Cars are a 'privacy nightmare on wheels'
theconversation.com
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/porsche-rolls-out-board-approve...
And they all do, even their EV. I voted with my wallet.
The most range-anxious person I ever saw was a tesla driver at a rest stop. A traffic accident had put us on a 150km detour though a different mountain valley, one without cellphone connectivity. He was at the first rest stop trying to figure out whether to push on or attempt to turn around and go home. He didn't have the range to go back, and couldn't figure out of there were any chargers 115km forwards at the next town. No cellphone coverage had turned him into a seething ball of indecision.
Doesn’t really seem like a seismic shift in paradigm to be honest. Certainly not to justify a different level of range anxiety than a gas car running a bit low.
With a 60 kw battery that is about 2% of the battery per minute. Or 1.2kw/minute and I get 3.7 mi/km, so about 4.3 miles of range a minute.
I'm assuming regen is designed to be used for short periods when slowing down, I wonder how long it can be used continuously.
Also, what would be the requirements for the towing vehicle? 70 kW of extra load is no joke, and car engines are generally not designed to handle heavy loads for extended periods of time.
Some vehicles could maybe handle towing an extra 70kw (~100hp). You could always use a lesser regen level more suitable to the towing vehicle too.
It really does, at least for those not living in big cities. It isn't even really about the range. It is about the limited availability of charging infrastructure, and I don't mean charge points. I mean that any gas-powered car can be "recharged" at the roadside. Someone can give you some gas. That isn't a thing for electric cars.
If a town must evacuate, a thing that does happen, you will want the ICEs vehicles that can be refueled quickly and easily in less-than-ideal conditions. A few years ago Fort McMurray Canada had to evacuate ahead of a wildfire. 80,000 people on the road in maybe 30,000 vehicles. The nearest town was over a hundred miles away, the nearest safe place maybe a hundred more. There were trucks handing out gas/diesel along the evac route to keep people moving. Such an impromptu evacuation would not have been possible using EVs. Evac situations also tend to coincide with loss of grid power (fires/hurricanes/flooding) which only further complicates the problem. Lots of people in small towns keep extra gas at home, or at least know how to syphon gas quickly between vehicles. EVs cannot do such tings.
This is, in fact, precisely backward. A fully charged EV will stomp all over a fully gassed ICE in a stop and go evacuation situation.
EVs don't have to idle. So, unlike older combustion engines, they don't use energy unless moving, and they recover most of the same energy when braking. At very low speeds, EVs stomp all over combustion engines. You don't need to refuel people because the EV isn't running out of gas from idling in stopped traffic.
More modern combustion engines turn themselves off. But, even that has its limits as you can't recover the start stop energy like an EV can.
>> It is about the limited availability of charging infrastructure
You begin most days at home, do you need more than the charging infra? You start each day with the ability to drive 2-4 hours. Are you planning to spend more time driving most days?
An EV sat at home has 80% range. You don’t leave them fully charged usually, for the sake of battery longevity but you absolutely want any excess solar in your remote property being added to your EV rather than sent back to the grid.
That may be more range than the gas car sat next to it on an idle Tuesday when an emergency hits. Who keeps a gas car fully topped up at all times?
With an ev in a remote location, you start every day with 80%. That gas car you meant to fill up when you were next in town? Good luck because:
>> Evac situations also tend to coincide with loss of grid power (fires/hurricanes/flooding)
This means the gas pumps are off. They use electricity, plus the staff are evacuating anyway.
Need to cross a now flooded road? You might have to hitch a ride across in an EV, your gas cars intake might be too low and end up with the engine hydro-locked.
> Are you planning to spend more time driving most days?
Where I live in a sparse rural area, if you take a vehicle out it is very likely to be for a minimum of four hours, distances are large and any vehicles are work horses, if they're not travelling they're putting in an 8 hour shift (minimum).
> Who keeps a gas car fully topped up at all times?
We do, and most of our neighbours do, in our case this goes to my father who was born in 1935 and still keeps things "ready to go", be it cars, tools, spare generators, etc.
The vehicles are filled and there are spare jerry cans, full, in the sheds.
Our neighbours are ready to fight fires on five minutes notice, they've got tenders topped with fuel and water and all times, etc.
> This means the gas pumps are off. They use electricity,
What the literal F? - Sure they have electric motors but they (the local ones here at least) have attachable hand cranks not to mention the servo has a "generator" that provides "electricity" when the main grid is down.
> Need to cross a now flooded road? ... your gas cars intake might be too low
Say what? I cannot recall the last time I saw a 4x4 without a snorkel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC5ld79joIA
I'm guessing you're city born and bred?
A tow truck by contrast will cost you $100 to get you to a gas station. Tow trucks are great services if the problem is more than out of gas (and some of them will bring gas for less, but you still pay for the service), but there are not what most people use when out of gas.
Name one. Name one notable person here on HN who wants to "end individual car ownership". Not to offer an alternative for people who don't need to own a car all day every day, but to end it.
That said, I think a lot of non tech savvy people associate the two. My dad dislikes EVs for many reasons Fox News tells him to, but one of them is "self driving cars are never going to be safe or practical". He doesn't get that EVs can exist separate from Tesla self driving shenanigans, or that ICE vehicles are trying to do the same thing.
Crash test: https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/dacia/spring/44197
It's 3.70 meters long, definitely not an SUV. It's not only the smallest EV (the Volkswagen e-UP is unobtainable at least in Italy) but one of the smallest cars in general.
https://www.largus.fr/actualite-automobile/dacia-spring-pres...
Giant colorful "econometer" that screams like "some manager wanted to put an ad to remind you how efficient the car is" that has questionable usability, especially compared to its size. And right-hand side displays a red-colored last block even when the tank is not empty, messing up color coding. It would've made more sense to apply colors where they matter, like on the speedometer when you're going too fast, or when the car is in reverse.
Why can't most car vendors hire someone with a brain for a UI designer?
* https://driving.ca/auto-news/news/new-cars-in-europe-could-s...
It is of no interest for a company to just sell you a thing for cheap, not extract some sort of rent from it and for you to not replace it constantly.
In theory a revenue model based on subscription fees is also more aligned with the preservation of the environment and providing the end-user long term quality components, as to extract said rent smoothly and for as long as possible.
That of course assuming those subscriptions cover actual vehicle maintenance (somewhat like Managed Services Provider do for, say, printers), why not? Transportation-as-a-Service seems a very reasonable X-as-a-Service model .
sudo ifconfig eth1 downIf you ever have an opportunity to attend a training/info seminar put on by legal, I promise you it is way more interesting than it sounds on the face of it.
It always depends on how much money is at stake. Usually a lot, when it is about setting a precedent.
And with how traceable cars are, the idea that it has to do the data sending for you is a bit outdated. If it was ever accurate.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a bit concerned about internet connected cars, too. But privacy seems a weak angle there. I'm much more concerned with safety than I am privacy. I fully expect that with all of the license scanners that exist today, if the government wanted to track my movements, that ship sailed a long time ago. I'm not convinced that having the ability to connect to my car from remote is at all safe. Especially to the control facilities.
Vehicles having GPS, compass, cell service, bluetooth, and WiFi just makes that tracking trivial. All that's currently missing is the internet connectivity to upload the data in real time instead of the data being pulled at maintenance. Many manufactures also do have background data upload over cell service, even if they don't expose internet features to the vehicle owner.
And, again, I also know it is pretty trivial to recreate exact routes from relatively low powered phones and watches. Because I do that on the regular for cycling and such. I haven't seen a ton of articles worried about the privacy nightmare of smart watches, though? (Mayhap I've just missed them?)
Those are also things that are also usually logged, those are things most people probably don't want to be continuously uploaded and recklessly exposed.
And your phone is much more directly linked to you. And can probably track you through buildings quite easily. Worse, probably makes you trackable to anyone that wants to, for example, watch for your phone's bluetooth id to pass by.
To be clear, the cameras around the car, I think, is mostly a good thing to consider in more depth. Though, again, I'm not too clear on what makes these unique for being on the car. If someone was to stick a camera next to their mailbox, I'd expect they would also be limited in what they are allowed to do with the images they capture.
Again, though, if you are at all worried about your privacy of data collection, watches and phones are far more of a concern than your car.
Just to explore the idea some more, how much of what can be learned about you from the car, cannot be learned about you from looking at cell tower logs about where your phone has been? Heck, for most of us, looking at where you have scanned your credit card is already more than enough to construct when and where you traveled throughout the day. The wifi history of your phone is probably good enough, as well.
With phones and fixed cameras, people have to make a deliberate choice to point them at something of interest. If your neighbor decided to mount a camera that always looked into your bedroom window or yard, you probably won't be very happy about it, but you also know they had to deliberately do it and likely know the area they're monitoring.
Now with phone cameras, it's more likely than not that it's not looking at anything interesting most of the time, since it'd be lying flat on a surface or in a pocket/bag.
Car cameras are specifically designed to be very good at detecting people, since their primary purpose tends to be pedestrian avoidance. They also tend to not be obfuscated and have great vantage points. That makes them very likely to see something interesting, with very strong signal for how interesting it is. And the intention of the vehicle owner doesn't have to be aligned with the manufacturer.
Let's say you're a complete luddite with no power, phone, car, or internet of any kind. If I were, say Tesla and you were in a major metro areas, I could probably still construct a pretty through understanding of you or your home just from various Teslas driving or parked in your area. We can even go full facial or body recognition and figure out where you are from your appearances on their vehicles. How distinguishable are you from video+sonar+radar identification? How feasible is it to hide from sight from every car?
It's like how Facebook or Google can create a profile and understanding of what you do, without you ever touching any of its services, because it's practically impossible to use the internet without touching a service that'll feed information to them, or stopping everyone who knows something about you from disclosing that information to them.
And, really, if you want to know what someone's house is like on the interior, you can probably just look it up at the local planning office. Often for free. And this isn't even getting into the people that have vacuums that map out the place on a somewhat regular basis...
Look, I get it that this is yet another vector for information. I just can't bring myself to think it is a meaningfully worse one than any others. If you view it as "cars are another item on the nightmare that is modern privacy", I fully agree. Thinking they are somehow more capable of surveillance than basically every other one that has proliferated in recent years feels off.
Porsche's classic division is really setting the standards for supporting older cars. They realize over time it'll become an increasingly relevant portion of their business and just increase revenue. You can even send a car out to Germany and they'll fully restore it (at quite a price). The big thing though is they simply produce parts for their older cars.
Mercedes-Benz is also pretty up there for supporting their classic cars. Aston Martin also increasingly building out their support for their cars. Ferrari and Lamborghini starting to get more into the game, but for those brands it very much remains going to a big few shows in the EU to round up parts at times. Toyota, Nissan, Ford, Chevrolet also have some levels of support.
I don't think there'll ever be a need to 3d print shock absorbers or bearings, since those tend to be commodity wear parts and there will probably always be compatible modern variants (or if you look at some parts guides, many current cars still use the exact same basic parts from several decades ago).
Engine blocks and major large internals like conrods or more commonly needed transmission internals are the parts I think will be most difficult to keep stocked.
No good enough, unless the hardware is not installed.
I feel like $25k+ is paying for something. Stop it you jerks.
2015+ "You are the product, doesn't matter if you pay for it or not"
One hope is that the cheap EV cars from China won't have this bloatware.
Not paying means you are the product, but paying does not mean you are not the product.
It the same way, cheap stuff is crap, but it doesn't mean that expensive stuff is not crap.
Annoying, I know.
Also if someone has evidence that they do in fact collect data then I am happy to update my comment.
That being said, I have no clue what their plan is with tracking. They have knobs for everything because someone sufficiently high up in the organization hates touch screens as much as I do. They aren't particularly technology averse.
Unfortunately this has also led to slow advancement in their EV efforts. I would love nothing more than an all electric Mazda 3: The first car I owned and will always have fond memories for. Instead I am forced to consider Tesla and play russian roulette with their mediocre build quality and whatever nonsense Elon comes up with (touchscreen gear shifter, stupid steering wheel etc.).
I'm in the market for a new car (preferably an EV) so i've been reading up on their EV efforts. It seems like their current plan is to lower their entire fleet average to meet government requirements in the short term while partnering up with Toyota to cross develop an EV powertrain. This resulted in them dropping their pickup truck, improving avg fuel economy across the lineup with better engines and then slowly introducing hybrids and then finally convert everything to EV. That MX-30 EV was super cool and I wish they had put more effort into it but it seems like that model ended up not working. Looking forward to seeing how the new version with the small rotary range extender works!
Their plan seems to be to let the bigger wealthier players figure it out first, because the bigger players have to because of regulatory pressure, and in the meantime they're encouraged by Toyota to work on their passion projects.
They collect significantly more environmental/operational data than other manufactures because they need it for their engine and stability systems to run well. With their move upmarket, they tend to be better equipped and come standard with a lot more remote connectivity features as well; they practically know where every vehicle is and what it's doing in near real time, even if you don't pay for the subscription for them to tell you.
I know what happens when you buy into closed, adversarial technology for convenience.
Fool me in virtually every corporate interaction over a period spanning decades, shame on me...
So it was sort of a cancer, but it was more of a symbiotic relationship
That was the paid service. If you didn't pay, you were still tracked and your motor could still be shut down. So if you paid, you got tracking++. If you didn't pay, you just got tracking.
For whatever reason the dialog disappears on its own without touching "I agree" once you start driving though.
I recall deciding to buy this car because the new model year was coming out soon and the touchscreen controls were even worse.
This is exactly what Mr. Garrison’s “It” sorely needed.
* Privacy Nightmare on Wheels’: Every Car Brand Reviewed by Mozilla: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37443644
* Internet-connected cars fail privacy and security tests conducted by Mozilla: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37404413
> The very worst offender is Nissan. The Japanese car manufacturer admits in their privacy policy to collecting a wide range of information, including sexual activity, health diagnosis data, and genetic data — but doesn’t specify how.
What I don't get is at what point are you asked to agree to this stuff. Before you make a deposit? Before the sale is "closed"? What happens if you buy a used car from a private seller, when are you presented with the privacy policy/agreement?
Specifically, phones can almost certainly record all of the stuff we are talking about here, too. Security cameras around shopping places probably record and keep it on file for a time. Your ISP can probably tell more about you than you'd care to know about. Your credit cards can see your purchase histories.
What is it that makes cars particularly worse?
The other issue is that a remote exploit of a moving car is potentially much more dangerous than remote exploit of a phone. Worst case with a phone is a massive breach of personal data. Worst case with a car is death.
But my point was more for "privacy" reasons. I confess many of the cars with cameras on them probably are worth a bit more looking at specifically. I'd be fine with a "not really allowed to record" things from the outside cameras. Dashcams would need a carve out, I suppose? (And really, any sensor reading that can go to a "blackbox" device is probably ok? That said, physical access is probably best required for those.)
I fully agree on the concerns of exploits. Remote control of a car is where my main worry of these would be. Exploits of your phone are probably already pretty scary with passkeys and other similar things growing in use.
Edit: It is unfortunate that the iOS Control Center toggles for WiFi/Bluetooth no longer turn the radios off but just prevent "association". AFAIK you can still turn these radios off in "Settings", but it's pretty misleading UI.
Not that there aren't some problems here, of course. My point was more amusement that I doubt I could tell you exactly what "airplane mode" actually does, now.
On topic for this article, my question is what makes cars more of a privacy nightmare than the phones and basically every other connection that we have? Note that I'm not trying to say there is no nightmare, per se. I just don't know that I buy the car being a prime mover on that.
Now, I will gladly bold and underline the security/safety concerns in cars getting connected. That, I 100% agree with.
Airplane mode is one of those things that sticks around because people think it's important and they expect it. It doesn't really help airplanes, it's more of a general "disable radios" mode now.
Typically airplane mode does turn off all radios in your device, but modern devices allow you to turn WiFi or Bluetooth back on while keeping the cell radio turned off.
I think the reasoning here is that while in a plane, your phone will try really hard to find a cell tower to connect to. The output power of the radio will get turned up to max, which ends up being a lot more RF power being sent out than your WiFi or Bluetooth radio puts out. Hypothetically this can interfere with safety-critical electronics in the plane, but in reality those systems are incredibly robust and very well shielded.
(Edit) Actually, come to think of it the lack of reasonable solutions is a lot of the difference. I can use cash or a vpn, but I still have to drive to get places.
Information about people is something i think deserves a lot of legislation. And I'd expect it to be very cross cutting. I see very little advantage of special casing cars/phones/whatever.
To that end, I can fully get behind efforts to protect how information about people is used and stored. I don't know why "in cars" is particularly important to that discussion. Outside of the fact that cars need to be added to the same list of sources that other items are on.
So, yeah, outside of my not seeing cars as a nightmare, we probably fully agree. I don't know what makes the car a nightmare moreso than most anything else out there.
But I think we've now crossed a threshold where most of society agrees with continuous monitoring of some things for safety reasons. Cars are probably the most technologically advanced, potentially dangerous, and socially disruptive thing most people buy.
If cars were invented today the regulations would be far more onerous and intrusive than the regulatory system we got from before computers existed. Safety regulators in the US are already evaluating next-gen regulations to require a car to disable if alcoholic breath is detected, regardless of driver overrides.
For better or worse, we're on a one-way ratchet with this stuff.
Make sure you leave your cell phone at home if you are concerned about tracking though.
What you would need to disable would be Bluetooth, cellular (e.g. OnStar), and potentially TPMS.
Curious about this. What else does this do besides measure the pressure of your tires? Or could the system transmit some other info?
The idea that I have to allow myself to be compromised or ignore that compromise because there's some other _partially_ equivalent identifier is not justified.
Do those work on the move? (Outside of automatic tolls.) At least for parked applications you can use a license plate flipper.
To me this seems more like just one piece of a more meta issue that is arguably turning in to a multi-headed monster for the average citizen to contend with going forward. I’ve also seen no evidence of effective, concrete, and widespread clarity, reform, or help coming from anywhere. I hope I’m horribly wrong.
These features, and others, are features I never wanted. I really do want a simple mechanical car. It is possible to get this as an antique...
I'm sure there would be some demand for such a car, but if the customer is king, as we are told, went do we not get any cards like this at all?