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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

"But those clouds and servers will not be maintained indefinitely, and once they go down, the cars that depend on them will lose features that owners may be relying upon."

This may prevent cars being advertised for "sale" in California after January 1.

AB 2426: Consumer protection: false advertising: digital goods.[1]

“Digital application or game” means any application or game that a person accesses and manipulates using a specialized electronic gaming device, computer, mobile device, tablet, or other device with a display screen, including any add-ons or additional content for that application or game.

That's a car with an infotainment system.

This law makes it a crime to offer something "for sale" if it can be remotely disabled later, absent a separate acknowledgement that it's a lease.

[1] https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB2426/2023

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> This law makes it a crime to offer something "for sale" if it can be remotely disabled later

Solution: stop making vehicles require constant updates and live servers.

The entire point of Android Auto and Apple CarPlay is that you can outsource this task to a device that has a MUCH higher guarantee of support, software quality, and connectivity.

A car infotainment should be able to play local music, control car functions, listen to the radio. None of these require connectivity. You need connectivity for streaming music and GPS. Well phones are really, really good at that.

Well yeah, but think of the poor product managers who must impose their vision on consumers.

Simply remove the product managers or at least rip out their vision. Take that as violently threatening as you find appropriate from your personal experience with nested menus on touch screens replacing simple buttons you could operate without looking down.

Hopefully the end result is that this molds their behavior as this becomes an unreasonable task for the company.

Somehow this feels like it could backfire spectacularly.

“Sorry, we can’t ‘sell’ our cars anymore. The law says we have to call them a ‘lease’ and that’ll be be $X,XXX/year”

> “Sorry, we can’t ‘sell’ our cars anymore. The law says we have to call them a ‘lease’ and that’ll be be $X,XXX/year”

Wouldn't that be enough reason to take your business elsewhere?

I mean, that assumes there's anywhere else to go that's doing it differently.

It feels like market forces can push things in either of 2 directions:

(a) People hate practice X, so they shun companies that do it, and enough go to companies who don't do X, which leads to fewer companies doing X

(b) One company gets away with doing X, and despite some complaints, they do just fine – and other companies realize they can get away doing X too, and soon every company is doing it

People always jump to 0% vs 100%. That almost never happens but rather you get some percentage and that is often enough for a law to be considered successful.

There arent that many console manufacturers / tractor manufacturers / car manufacturers / phone manufacturers / (and unrelated: banks).

Some specialized equipment has few manufacturers.

Arguably this allready happened with computer games.

At least it will be honest then. They should also be forced to disclose how they are stealing all your personal info and data as you're driving around. People would think twice before buying any of these cars.

The result? They will not sell any. There is enough old cars around to sustain the transportation needs of the population for quite a while (certainly until someone decides to make new cars without all this crap).

>The result? They will not sell any.

Citation needed. People just don't care enough about their privacy to change their behaviour. It's been proven over and over unfortunately.

A person who wants the new shiny thing is not going to buy an old secondhand car just because of some abstract privacy concern.

I would though... because even though I love technology, I'm a luddite because modern technology doesn't have innovation, only cheap touchscreens, beta testing by users, and rent-seeking.

Considering the number of cars I've owned over the decades that couldn't have the entertainment system disabled remotely, I would be fine having those companies with hostile practices exposed.

That's exactly what we want. Companies to stop selling me shit I can't own.

If they are only willing to lease the car to me, I will happily take my money elsewhere.

Maybe lease is a good idea in this case? Especially if the lease had a "fit for purpose" clause like apartment leases have, that means if the car quits working it's their problem and you quit paying.

Same as with cookie banners. Much as I appreciate the intent of the law, any regulation based on disclosure / consent / name-and-shame is bound to fail or make things worse when enshittification is already the standard rather than the exception. There is simply nowhere for customers to take their dollars instead, when manufacturers start rubbing their dark patterns in their customer's faces, as per legal requirement.

Or, you know, actually design the systems to be handed off at some point. Instead of the Internet Archive we could have the EV Archive.

How does Tesla sell vehicles in California then?

This takes effect 1 JAN 2025.

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