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Comment by hkopr | Hacker News Reader

This is good from an environmental perspective, if (and that is a big if) the electricity is generated from clean sources.

The societal implications are worrisome. Electric vehicles tend to track and surveil their "owners", fast charging is centralized and can be tracked as well.

We have seen how far dystopian regimes like Trudeau's are willing to go. Instead of freezing the bank accounts using enabling laws, he could also shut off the grid or exclude specific vehicles. Mandatory kill switches for vehicles will come in handy as well.

I'm sure the army and police armored vehicles for population suppression will still have combustion engines.

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All vehicles, no matter how old, or what form of propulsion, are tracked via the ANPR systems which have been built over the last three decades.

This is certainly true in Europe, though I understand that those networks aren't as mature in the USA yet (anecdotal, and I could be very wrong about that).

I've yet to hear about any vehicles with 'kill switches'. Is there any evidence of this, or is it just a possibility?

A reality since at least 2009: OnStar remotely disabled the gas pedal... https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/10/onstar-g...

It's even good from an environmental perspective if electricity is not all low emissions. In fact, even with the current energy mix in germany, with a large portion of coal.

ICEs are very inefficient at converting gas to movement, so the per-km emissions almost always favor EVs, independent of power generation. So if the manufacturing gets greener (which will hopefully be sufficiently the case by then), it doesn't matter.

I've not heard of Canada having a dystopian regime, can you elaborate what you mean by that?

OP is likely referring to the current government using emergency powers to order banks to freeze the accounts of protestors. The government has also (re-) introduced legislation to require platforms to regulate social media posts, as well as taken several other positions the perceived wisdom of which depends greatly on one's politics.

I don't know what things are like in the US or Canada but I'm a privacy-conscious European EV owner and realistically don't feel that I've been forced to make any compromises.

The car's connected features like remote unlocking are completely optional and easy to live without.

Fast charging data, as far as I can tell, are only centralized within my payment provider, similar to how it would be if I were to use a debit/credit card to buy fuel.

I trust the EU and my country's government not to introduce dystopian measures like mandatory kill switches.

What you say about electric cars is also true for new fossil cars.

Older ones too. If anything, newer cars are getting more secure in this, because if laws like GDPR. Many cars don't even really wipe data when you do a 'factory reset'. They just don't show it anymore, but if you get to the source data, you can still see it. Think about that next time you sell your car.

You have to fight again and again to enforce GDPR. GDPR certainly did not make ISPs more honest. In fact, Vodafone (in Europe) has just announced that they will track all connections, assign each customer a supercookie (on their side) and sell out the paying customer to advertisers.

I don't think this would have happened in Europe in 2005.

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