Friendly reminder: Mozilla studied 25 car brands and NONE of them passed the privacy test. Mozilla even said that cars are "privacy nightmares".
this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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I mean this is gotta be on the newest Internet connected cars right? Cause like aint no way my 2017 ford focus has that many "privacy issues" it doesn't even have android auto lol.
Has what's called a Telematics Control Unit. And that thing phones home. It's basically a wifi modem.
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Notable was (I believe) Nissan, who included a clause about tracking your sexual activity.
Car companies really seem to be going all-in on technofeudalism. It’s definitely not the industry I would have expected.
Here's the reason: it's not the industry that's the problem. It's the system surrounding the industry.
"you will own nothing"
Collective ownership of communism gonna start looking a lot less scary to everyone when they own nothing anyway.
Communism would be nice economic model to try, but i wonder if its possible to setup in such a way it wont become mockery of itself like how russians did it. At least if hypothetically there was some kind of revolution after people get enough of current exploitation, most likely horrible people would worm into positions of power using the chaos and it would turn out like soviet union eventually. Peaceful and well though plan would be more resilient to corruption, but in current world even serious talk of such things gets shot down immediately.
people would worm into positions of power
Literally the reason models like that will never work. They don't account for human nature. Humans love finding ways to put themselves ahead of others. You put a system in place to make people "even" -- we'll find a way to be more 'even' than Frank. That guys not nearly as 'even' as me. At the end of the day we are apes with hierarchical social structures. Any economic or political model that has a snowballs chance of succeeding needs to account for that.
I think the first thing has to be making the government more representative. Congress should be something like 10,000 people based on the original ratio. We don't have to go that far but a country of 325 million people needs a very large people's house. Then we need to make it to where people vote, not land. Get rid of districts, first past the post, and the Senate.
Without those changes anything we do is doomed to just be another way to make rich people richer.
It's really refreshing to see someone else point out the issue of how the small size of the House results in shitty representation. I have never seen anyone else bring this up before, thank you!
One of several reasons I really want to do an electric conversion of an old car rather than buying a new electric car.
Renault Twingo, the original one with the eyes
Would sell like hot cakes in Paris
I'm not sure how feasible that is. Batteries are heavy, and take up space, and there's only so much room under the hood for battery modules. If you cram it to the max, can the frame take that load all the time? It might work for a short-ranged car - maybe 100km range, to avoid going much heavier than the normal curb-weight.
You’re not wrong about those things being issues, but also people do electric conversions all the time, there are shops that specialize in it and premade kits you can buy for it. Low range is certainly a very common outcome, but I don’t have big range requirements for most of my driving. Plus, I love taking on projects that are way over my had and muddling through them somehow. It’s how I learn best.
This is actually a not uncommon swap and some companies have even started selling kits to do it on certain vehicles.
I have my shopping list together to convert an old Kia Rio to electric for 100 km range, it's about 400lbs of lifepo batteries and a 200lb motor. So slightly more than the cratered ICE motor I'd be taking out.
But yah, if you want to drive across the country, convert an SUV or light pickup for the room to keep the batteries, and remove everything weight wise that you can to compensate.
I've thought about this also but that's insanely expensive and older cars are very unsafe by comparison.
I no longer have a family and don’t prioritize personal safety, but there are a lot of cars that aren’t too old which are still quite safe and lack all the connectivity crap.
I'm pretty happy with my 2007 pickup truck. Not sure I'd be interested in a new one even if I could afford it. I consider even the automatic windshield wipers to be too fancy for my taste and would rather have the traditional ones. Connecting my car to the internet is out of the question.
I'll die before I give up my automatic wipers! Thankfully my 2004 and 2013 VWs have it and don't lock me out of features like new cars.
I'll just stick with my 94.
I'm a modern man, I have a 98. Well, and a 77, though carburetors are black magic still.
I've said the same about carbs, all I see is screws and black magic.
This seems more about repair notifications target than the repairs themselves. Personally, so long as the technicians in the shop aren't locked out by proprietary controls from diagnostics on-site, I couldn't give a damn if the dealership is getting the wireless "notifications" or not.
My dealership tells us about lots of things we "need done". I take the vehicle to a trusted mechanic who either does the work or tells me when they're full of shit
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Nathan White, CitySide’s general manager, said his staff warns car shoppers that features like those requiring wireless transmission don’t work on new Subaru models sold in the state.
Subaru crippled its technology over a state law intended to let people share their car’s wireless repair information with any service shop — not only the authorized dealer.
The Massachusetts law, and a similar one that Maine voters approved in a landslide this week, show our desire to influence what happens to the reams of data our cars collect.
The Massachusetts and Maine laws could let a car owner send an in-dash warning about worn brake pads to a service shop of her choice to schedule repairs.
Joshua Siegel, a Michigan State University engineering professor, said this isn’t a simple task and that car manufacturers are doing a reasonable job in trying to comply with the spirit of a first-of-its-kind law in Massachusetts.
At CitySide Subaru, White hopes that automakers find a way to let car owners provide remote vehicle maintenance data to any service shop.
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in the future there is only one company and it is not possible to own anything
AmaMetAppleSoftGle™
Isn't mercedes doing subscription heated seats etc?
That was BMW who tried it
https://www.businessinsider.com/bmw-scrap-heated-seats-subscription-service-car-2023-9?op=1
And they gave up on it, at least for now, because not unexpectedly it was a terrible fucking idea
I'm sure they knew it was a terrible idea. They just boiled the frog too quickly. They'll try it again in 5 years.
That was BMW. Mercedes was even worse: they locked full acceleration behind a subscription
BMW already dropped it, it was that popular.
whatttttt
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