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Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

> How remote does it have to be

My SO absolutely loves being able to enter a heated (winter) or cooled (summer) car for the drive home from a cafe, restaurant or similar.

Parking for these activities is seldom within direct phone range (BT/WiFi), so would have to be something else.

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Yeah, I also like the ability of third parties like Teslabout to provide dashboards of your car usage. Personally, I want "personal telemetry" in all my devices: if protocols like Solid ( https://solidproject.org ) were more well-established, they'd be a great way to have this sort of functionality without relying on the vendor to store/process all the data.

Solid still requires data to be stored somewhere thought, someone needs to host the pod -- and the chances are, it'd still be one huge vendor-owned pod.

You could say: "but I want to configure my car to upload data to a different pod" -- but this is possible today. If there were an interest, the car could ask for WebDAV / sftp / webhook address + credentials, and put telemetry there. But manufactures don't do that because there is not enough interest for this feature to justify development + support costs.

The problem is UX: if data privacy laws forced the issue, I think we could come up with a nice way to specify the pod that is accessible to non-techies.

Agreed, those are reasonable additional features. And critically, they aren't necessary for the car to function (so they could, and should, be optional).

It could be something you self host on your own server.

True. However my SO also loves not having to set up her own server in order for her to enjoy her comfortable car.

That was an extreme example. My point was more that it's technically possible to enjoy your car and have privacy. There's just no incentive for car manufacturers to not control your data. If there was user friendly was to have control of the data by running on either your own computer or have it hosted somewhere without having to think about it that would be ideal.

This could be done via ZigBee, you'd plug in a transceiver to your home local home network your phone could connect to you or access via BT. Or maybe the keyfob itself can act as a ZigBee transceiver?

I dont think zigbee covers the usecase highlighted. Consider your are at a cafe and your vehicle is parked on the street maybe 700m away.

Or alternatively that you live in an apartment complex where your vehicle does not reach your personal router.

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