High-Tech Cars Might Be More Trouble Than They’re Worth

Which were the four good brands? Also, could this be regulated at the state level?

How does a car figure out your sexual behaviour? Does it ask you?

The following paragraph clarifies: " “Kia does not and has never collected ‘sex life or sexual orientation’ information from vehicles or consumers in the context of providing the Kia Connect Services,” says Kia spokesperson James Bell. He adds that the brand includes the category in its privacy policy to define “sensitive personal information” under the California Consumer Privacy Act. "

It's not as bad as it sounds. It seems just like legalese making things sound more dire than they are.

None of this has anything to do with EVs in particular. All of this stuff is on ICE cars too.

I'm most curious about range anxiety, because I really feel like we're at the point where the vast majority of people's driving habits will fall into one of three categories:

1. Your driving habits make most/all EVs so clearly nonviable that you would never even consider an EV. If you're driving 400 miles a day in freezing temperatures far from any charging infrastructure, of course you're not getting an EV any time soon. 2. You don't drive that much every day, but you can't regularly charge at home or work, so you're not going to consider an EV. 3. Your driving habits are much closer to the average person, and with an EV you'd just charge at home or work a few times per week and never think about range.

The situations where you'd ever experience range anxiety seem pretty narrow to me. It would basically only happen if you were in category 3 but needed to do a rare long road trip in an area without charging infrastructure.

I don't think we are ever going back...Manufacturers have seen what they can get away with

My other daily driver is one of the last models of <brand> that doesn’t include any consumer computers. There’s a generic computer under the hood for engine management, but the UX is all beautiful vacuum fluorescent numbers that can de dialled down all at once.

I recently test drove a car with four displays that seems to be sourced from different manufacturers - there was no consistency of UX. I told the salesman that I wasn’t interested in purchasing a 2 ton appliance that was unlikely to receive patching beyond 5 years.

I fear we'll never get these, not even for ICE cars.

Yeah, the least bad EV as far as I can tell is a Bolt EUV. But I think what I really want is an EV that looks like a regular car. I don't want something that looks like a space ship and has big screens inside it.

While not spot on, have a look at the smart fortwo or smart forfour, IF you don’t need a lot of range.

It’s the perfect electric city car, and it’s basically “analog” from a UX perspective.

I have a 2017 Ford Focus without a 4G cell connection (came with 3G, which is no longer supported) - no tracking.

It works fine - has physical dials/switches for most things, it does have a screen for backup camera and CarPlay and the like. It doesn't have parking assist or any sort of lane keeping or autopilot. Seats 5, but not a lot of trunk space.

Only issue is it has a 110mi range which is fine for my commute or going short distances out of town.

If you want something like this find an older EV, and disconnect the cell modem.

You’ll be waiting a long time.

The manufacturers are acting as a surveillance cartel. If they all spy on you there’s no way to opt out without a change in privacy legislation.

I’d rather pay them, as long as they keep the data secured and aren’t selling it.

Maybe incompetence and thinking these trends are good go together.

C'mon, get real. How can you drive a vehicle without a huge screen blocking your view? That you have to take your eyes off the road to actually read, or to change the volume?

I've got a 62 fairlane that's easier to work on than my lawnmower so I hear what you're saying. Some of the complexity under a modern hood is necessary to hit fuel efficiency and emissions requirements, but the rest of it is unnecessary bullshit. I've kept up with new car developments mostly due to annual trips that involve renting a car for a week. On my last trip I got handed a new forrester and between the center console display, blinky shit on the dash and rearviews, and the lane assist feature consistently freaking out whenever it encountered a seam in the pavement I've never had a harder time keeping focus and control over the vehicle I was driving. First thing I did the morning after I picked the car up was spend 45 minutes grovelling through every settings menu the car had looking for shit I could turn off.

The only real caveat is that if you and your friend get in a head-on collision on the highway one of you is probably going to come out of it a lot better.

Yep. For my part, I simply cannot imagine buying a relatively modern car for a whole bunch of reasons, including this. I don't want a smartphone on wheels. I want a car.

That's awesome! I just lost my old 2012 Jeep Grand Cherokee when it decided to blow its engine at 107K miles. I'm told it had something to do with the variable valve timing system they put in, then I found out that this is not an uncommon problem such that some people pay 1000s of dollars to remove this feature from their engine. Replacing the engine would have cost me 14k. I had no idea, but I long for a car that isn't essentially disposable after 10 years. I really wish they made a car like that these days.

Europe is in an effort to forbid those vehicles circulation.

New cars are unwantable, old cars are progressively banned.

That was my general opinion on 1990s cars in the 1990s when my car was a 1972 VW beetle. I had the shop manual, and most things that didn't need a lift for I could do myself.

Now I’ve got a full-time job, own a house, and have a spouse and children and even if I could have something as simple to work on as a ’72 Beetle, I wouldn't want to spend my time doing the work on it. And I like modern features like lane assist and radar cruise control and blindspot sensors that you can't get via a phone (and I prefer integrating a phone via Android Auto rather than using the actual phone for the UI rather than just the brains of the functions it does power.)

Yeah, modern cars or more expensive than an old car, and, yes, it costs more cash to pay someone to maintain it than to maintain an older car yourself, but cash costs aren't the only costs, opportunity costs are a thing.

I have a 1995 F-350 Power Stroke that I will probably be buried in. There is very little in that truck I can't fix or change.

Slightly newer but also have a basic 2012 F-150 5.0 that is probably the easiest thing I've ever owned to work on that i daily drive.

Having worked on some of the newer Ecoboost's so many damn tubes and wiring everywhere.

Are there any new cars that buck this trend? I've been buying used 00s vehicles for a while but a day will come when I won't be able to use that approach to buy simplicity with reliability and cost effectiveness.

I actually had the following (mental) debate about a decade ago:

> Given that we can see that cars are going to send more and more data about me to manufacturers, and that this will get worse with every new generation of car that comes out, I should only buy used cars from the 90s that don't do this. On the other hand, eventually cars from this era will become too old to be practical, even with maintenance and repair. This may be in twenty years, or fifty years, but eventually I'll no longer be able to keep a 1996 Toyota pickup on the road. At that point, I will have to buy a newer vehicle. At that point, I'll either buy a brand new vehicle, and I will probably freak out and panic at the amount of garbage they've packed into it by then. Or, I could buy a succession of newer used vehicles, each more packed with electronic garbage than the last one, and I will have merely delayed the encroachment on my privacy and driving experience by a couple decades, not prevented it. So, really, it's going to happen one way or the other, and maybe it's better to just be the frog who is slowly boiled rather than have it happen all at once. I guess I'll just buy newer cars as needed, like everybody else, and just be slightly less happy about it each time.

This is not a commentary on your decision, this is just a glimpse into my (tortured, possibly idiotic) thought process.

The 90s were the inflection point where "tech" and necessity intersected for many brands. We finally got mature and minimalist EFI+emissions controls, cars with vacuum lines numbering in the single digits, delivering relatively great all-round performance.

Once you start seeing drive-by-wire / brake-by-wire / "on-star" systems appearing it's pretty much all downhill. They just couldn't leave well enough alone.

What we needed was automation for carburetors mostly to run the catalytic convertors without self-destructing. Once we got that it's mostly solutions looking for problems (and revenue streams).

What I want from EVs is an electrified version of that 90s-era simplicity with the modicum of necessary automation (in EVs that's probably all thermal/(dis)charge rate management and battery balancing). Just replace the ICE/ECU/tank with a motor+ESC+battery and leave out the touchscreens and driver deprecation+surveillance trash.

I feel like there must be a business opportunity to produce EVs in this vein. What's the affordable Driver's Car EV brand? Are we all just waiting for Mazda to deliver an EV Miata? I can't be alone here.

It's straightforward to do all the regular maintenance on an EV yourself, mostly because there is so much less of it to do. And the core drivetrain is extremely simple and robust.

But like every other vehicle we've had in our pothole ridden city, the weakness is the suspension.

Maybe they ran fine, but they also spewed pollution everywhere and guzzled fuel like crazy. My reasonably modern family car does 55 US MPG. Cars 50 years ago weren’t just “simple”, they were in many ways PRIMITIVE.