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Comment by ikurei | Hacker News Reader

> Knobs in the car and on appliances.

I want knobs in my car, but I specially want no GPS tracking, no connection to the internet. My not-that-old dead-dinosaur-powered car doesn't have it, but I'd like to switch to an electric car in the next few years and I'm fearing it.

Will anyone build an electric but dumb car? I know some of the earlier electrics were dumb (in this desirable sense) but they also had significat compromises. Will it be possible to buy a privacy-respecting, good, new-ish electric car in a few years? It looks unlikely...

(I'm honestly asking, someone here will know way more than me about this)

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Well if you're in the EU then no, unless you can overturn the legislation.

> The Background: In 2019, the European Commission and the European Council jointly approved a regulation that will require new safety measures in motor vehicles starting July 2022, including the installation of so-called "Event Data Recorders," a device similar to "black boxes" in aircrafts.

From what I heard the car company has access to this device at all times and does not need a court order to listen in. They are supposed to only use it when the car has had an accident but it's a terrible precedent.

Edit: forgot the link https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/black-boxes-in-automobiles...

Thank you, I didn't know about this. I'll have a read but at first sight I wonder if this Event Recorder couldn't just work offline like an airplane's black box; would that just be super expensive?

My car recording what happens for accidents doesn't sound awful. It could even record my last 30 minutes of locations, all you would need to analyze a crash.

It recording my locations long-term, and specially sending them somewhere, sucks.

It ought to be possible to locate the cellular antenna on any car and disconnect it or wrap a Faraday cage around it. (The latter is probably a better solution because it makes it harder for the software to detect a fault. You want the software to think the car is simply in a no-cell-coverage area.)

> Will anyone build an electric but dumb car?

This is what Bollinger Motors was going to do, but then they pivoted to building platforms for commercial vehicles instead.

Essentially every modern car is deliberately optimized to fail within 10 years and requires expensive subassemblies primarily made from fragile plastic.

I'd say Apple is basically your only hope. And it remains to be seen whether Apple's car will ever ship, and if it does, it might not be available for the public to purchase.

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