outside of the range of the fob, or add some extra things that the fob can't do.