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Comment by kenmacd | Hacker News Reader

You're also trading some amount of risk due to not having newer safety features. For example electronic stability control has been shown by study after study to reduce accidents. With your manual brakes there's simply no way to apply the brake to one wheel only to pull a vehicle out of a skid.

Example study: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15389588.2014.9...

> In line with previous results, this study concludes that ESC reduces the risk for single-vehicle injury accidents by 31% when controlling for various confounding factors related to the driver, the car, and the accident surroundings.

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I'm deviant in my habits there, too: i prefer the manual control and feedback, even when they're not required. I want to feel the health of my brake pads and ball joints.

Did some drifting back when, in a car set up with all sorts of tricks, including 4 wheel line locks on the brakes. Those were used more often to put the car into a spin than to recover from one.

To drill in on this, 2nd generation stability control began as a feature between 1995 and 1998; so many premium brands that are 20-25 years old do this.

In the context of the article; NHSTA mandated stability control in 2012, so any car newer than average is guaranteed to have the feature.

This is true. But for me, personally, the increased safety measures aren't worth the cost of having to put up with the data collection.

I have a brand new car and don't have to put up with any sort of data collection.

That seems a bit dubious. What makes you say that?

The reason I ask is that, as I understand it, the collection happens via cellular modems talking to cell towers to report back to the mothership; it's not through, e.g., connecting your smartphone via bluetooth. (The non-smartphone information they send is about car usage habits and statistics, including location.) I'd be curious what the make/model of the car is which doesn't have this hardware.

The sibling comment about the 2013 model is more likely since I don't know when manufacturers started putting cellular modems in their cars. "Brand new", not so much.

lol - check again. As others pointed out it's just about assured your car has an embedded cellular modem and is spying on you unless you explicitly opt out.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/how-figure-out-what-yo...

My car is from 2013. It’s got more safety features but I don’t think it has any way to report data about me. You could consider getting something that age, when the time comes.

around 2010 just about every car started to come with an embedded cellular modem. If your car offers any sort of remote start, SOS or concierge functionality, it's infected. And car companies have been caught selling driving data to insurance companies. Ugh.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/how-figure-out-what-yo...

The good news is that if your car has a 3G embedded modem, it probably doesn't have any networks to connect to anymore.

Yes, I should have been more explicit but I was relying on the fact that the cellular modem in my car and many others from that time have had their service discontinued. So the car likely did used to report on me, but I suspect it does not any longer.

> With your manual brakes there's simply no way to apply the brake to one wheel only to pull a vehicle out of a skid.

Just don't drive like an idiot and/or learn how to manually recover from a skid.

I mean, I've never been in a skid that wasn't a direct result of driving like an idiot and have never crashed due to loss of traction. Probably the worst case was in my old BMW 2002 where I was making a left turn at an intersection, on wet roads, sideways, and instead of panicking I just gave it more gas until the rear end came around.

> Just don't drive like an idiot and/or learn how to manually recover from a skid.

There was a Top Gear segment on why so many Finns are F1 drivers, etc., and it was actually good and informative, talking about their approach to childhood drivers ed.

We're talking skid pans, advanced defensive driving techniques, while you're a teenager. Dealing with hydroplaning, black ice, brake failure, all of it.

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