Is there at least a license agreement you are showned at and have to agree to upon delivery? Can you operate those vehicules offline by choice?
https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-exec-gps-2014-1
I too wish that there would be an easy way to disconnect my car (it is of zero use to me).
In Europe, eCall (automated emergency call) has been mandatory since 2018.
I don't like this type of advice as everyday technology gets more evil. It's shifting the blame to the consumer instead of the makers of the evil, and it's nearly impossible to follow. I'm a software developer/tech nerd and couldn't tell you which cars do and don't track you, and we expect the average purchaser to know..? It's not like the window sticker will say 'hey this car tracks you', that detail will be in the middle of a 30 page dense legal speak document that almost nobody reads.
It's very similar to when a large food conglomerate does something terrible and people try to boycott. I'm completely aware of the terrible things food company x did and try to be at least somewhat informed with my purchasing, but food company x has 50 subsidiaries who have 50 subsidiaries, etc. I don't know about you but when I go shopping I don't have all day to google on my phone if the specific product I'm looking at is 4 levels down from evil company x. And I have a relatively large amount of free time in my life at the moment - it's a completely hopeless endeavor for someone with kids or other responsibilities that significantly cut down on their idle time.
If only our government would step in and you know...stop companies from getting away with evil things.
my phone can communicate without a sim card (at least with 911)... and I have no clue if my car has a sim card or if it needs one.
> don't buy a car that tracks you
For that, you probably need to buy a car that is at least 20 years old?
I do know you can drive the car while the computer is rebooting (when it's rebooting the screen is completely black and you have to gauge your speed by comparison to other cars the road), so in theory it seems you don't need the computer for basic driving, which would suggest maybe what you say is also possible, if there's a setting for it.
I haven't checked because I like the benefits of being connected — starting and stopping a charge remotely, seeing the state of charge while it's charging somewhere far away, opening / closing windows, unlocking the car, flashing lights or honking horn to locate car, preheating, and coming soon, seeing car's location on a map when it's being driven by someone else, viewing live dash cam (sentry) footage while the car is parked remotely, etc. etc.
I mean I do see your point but I've listed some of the benefits, and life is full of tradeoffs. I'm not saying that the takeoffs that work for me would ever in a million years work for you.
It would also be great if all of the above could be done through a neutral third party or through one's own server. But as a startup that was struggling at the beginning, that probably wasn't the low hanging fruit for Tesla to work on, and there are benefits for Tesla to having the connection be to Tesla. And some of those benefits accrue indirectly back to consumers through safer cars, better accountability for accidents, and better data for future self driving software.
I'm concerned these features in specific may be used by abusive spouses to track and control their partners (or extract revenge upon them). It's honestly pretty grim when you can't even use the "shared" (abuser likely would be the sole 'owner' on the title) vehicles to escape an abusive situation. Any upside of this kind of feature is very must overshadowed by the abuses enabled.
Additionally, I'm sad that if I do something stupid in a parking lot (say I fall and hurt myself) that the video can be recorded by any number of vehicles and posted to facebook/youtube/etc for yucks. Nothing can be done about it, there's no way to stop it. I hate it, though, and I hate that people are excited for these terrible slipshod "features" that won't help them as much as they hurt others.
She found out when I used it coordinate a birthday surprise at our place, I could tell when she left her office and was about 30 minutes away.
Management of driver profiles is still a work in progress for example. Some things work great and some features simply aren’t there yet. For example I have issues with music handoff between two different drivers on one family Spotify account (where each driver has their own Spotify account using their own distinct email). They could easily make it so that it knows by phone proximity which driver is in the car, and play only their music, but they haven’t gotten to this yet.
Anyway, in addition to stuff like music profile improvements, I’d expect privacy options to get better too.
The parking lot thing, I don’t see the harm really until the day when the likes of Google has a car gathering these recordings.
Thank you but no. Tesla sales are skyrocketing because people want smart car that makes their life easier, safer. Legacy car makers also trying to keep up with trend.
It's a typical misconception. You were young back in the days the car didn't have all this amazing features. Not having this features doesn't this car magical just because of your sentiments about you been young. Driving a dumb car will not make you younger either.
I'll surprise you, most of tesla owners pay extra money ($10/mo) to have a better connectivity. Not the other way around.
About a year ago I took my fancy EV on a ferry. I kept it on and ran the air conditioner because it was hot outside. Partway through the crossing I guess the suspension sensors interpreted the boat rocking as "something is seriously screwed up," and it locked the brakes and wouldn't release them when it was time to disembark. I had to sit there in my fancy EV looking like an idiot while everyone filtered around me and I took another trip across the water with cones around the car.
When I frantically called the dealership in the middle of all that, they said, "Sorry, your car has decided that it isn't safe to drive. You'll have to get it towed in so we can take a look at it. Oh, and since you're on a ferry, our roadside assistance won't help you. Good luck!" When I asked the ferry staff what I should do, they replied, "Uh, usually we just ask the owner to shift into neutral, and we push the car off." Only the car decided for me that this wasn't a possibility, and the brakes remained engaged with no way for me to disengage them.
The next thing I did after I finally got back home was research which cars I could still buy today with manual transmission and an emergency brake attached to a lever and a cable. It's not at all about holding onto my youth. It's about being the final authority over my own goddamned property.
True that I bought a brand that doesn't have a long history of EV tech. However it does indeed have a neutral button. It's just that after throwing itself into some exception state, "shifting" into it by hitting the button on the console would highlight the "N" letter as if it acknowledged my "request," but some logic in the car simply refused to actually fully execute my "request" to shift into neutral. There was no "STFU and do what I say; I don't care what your logic thinks about the situation" because the product managers and/or engineers who built it had the hubris to believe they had thought of everything and there would never be any need for that mode of operation.
If I can physically pull a manual transmission stick into the neutral position and release a brake cable, my car will roll. After my experience on the ferry, I no longer want any software logic at all being able to prevent my car from moving when I want it to move. "Just find a car brand that has better logic that you can probably rely on" isn't the solution I'm looking for. Software systems in cars are way too complicated, and there will always be corner cases. I demand a failsafe manual override. I am the one driving the vehicle, and I make the ultimate judgement call on what it does and doesn't do.
One car I found that has manual transmission and a pull-lever emergency brake is the 2021 Subaru Crosstrek. The manual transmission Crosstrek reportedly doesn't have EyeSight, and hence there's no automatic emergency braking (AEB).
https://www.subaru.ca/content/7907/media/General/download/C1...
There is no need to send everything to the manufacturer and a way to avoid that should be mandatory.
With actual possession of vehicles going down, in favor of leases (or leases-to-buy) and short term rentals/"ride-sharing", and with ever more permanent monitoring, the future seems to go into a direction where you're required to have a constantly available data connection in your car back to the car company or lease company, and they will be able to remotely disable access if you don't pay up. And they will probably consider loss of such connection as "tampering" and disable the cars until it gets online again.
Right. But there is another issue especially with vehicles... You need insurance to operate them on public road. And insurers like to monitor things now that the tech is available/becomes available...
And the current US government wants your car to monitor your "impairness" as well[0] and brick itself if it considers you impaired.
Do you mean DRM?
> For example the law that was just passed that new cars will have to come with alcohol detectors
On the one hand, this is a welcome innovation because one is free to do whatever they want as long as that doesn't endanger others and drunk driving does endanger others quite a lot. On the other, if you own your car, what's to stop you from bypassing the detector like some people would bypass the seatbelt beeping thing?
It sucks, and I hate it. But the car isn’t any additional problem.
A few.