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Comment by lwhalen | Hacker News Reader

Is there a way to disable all the Tesla telemetry, even if it means reduced functionality? I'd love a Model X, but I refuse to own a car that tracks my location and reports it back to the mothership. I'm so serious about this, I've disabled my BMW cell subscription (and cut the cable to the cell modem).

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All cars nowadays appears to have this[0] and I wish that a law would force manufacturers to provide instructions for disabling internet connectivity and all telemetry or meta data collection.

0. https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-exec-gps-2014-1 (comment from 2014)

BMW dealership did it for me after I signed a standard form that, yes, this is what I wanted. A friendly chat with the master mechanic gave me the rough location of the cell box (easy to get to in a convertible) and a 'wink wink nudge nudge' understanding that, while cutting that cable is absolutely not recommended, the car wouldn't spontaneously explode if it somehow became accidentally disconnected.

BMWs have always (since CAN introduction in 99 at least) had the nice ability to silently disable modules that are no longer in communication with the rest of the bus.

Most other luxury cars will throw a million lights and warnings on the dash for a missing module, and the warnings must be coded out with specialty software.

BMWs tend to only throw a lot of lights when there is a specific module error, or the module acting up is vital to powertrain operation.

This also has the unintended consequence that nearly every light you end up seeing on a BMW will be a costly repair rather than just some nuisance error message.

This feature is a godsend when making a BMW based race-car and ripping out miles of wire.

Agreed, but what about bug fixes? I also wonder if it would impact the warranty. Would they argue issues can be identified prior to equipment failure?

You can opt out. They give the usual unspecified things may not work right. I've read about people doing this. You lose updated maps, and they actually have a ton of great things they've added since it started. Some people always connect to wifi hotspot from their phones when driving around.

If you opt out of the data collection, I don't know if the 3g modem will still be active. There are people who have turned it off. The tesla is one car that actually has a ton of useful software apps (even though they never realized the promise of their own app store, they have useful things).

I love the homemade mapping and traffic site that combines maps, weather, waze updates and many other things at https://teslawaze.azurewebsites.net/.

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