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Comment by SamuelAdams | Hacker News Reader

> “There’s just massive amounts of data being collected, and if you want the service, you have to agree to it. And people do agree to it, and they have relatively little control over things,” Scassa says.

I'm curious what this will do to the used car market in 10-15 years. Say the original owner consented to all this data tracking. They go to sell the car to buy a new one, and the 2nd owner does not agree to the tracking. Is there a vendor-provided way to shut this off? Or is the vehicle always stuck in a "data collecting mode" regardless of who it is sold to?

Furthermore, if a customer changes the car to stop data upload, that could be seen as tampering with a vehicle. This could lead to legal consequences, but I'm not a lawyer so I can't dwell on the specifics.

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This is not legal advice, and you should consult an attorney if you believe that an OEM may come after you for tampering with your own vehicle.

That said, I believe that there is very limited legal recourse for a vehicle OEM who wants to prevent an end user from changing the data collection and upload features of their vehicles. The worst thing would be potentially voiding the warranty, but for 10-15 year old used vehicles, that's not an issue.

I work as an in-house counsel at a vehicle OEM (likely not one you've heard of). Our end customers are generally large companies, so it may be different for personal passenger vehicles, but we actively plan for the contingencies where our end users switch out their telematics module, or request to have the telematics data stream be directed to another service provider. Further, in our market, the idea that the customer wouldn't want telematics at all is not really likely, but we also plan for that possibility.

So, I don't believe the used market isn't as big of a deal as you may think. The real concern for personal vehicles is losing essential warranty or service options for new vehicles by turning off the data collection.

Don't forget that Tesla is now in this space, and turning off Tesla's access to it will turn off your car, period. I have a hard time believing that others in the industry will not take the blase reaction to this and then do it themselves.

Finally car manufacturers can kill the used car market just like video game companies killed the used game market.

I'm sure its not going to be long before you don't _own_ your car, you just purchased a license to use it for a period of time.

> Don't forget that Tesla is now in this space, and turning off Tesla's access to it will turn off your car, period.

Which is super scary. A couple years ago one of their firmware engineers had his NDA expire, and he posted some stories about his time there in some forum.

One of the stories that stuck with me is they were really sloppy with their updates. One time the pushed one that wasn't fully cooked (it might have bricked some, I can't remember), so one of the engineers literally wrote a script to SSH into each of the cars to roll back part of the update.

Update: here's the original source: https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376

I have this Reddit link: https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/99sbwa/form...

That's horrifying. Reminds me of this:

https://www.wired.com/2016/08/jeep-hackers-return-high-speed...

This was really iffy even then. If the car is connected by cellular, it doesn't have a unique IP address to SSH into. If it is connected to WiFi, the router has to be configured to forward that port.

Since the author remains anon, I always thought it was just a troll.

Busting through NAT is really easy... The car could just ping home and open the tunnel by itself when it sees the appropriate signal.

The whole thread doesn't hold water. It was just a mix of plausible, implausible, jargon and some profanity for relatability.

Full quote:

> model s and x use openvpn to talk to their backend. inside that backend there are metadata services that feed info to the system, one of those things being a ~20MB+ (generated by the worst erp system) json payload that describes supercharger shit for the map in the touchscreen. somebody was smart enough to do automated linting but forgot to validate against the custom parser the car runs which caused a segfault in the qt app that runs the ui, which in turn for a variety of reasons forces a reboot of that component. I think we clocked about 15 seconds before it read the file and faulted after boot. it was doing that for an hour before everyone panicked and got me and qa on the phone to fix it. i wrote a quick python/fabric script that ssh’d to as many cars as possible at a time to rm the file

Another interesting quote from this thread:

- "On that note, China has a law in place that mandates all electric cars send real time telemetry to their government servers - Model S/X/3, NIO cars and any other electric car if they're driving already complies with that law to be road certified"

- "Don't be surprised if that becomes a mandate in other countries"

FYI, those details were originally posted on YOSPOS, a SomethingAwful sub-forum which is the world's best Internet forum for computer touchers.

They regularly lambast HN via this thread. It would be great if more people read their criticisms of the community here.

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=39...

I don't think anyone is going to pay $10 just to read that thread.

Hopefully the rest of the industry follows Tesla and makes paid car DLC and constant updates. /S

Yeah, fair - that's definitely a difference between vocational vehicles and personal vehicles. If we tried to do that, our end customers would laugh us out of the room.

However, I believe consumers also have a way to laugh Tesla out of the room, eventually: public policy ideas like the first sale doctrine, or just straight up passing new laws saying that when you buy a car, the manufacturer must provide basic certain basic services (such as allowing the vehicle to run, and warranty for basic components) even if the purchaser elects to deactivate some of the data collection.

In the past few decades, we have really allowed power to accrue to large corporations, but I think that things like the right-to-repair movement show that the pendulum may swing the other direction, at least in some contexts. Regardless of overall political or economic ideology, as soon as a large portion of the population realizes that these OEMs are basically saying "yes, pay me a good chunk of your annual salary, and I'll let you use this vehicle as long as you don't piss me off," I think things will swing very quickly in favor of consumers. The reason it hasn't yet is because most people don't have to deal with vehicles with these restrictions.

I've read about people removing the modems from their Teslas in the past.

Have they updated the software such that this isn't possible?

Which is why Tesla will never have a place in my fleet. I can afford it, and love the mechanical tech, but the lack of rights and privacy is appaling. It shocks me people pay for their own piecemeal enslavement for the latest shiny thing.

>That said, I believe that there is very limited legal recourse for a vehicle OEM who wants to prevent an end user from changing the data collection and upload features of their vehicles. The worst thing would be potentially voiding the warranty, but for 10-15 year old used vehicles, that's not an issue.

>I work as an in-house counsel at a vehicle OEM

If you're really a lawyer, I'm surprised you'd write any of this, because it's blatantly false. The Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975 makes it blatantly illegal to "void" a warranty for any modification, unless it can be proven that the modification caused the issue that the customer is making a warranty claim for.

I wasn't aware of that, but perhaps it will hearten you to know that I don't deal with warranty law in my day-to-day. So, I clearly have more to learn - not sure why you felt it necessary to call my credentials into question over it though.

But in any case, your post does strengthens my main point, which is that fear over surveillance of vehicles by OEMs, with no consumer recourse, is somewhat overblown.

EDIT:

Just read Magnusson-Moss, and I have a question since you seem to know about it - you said the act "makes it blatantly illegal to 'void' a warranty for any modification, unless it can be proven that the modification caused the issue that the customer is making a warranty claim for."

But the act itself says "the warrantor shall not impose any duty other than notification upon any consumer as a condition of securing remedy [...] unless the warrantor has demonstrated [...] that such a duty is reasonable." 15 U.S.C. § 2304(b)(1).

Based on what's actually in the text of the law, I could imagine Tesla or some other OE making the argument that it is "reasonable" to condition the warranty on the consumer continuing to feed the stream of telematics data to the OE, because it allows them to identify warranty issues before they require substantial repairs, thus potentially saving significant money for the OE, and significant time for the consumer - certainly a reasonable thing. I personally don't agree with that argument, but I'm curious how you would respond to it, and how you can be sure that a court would shoot it down.

I only questioned your credentials because you said you were in legal counsel, and at an automotive OEM of some kind. Most people who've done any significant DIY car work know about this law, because it's protected them for decades from dealers that would try to deny them warranty coverage for completely unrelated non-dealer repairs or maintenance. For instance, a dealer can't claim that some kind of engine trouble isn't covered because you replaced your own brake pads, or worse, because you replaced the radio. They also can't deny warranty coverage just because you had an independent mechanic work on your car instead of the dealership. Furthermore, they can't require OEM parts to be used, unless they provide them for free. I would have thought anyone working in automotive legal would know about this off the top of their head.

As for your example, that sounds pretty contrived and ridiculous to me. Doesn't mean someone might not try it though; companies have tried lots of ridiculous legal tactics before, such as Oracle's current API lawsuit. But I imagine any decent court would shoot it down pretty quickly. Warranty claims are made because parts fail before the warranty expires; the absence of telematics isn't going to magically make some mechanical part fail faster. It might help identify it sooner, sure, but it's still a defective part for failing that quickly, so I don't see how the consumer disabling telematics absolves the manufacturer from covering this. In short, it's never been "reasonable" before this for car companies to have telematics to keep their machines working properly through the warranty period, so why is it suddenly required now? It's not reasonable for anything else either; does a new house need telematics for the house warranty to be valid? How about a blender or toaster in the kitchen? I don't see this argument going far at all.

Fair enough. Thanks for the reply, that all makes sense.

I have never run into a situation where my current company tried to limit its warranty in legally interesting ways (and it wouldn't necessarily get to my desk anyway), so I never really had call to dig and find Magnusson-Moss. I suspect that knowledge of that law is probably more top-of-mind for DIYers than for OEM lawyers.

I still think that whether requiring telematics is a "reasonable" condition for a warranty is more complicated than you think, but what you're saying is exactly the counterargument I would make.

And, I hope I've provided some assurance that I am, in fact, a lawyer. Whether I'm a good one is perhaps up for debate. :)

I shouldn't need to attack my car with a soldering iron and wire cutters because I don't want to be tracked by it.

I agree it should be an opt in policy. This is why I'm against tollways because they don't immediately just charge me and toss the data after say 90 days. They keep where you've been essentially forever or until DOT forgets to back it up and the drive crashes.

Seems to me answering those questions will be part of a greater process to balance power and interests between manufacturers and consumers/users.

E.g., Tesla already seems to try and decide the questions in the way manufacturers would likely have them, i.e. suppressing data transmission is tampering and the problem of car reselling doesn't apply as cars cannot be resold anymore without manufacturer involvement.

I think it's up to consumers to offer a different perspective here.

> s tampering and the problem of car reselling doesn't apply as cars cannot be resold anymore without manufacturer involvement.

I suspect this will become a huge societal problem if it continues like this in a car-dependent country like the US. Yes, the middle-class people will probably still be able to purchase $30,000-40,000 cars for the foreseeable future (even adjusted for inflation), but what will happen to the people who won't be able to purchase a second-hand car that costs more than $5000-6000 (or even $1000-2000)? How will they continue to get to work in a country that values public transport so lowly?

The more technology is built into a car, the more obsolescence shall quickly devaluate it?

You would think so, but afaik there's almost no older smart-phones around (think 4-5 years-old) because they're expensive to repair, that is if you can repair them at all.

That's why you don't see less-wealthy people commuting to their jobs in an early 2000s Mercedes S-Klass or in a VW Phaeton (even though they'd be able to purchase such vehicles at today's prices), but instead they use an older Honda or a Toyota or a slightly newer Nissan.

Smartphones aren't cars. Cars are much bigger, therefore easier to make [somewhat] modular. Furthermore, the recent hype with smartphones was smaller, thinner, and more glue.

To judge by what I've seen lately cars have started becoming full of tablets and tablet-like screens, those things will be expensive if not impossible to repair in 10-years' time.

The future is now.

Sourcing a CANBUS module for a 10+yo car is already a roll of the dice. Take all the modules that are required for the vehicle to operate, are matched to the VIN, can't be re-flashed, aren't available aftermarket and aren't made by the OEM anymore and anything that breaks where those sets intersect turns the vehicle into a brick. The list gets a little longer every day and won't get shorter until we get right to repair legislation with teeth.

You can drive a car without all the fancy electronic doodads. Everyone who drives a 20+yo car does it every day. You can't drive a vehicle that won't start because it doesn't see some quasi-essential (e.g. ABS) module talking on the bus.

>Take all the modules that are required for the vehicle to operate, are matched to the VIN, can't be re-flashed, aren't available aftermarket and aren't made by the OEM anymore and anything that breaks where those sets intersect turns the vehicle into a brick.

I'm starting to doubt this more and more. Dumping the ROM from a read-only chip and flashing a new one isn't rocket science. After watching stuff like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqWhId-tQXs&t=9m31s and guys like Dave Jones and Louis Rossman, it looks like the entire repair industry is long due for disruption. Sure, finding old or obsolete parts will still be a problem, but not impossible.

It's already expensive. The Entune head unit in my Corolla would cost me $1000 for an OEM replacement (they have a known touchscreen issue), but an aftermarket head unit with way more features may run me ~$400 including a mounting kit, and that's if I splurge on a nice one. I may give up a few features by switching, but certainly not $600 worth of features.

Good reliable cars are currently cheaper than ever. Of all the problems stacked against the poor, I'm not sure that cars have become less obtainable. Adjusted for inflation, the cheapest economy cars are quite inexpensive, and generally speaking, they last much longer than they did 20-30 years ago.

That's the opposite sentiment that I've heard recently (from an American perspective). My understanding is that our used cars are more expensive than ever due to:

a) Certified pre-owned and similar programs making some used cars more appealing (and thus more valuable), removing them from the supply of unvetted, cheap used cars.

b) More folks being able to afford used cars around the world. It seems like at the lower end of the market, many American used cars are shipped to Latin America or the Caribbean (in Europe many older cars are sent to Africa), again reducing the supply of used cars.

This is my sketchy recollection of things I've heard and read, I don't have any direct sources to link you to, but I've certainly heard multiple people bemoan that say, $5-10k doesn't buy you nearly as good a car as it used to (even adjusting for inflation).

EDIT: As an aside, the issue of shipping cars to different regions could also prove interesting for owners down the road. There are already some issues there - I believe my car's navigation system is for North America, or maybe US+Canada. So if my car gets shipped to Argentina in 10 years, the Nav will be useless or will need an update. Not a huge deal. But if Tesla's Autopilot is tuned for conditions and laws in a certain region, it would presumably require reprogramming for another region. Would that be an automatic over-the-air update? Or would Tesla not want to bother with free updates to a 20-year-old car?

There's a very long tail of used cars. When you are talking CPO (certified pre-owned), you are talking 0-3 years old, with perhaps 50,000 miles or less (15k-30k probably the sweet spot). Sometimes these can be a good deal, sometimes you can get like 5-10% off the new price (which seems not worth it...to me)

The OP talking about a $5,000 car is talking about a 10-20 year old car with 100,000+ miles.

Both cars appeal to a different set of buyers. The CPO car effectively competes against new cars.

It's not uncommon at all today to see a car tick over 200,000+ miles, so buying a car for $5,000 with 100,000 miles on it can be seen as a pretty good deal. Usually people would recommend a good Japanese / Korean car (Toyota, Honda, etc.).

The market was disrupted a decade back by cash for clunkers, which took lots of cars off the road. That raised prices and forced banks to write loans for older cars.

At the same time, emissions controls changed the market in that cars are more governed by use not age. I mostly buy Hondas and know the market a bit, and they are all good for about 200,000 miles without significant maintenance.

I sold a 2003 Honda Pilot with 250k miles for $2,500 last year -- really high considering all of the stuff that will break on a car of that vintage. In the 90's, that pricepoint would be for a much younger car. A place like CarMax will sell a 2010 Pilot with low mileage for $15k, which works because the TCO works out -- you won't have lots of maintenance.

>a) Certified pre-owned and similar programs making some used cars more appealing (and thus more valuable), removing them from the supply of unvetted, cheap used cars.

That seemed to be true for a while, but I've seen prices relax quite a bit lately. It's possible this was just local, and I'm not seeing a broader trend.

It's also the case that perfectly good brand new cars can be had for $13-$14k, (Nissan Versa, Ford Fiesta) which I appreciate are not attainable for many people.

> E.g., Tesla already seems to try and decide the questions in the way manufacturers would likely have them, i.e. suppressing data transmission is tampering and the problem of car reselling doesn't apply as cars cannot be resold anymore without manufacturer involvement.

Not that I doubt that they believe this, or even that they've said or implied it, but is there any official statement from Tesla to the effect of prohibiting, or even trying to limit, resale without Tesla's involvement?

> ... cars cannot be resold anymore without manufacturer involvement.

This seems like a violation of long-standing consumer protection laws and precedents.

It's Elon Musk, who cares about minor things like law.

Or ethics. Were saving the world, why do you want freedom!?

It will be interesting to see how this collides with California's new CCPA.

The 80's tractor market is heating up because farmers are tired of the problems of modern technology and how companies are using it [1].

I wonder if anyone will jump at the market for cars that don't track you. I wonder who would fund that.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971545

The trouble is that this isn't true for large companies who are consolidating all the farms anyway. They can afford the the new equipment. This is just a niche thing for the family farm which is steadily dying off as they can't compete on price. Sure there will always be some family farms, but no doubt they will be driven to say "organic small farm raised" for the whole foods and farmer's market type niche of people. This "heating up" is a drop in the ocean.

> Is there a vendor-provided way to shut this off?

In the Tesla Model 3 and Nissan Leaf there are menu settings to disable it. Additionally in the Leaf it prompts you at interval (every 2000 miles?) to notify you about it.

Leaf it prompts you at interval (every 2000 miles?

Or every g-ddamned time you start the car, depending if you have a first-gen or not. The GPRS radio in ours is unhooked, so now the button press is just ceremony so you can see the screen.

But do note the part where the cell radio is unhooked. Whatever the car, there’s a module in there somewhere that probably just needs to be unplugged.

> Or every g-ddamned time you start the car, depending if you have a first-gen or not.

My in-laws have a Ford Escape that does that.

>Furthermore, if a customer changes the car to stop data upload, that could be seen as tampering with a vehicle. This could lead to legal consequences, but I'm not a lawyer so I can't dwell on the specifics.

Where are you getting this crazy idea? If it's your car, you can tamper with it all you want, as long as you don't violate emissions laws and stuff like that. There's no law preventing you from tampering with your car's data collection or transmission, or most other things for that matter. How do you think the entire aftermarket parts industry exists?

I think the used car market will get destroyed. In a few years buying a used car older than a few years will probably be a quaint memory. That is unless manufacturers will get forced to open up their systems by law.

I think the move to electric vehicles will actually collapse the second-hand car market - no-one wants to buy a car with batteries that no longer hold enough charge to complete a journey. We already see this effect with used laptops and smartphones, however I can never see changing your cars battery pack being a end-user activity.

If batteries get commoditized then it could be an easy process to replace the battery. It becomes no different than many other repairs you would typically make to make a used car sellable.

However it will likely require legislation to ensure there's no DRM bullshit in the battery packs.

It becomes an issue because batteries are so much more expensive than other things you can get though. It's not replacing a alternator, it's replacing a $15000 battery "set". Also I'm hoping electric car longevity will prove out the value in this. Electric car drive trains "in principle" should have much longer lives than gas engines.

I went to look up battery prices to prove you wrong, but your price is spot on.

https://www.evwest.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=4&prod...

Used Tesla battery, 5kWh for $1500. you're looking at ~10 of these for decent range.

Swings and roundabouts in the EU: GDPR should clobber all the nonconsensual data collection, but there is also the "eCall" mandate that will require your car to phone in location to the emergency services in the event of a crash.

(What happens when an EU national drives one of the American surveillancemobiles? Sounds like a straightforward GDPR violation to me, although good luck getting that resolved)

Don't really see how eCall is related to the data collection?

A potential privacy issue yes, but much less so than the data collection.

Well, in order to implement it the car has to have a "phone" (mobile station) and a GPS. And I think (although not proven) that in order to meet the time requirement it has to keep both of them "warm", ie registered to network with a GPS fix. Which means at the minimum the mobile operators know where the car is at all times. And the car manufacturer has built almost all the hardware for full tracking.

Does this mean that if you cut the wires to your antenna you will be jailed in Europe?

Unlikely; you'd have to find the directive to check.

The first recourse of the law typically isn't jail.

Anecdotally, I can tell you my 6 year old Nissan Leaf asks me every time I start up the car if it can send data back to Nissan. The 2g radio doesn't actually have a network to connect to, so it's kind of a moot point.

I imagine it'll be like any useful service, once you turn off the data collection, it suddenly loses a bunch of useful features

>They go to sell the car to buy a new one, and the 2nd owner does not agree to the tracking. Is there a vendor-provided way to shut this off?

In Europe there needs to be due to GDPR. It will be interesting to see how this works out as this has not been challenged as far as I know.

And if not, what if regulation suddenly makes it illegal to opt out? California maybe?

>I'm curious what this will do to the used car market in 10-15 years.

Depends on LEO. If it is easier to deal with trackable cars, then untrackable cars will be hotter than black tinted windows and radar detectors.

It already is, to some extent; why can I not gut my catalytic converter & change some programming so my car says the outputs are fine? Because the state wants me to get rid of my old functional car to support the economy of newer more expensive vehicles.

> why can I not gut my catalytic converter & change some programming so my car says the outputs are fine? Because the state wants me to get rid of my old functional car to support the economy of newer more expensive vehicles.

...also probably to protect the environment?

tHe sTaTE wAnTs tO cOnTroL me!!!!

modifies car to literally emit noxious emissions everywhere

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN?

You have to have an incredibly inefficient vehicle for manufacturing and shipping a new one to be an environmental positive...

Catalytic converters reduce local pollution significantly. Smog reduction in major cities is in part due to their near-universality.

But the "manufacturing and shipping a new one" part is temporary until the majority of cars are replaced. The reduced emissions from more efficient cars will be permanent.

Yes, retrofitting would be better, but if that's not possible, what else would you do to get converters into cars?

Also, I think GP was talking about removing a converter from a car that already had one. Literally not doing anything would be better for the environment than that.

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