Comment by bipson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bipson | Hacker News Reader

This is not limited to EVs - several "old school" manufacturers have not only put uplinks in their cars (obviously just so that the user can do fancy things remotely /s), but also introduced rental options, pay-as-you-go extras (BMW had a "pay 5k, get a few extra kW for a weekend"-thing once, don't know if it still exists).

Skoda at least (I expect all of the newer VWs, Audis, Seats, ...) use the built in mobile uplink to gather massive amounts of data about usage, e.g. how often the car is "pushed hard", or driven dangerously. Nobody knows exactly how they will use that, maybe to limit guarantees? - but if the cars is yours and yours only, this shouldn't matter, right? It shouldn't happen in the first place. Well, not anymore I guess.

The manufacturers will not limit these possibilities to a certain drive-train technology - why should they? It is also not limited to "newer companies", all of them will do it. Further, if the customer likes these models, the manufacturers (and increasingly more of them) will expand their offering.

Heck, the majority of cars on the street where I live are not legally owned anyway, they are all leased and people like that a lot.

> use the built in mobile uplink to gather massive amounts of data about usage, e.g. how often the car is "pushed hard", or driven dangerously. Nobody knows exactly how they will use that, maybe to limit guarantees? - but if the cars is yours and yours only, this shouldn't matter, right?

Why wouldn't it matter? About 10 years ago, a friend bought a brand new VW Polo and after 2000km ended up with warped brake discs. When he went to the VW dealer to have them replaced under warranty, the dealer refused, claiming that the warrant only covers stuff like engine and bodywork and not consumable parts like brake discs, and also that brake discs should not warp under normal usage, which is one of the conditions of the warranty to be valid, and since they are warped, the dealer claimed that the owner mush have been driving his car outside of the normal usage specs the car is rated for and under which the warranty applies. I guess that telemetry will help manufacturers validate or invalidate warranty claims.

Who gets to see the telemetry?

Data about how I drive my car?

Laughs in GDPR

GDPR might have some teeth if it was actually seriously enforced. That's yet to be the case.

https://www.enforcementtracker.com/

Sorry, is several million Euros in fines this year, a billion over its lifetime not toothy enough for you? They're going after big players, tiny companies, even individuals.

From personal experience, getting access to data about me is usually fast, demanding they delete it appears to work, and my own complaints to the national regulatory body have resulted in me getting my own way.

GDPR is great.

> a billion over its lifetime not toothy enough for you

> They're going after big players

Don't you see the oxymoron in here? A billion is a non-event for a single one of the big players making their money on stalking, and you're saying that a billion over its lifetime (4 years) across all companies is toothy? Come on.

> my own complaints to the national regulatory body have resulted in me getting my own way.

I'm glad it works for you, and I guess you must live in a country where the regulator isn't completely useless. In my case, in the UK with the ICO, the best I managed to get out of them is a few letters which the company promptly ignored just like they ignored my own query, and this non-resolution still required significant admin work for me (just so they don't have an excuse to close your complaint on a technicality - despite being handed evidence of a GDPR breach).

I love that I might just be able to withdraw consent on my new car, instead of fishing around in the engine block to cut the antenna. Then again, I'm probably going to anyway, for good measure.

In Massachusetts, access to this telemetry by local repair shops is required by our new right-to-repair law. Some manufactures have made a fuss, but hopefully other states follow.

> I guess that telemetry will help manufacturers validate or invalidate warranty claims.

I have a feeling this will be one of those one-sided advantages, the manufacturer will review the telemetry and only use the data if it assists them in denying a warranty claim.

> warrant only covers stuff like engine and bodywork and not consumable parts like brake discs

You could have stopped there. After this point, there's really no more to be said.

>After this point, there's really no more to be said.

Really? Because if I buy a brand new car and end up with warped brake discs after just 2000km, and the dealer refuses to fix it under warranty, I will raise hell regardless of what technicality the dealer/manufacturer will uses to justify not fixing it.

You're certainly free to do so, but at that point you're really arguing about what should and should not be covered. Wear items like brake discs and windshield wipers generally aren't.

It's a matter of proportion. One does not expect brake disks to wear after 2,000km, that's plain defective. If it were 50,000km I'd agree that's more reasonable for a wear item.

I completely get that under normal operation brake disks should not be unusable after 2,000km. My point is simply that it's not expected to be a warranty item, so don't be surprised if the dealer hides behind that.

The issue wasn't that the discs were worn down after 2000km it was that they were "warped".

Warping is generally caused not by the rotor warping/bending so much as uneven wear or brake material deposits. This most frequently happens because the system is driven beyond design limits and overheated to the point that the pad material bonds with the rotor. It is also possible that this is a factory related issue and not overheating, but presumably this would have been noted on the test drive, and not after 2,000 km of gas.

If I'm the dealer, I ask myself which is more likely: 1. that my delivery inspection mechanic and the customer failed to notice a braking system issue at the time of sale, or 2. that a customer with a new car took it out and pushed it to the limits?

Exactly, fundamentally it's a piece of cast iron, cracking and other failure modes could be attributable to defects, but warping generally means overheating of the braking system.

Brake rotors often outlive the car they're in. There's no reason not to assume this was due to faulty manufacturing. It's not normal wear and tear, nor something that "just happens" even under high performance track driving.

I've never seen and would never expect a brake rotor to outlive the car! A brake rotor is a regular wear item, you'll replace it many times over the life of a car.

That said, ruined in 2000km is ridiculous, certainly a manufacturing defect.

Warped at 2k probably means they rode the brakes down a mountain, usually a particular driving style.

> Brake rotors often outlive the car they're in....[not] something that "just happens" even under high performance track driving.

That's laughable. I have to replace rotors on a semi-regular basis. It's absolutely normal if you drive your car hard even on the street.

He might have a point though. I remember the Nissan service writer telling me that if I went somewhere other than the dealership to get my brakes done, not to let them talk me into getting new rotors without seeing the measurement. Apparently Nissan OEM rotors are fairly thick and have plenty of "margin" before they get down to the wear limit.

He turned out to be right: I only recently replaced the rotors at 150,000 miles whereas at 100,000 miles, my Saturn and Ford had already had at least one rotor replacement. Since a lot of people will get a new car before the old one hits 100k, they may think of rotors as something that never needs replacing.

OTOH: those Nissan rotors were an absolute bitch to get off by that point. I was wearing hearing protection while wailing away at them with a 5lb hammer for at least 10 minutes each before they came loose.

> Heck, the majority of cars on the street where I live are not legally owned anyway, they are all leased and people like that a lot.

It's not the cars that are becoming less car-person centric that's the root of the so-called problem. It's the people themselves that are becoming less car-centric. As we continue to have more and more people in cities (growth outside large cities is basically nil) we need cars less and less. That means ultimately that we care very little about cars. We lease them to get rid of them as soon as possible, we want the least amount of trouble versus the easiest trouble to fix, etc.

It's not the cars, it's the people.

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