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Comment by a_e_k | Hacker News Reader

I live in Washington State, where the state legislature recently voted to ban sales of gasoline powered cars after 2030.

Aside from the fact that I enjoy drives through some pretty empty parts of the country, especially in the Southwest, where range is a concern (e.g., I drove the Great Basin Highway a few years ago), what bothers me about that measure is this sort of data collection thing.

I wouldn't mind a move to all-electric vehicles nearly so much if it were possible to get a "dumb" electric and the range was better.

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You can't really buy a "dumb" gas car anymore either. I'm holding onto my 2011 Nissan Versa to the bitter end.

Your Versa isn't exactly dumb either. It's younger than the iPhone.

You mean older?

A 2011 Versa is younger than the iPhone which launched in 2007.

You can still buy a brand new Toyota Land Cruiser J70 in 2021. Even though it will be newer than the iPhone 12, it won't spy on you -- because it was designed in 1984.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Land_Cruiser_(J70)

Mechanical design of original platform does NOT limit the OEMs ability to install telecommunications modules and other upgraded electronic.

Unfortunately, only in Australia and parts of Africa and a few other select markets.

I've been trying to buy a new J70, but AFAICT you can't buy a new one in the EU or US, and it's practically impossible to import one either. I'd be very happy to be corrected.

The 25 year rule sucks

Same here with my '93 Saab. I replaced the smart (for its time) HVAC control system with an Arduino running software I wrote, but otherwise it's bone stock.

I'd love an electric too, but the way I figure it, continuing to use a fairly efficient vehicle that already exists is probably better for the environment than buying something new anyway. It takes a lot of resources and material to build a car.

The problem with older cars, is that safety standards have improved dramatically in that time. So while you might have a "dumb" car that isn't spying on you, in the event of an crash, you are going to be much more likely to be injured. If I had to weigh being spied on with being injured, I'd guess the odds of being injured actually impacting my life negatively as greatly higher.

I do miss my old Saab though...

"Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither," as the saying goes, and these recent years that saying has gotten quite a bit more meaningful, I think.

From now on, you only get to pull that quote out if you make literally no compromises to your freedom for the sake of security. Lock your car doors, thus making yourself less free to open them in favor of a bit of security? Run a firewall on your server, reducing your freedom to connect frictionlessly however you like in favor of that also being true of others?

Car wrecks are a safety concern not security.

That phrase originally had the opposite meaning: https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...

> It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security.

That's not the correct quote, you're missing two key modifiers. It's "essential liberty" for "temporary security"... which is not the case here.

What about when the data is collected from all the spying and used to deny your claim?

Can you share more of the Arduino HVAC setup, possibly even the code and the wiring? I married into a family of classic-Saab-lovers and am curious.

That sounds very interesting. I don't own a Saab but I'd still like to see a write-up on your project.

I haven't written anything up for it yet, but I've been thinking about a hackaday post. Ideally I'd like to integrate the other chassis electronic systems at some point too – lights, radio, ignition, pretty much everything but engine management. Then you could add support for a yubikey or something before it would start, but it already has a manual transmission to that's probably sufficient antitheft these days.

[Very relevant BlipShift t-shirt I saw today](https://www.blipshift.com/products/enable-2fa)

You can buy dumb cars, they just won't be new cars.

I don't expect that to be financially viable too long into the future. Once a significant enough portion of the general public's fleet turns over you can expect to see onerous requirements applied to older vehicles to get people at the margins to buy newer stuff (e.g. inspection programs that drive up the cost of ownership under the guise of safety, some states already have these). Insurance lobby wants people in new cars. The Karens don't like seeing old junk. The upper middle class wants everyone driving EVs for the planet's sake. The state wants to be able to track everything. None of these parties care that most of the people affected will have credit scores in the 400s and be forced to do business with predatory "buy here pay here" lots.

California is running an experiment that collects all of your location data while in a car to collect a gas tax. Of course once they have it they will make it available for any government agency.

I really, really hate this. Why not just require an annual odometer reading and multiply by vehicle weight to determine how much should be owed to cover road and transportation infrastructure costs?

Far easier than maintaining a complex system to track every drivers' location over time. Ugh.

Because the goal is as much to collect the location data as it is the tax.

No I think collecting the data is much more the actual goal and the tax is a flimsy pretext.

Because the next logical step is to allow jurisdictions (cities/counties/whatever) charge more tax on their roads.

Oh boy just wait until the ultra wealthy realize they can lobby to have a $50 per mile road tax going into their community to discourage the poors from using their parks/beaches/public areas.

This is more or less the purpose of toll roads.

A dynamic toll can be used to reduce incentive to drive on the road at certain times. It's not feasible to make a 10 mile wide road due to congestion for 2 hours during the day.

Solution? Increase the cost during those 2 hours such that fewer people choose to use the road during those hours. You can give poor people cash and they can decide if it's worth using that road during the times with higher congestion, but the problem of exceeding a road's capacity along with the inability to build infinite lane roads is separate from income/wealth gaps.

Everyone already has to pay in time and frustration to use the roads when it is congested. Slapping a monetary fee on top gives priority to the wealthy. $10/day is a lot more when you make $12/hr. When you consider the flexibility afforded to well compensated white collar workers it becomes even less fair.

The drywaller has every right to sit in stop and go traffic with the investment banker.

Yes, and that’s a distribution of wealth problem. Making both the drywalled and banker sit in traffic doesn't solve it. The banker will take a helicopter. Or leave the office early.

Congested roads have externalities such as the congestion backing up into side streets, rubber banding the congestion along the rest of the road, and extra use of brakepads/fuel energy to stop and go.

Spending time in congestion also adversely affects lower paid people because the cost of their time spent in congestion is implicit. If it was made explicit via tolls, then employers would have to pay better to get them to their workplace at peak congestion times.

I suspect being able to assign infrastructure money to the correct county public works departments is a thing. And even on the more simple sense, your odometer read would let California tax people for miles they drove outside of California.

Not that I support this initiative at all, but your suggestion misses some key issues.

Assuming the tax rate was flat, regardless of the road, usage could be found as it is now, with road sensors and cameras. If they want to have different rates for different roads, then that could make sense.

Just because its convenient doesn't mean I want that. I want less tracking. At least let people opt in to reporting their mileage and paying an annual tax instead of even more tracking.

The usual explanation is that they want to tax only in-state travel, so they need the location data.

That seems like something that one ought to be allowed to opt out of in favor of an odometer reading; I do something like 99% of my driving in my home state, and would rather just go with an annual odometer reading and maybe slightly overpay on my road taxes than have a tracking device in my car.

do you have more information on this? what's it called? this one? http://caroadcharge.com/

you have a link to that claim? all i've seen have been for electric vehicles and a mileage at the end of the year on your taxes.

Why not just tax gas? It’s the perfect solution. The more you drive, the more you pay. The more polluting your car, the more you pay. Long term it seems inevitable that tax will need to move onto the electricity used to charge cars.

Yes, the fuel tax is far more perfect if the goal is to tax road usage and pollution but the state worried about future $$ and taxing gas is not future proof in the face of EVs. They want shovel read infrastructure to tax the people with money (the middle and upper middle class) and those people look like they're gonna buy EVs.

I'd like to think it's because EV proliferation makes the gas tax too regressive but I'm not that good at lying to myself.

The problem is this is liable to at minimum leak your entire social graph and all data that can be derived from same. The vastly more logical thing to do would be to abolish the gas tax and increase taxes either on vehicles or on income.

The second best solution if you must tax miles driven is to mandate new cars include short range Bluetooth readable odometers and let users electronically submit this data to oem. While we are at it car electronics should be mandated to be able to perform this task without giving your contact data to the fuckin car.

The legislature voted to set a _goal_:

> ... a goal is established for the state that all publicly owned and privately owned passenger and light duty vehicles of model year 2030 or later that are sold, purchased, or registered in Washington state be electric vehicles.

http://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2021-22/Pdf/Amendment...

We should get a WA state law passed controlling information access for cars. I'm sure it will be really hard with all the usual suspects against it. Most recent cars have a privacy policy and have some part of opt out. But it's unclear what you really get. A customer friendly law would be something like you can opt out and have your private tracking info deleted whenever you want. We should have a law against phone company tracking too. A year later and they have no reason to know what cell towers I was at, unless they are selling tracking on people. You've always paid the bill in a couple of months at most anyway.

I was surprised that WA did this, so I went to check if what you said was true, turns out, they actually didn't ban non-electric vehicle sales in 2030.

The actual bill: https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2021-22/Pdf/Amendmen...

On page 12:

line 36 & 37: Nothing in this section: a) Authorizes any state agency to restrict the purchase, sale, or registration of vehicles that are not electric vehicles;

and the actual quote around 2030(starting @ line 16):

"... then a goal is established for the state that all publicly owned and privately owned passenger and light duty vehicles of model year 2030 or later that are sold, purchased, or registered in Washington state be electric vehicles."

By 2030 gasoline cars are going to be just as equipped to violate your privacy as electrical cars. Many of them already are.

That's from 2014: "Ford Exec: 'We Know Everyone Who Breaks The Law' Thanks To Our GPS In Your Car" https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-exec-gps-2014-1

I guess it's only sales of new cars? Otherwise I can't imagine the classic car community is going to be happy about that...

And laws like that will just make even older vehicles more desirable.

There's already a classic car exception from a lot of road rules, there's a special numberplate for them.

Those rules are radically different depending on state or country (dunno if non-US countries mess with automotive rules depending on region).

Yes, I mean in WA.

It's just a target [1], and isn't even set as a target until some other tax stuff changes. See section 6 of [2] to really see that nothing is banned.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/washington-state-passes-bil...

[2] http://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2021-22/Pdf/Amendment...

Get a plug in hybrid.

Think about how much the iPhone improved over 9 years of sales from the original in 2007 to whatever model they had in 2016.

Given how many manufacturers are jumping on the electric bandwagon, the extremely fast decline in the cost of batteries, the rate of progress to date AND these kinds of laws to give some good motivation, I think it's very safe to say the electric vehicles on sale 9 years from now (2030) will be vastly superior to today's offerings.

>on sale 9 years from now (2030) will be vastly superior to today's offerings

I hope you are right. Discounting the environmental and societal impact of mining the materials needed for these advancements and the electrical generation, my concern is selfish. We drive for vacations and sometimes push 12 hours a day. A quick fill up of gas in the minivan seems better than an hour or two of charging.

Others have mentioned hybirds alleviate the long distance concern. There are minivan and larger vehicles already using hybird technology, so it should work out. It is such a wild change to think about.

The environmental and societal impact of EVs are largely localized. The impacts of internal combustion engines have been almost entirely externalized. While EVs will still have some negative impacts, it's a huge improvement over the status quo.

And, aside from the range like the GP said, will still be fully tracking all usage. Why does the car manufacturer get to see and sell my location information?

Aren't electric vehicles a lot simpler conceptually? No engine, no transmission, etc. Maybe someone could start a company that made the equivalent of a battery with wheels for very cheap.

I'd buy one

> Maybe someone could start a company that made the equivalent of a battery with wheels for very cheap.

Those cars exist in India and China, but for some reason Americans don't want to buy them. It could be that outside of the techie bubble, nobody cares very much about this problem, and within the techie bubble, most people stop caring the moment that they can be the first person on their street to own a Tesla.

Yes, it's probably true, the iPhone of 9 years ago probably collected a lot less information, and the cars of 9 years from now will also collect a lot more.

However, less on the original point and more on yours, the iPhone of 9 years ago didn't have that much worse of a battery than today. Batteries have technically been progressing, but it's slow.

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