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Comment by jimt1234 | Hacker News Reader

I drive a 30-year-old Nissan pickup truck for this exact reason. Not sure why, but I get a small sense of joy knowing that the corporate overlords aren't "watching" me drive. Of course they're "watching" me on my phone (as I drive the beater truck), but that's a different story.

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That old truck is probably polluting 10-30× more than a modern one. While corporations have their flaws, they have spent time and money making engines more efficient and reducing harmful emissions.

Don't care. They can entice us as much as they want. We will not comply. Some people love rolling coal for that reason.

(My semi-daily driver is over 50 years old.)

Some people love shooting guns into the air, why is that so bad?

that could directly cause a death

High particulate emissions directly cause deaths.

Everyone is born with a fatal disease called life.

After seeing how much safer new cars are in crash tests, old cars don't look so good anymore.

I wish more people were aware of this. I'm often reminded of a conversation I overheard at my high school retail job:

$OLDGUY_CUSTOMER (to my coworker): "Wow, I just saw a big crash on [nearby arterial road]! The entire front of the car was smashed in!"

$COWORKER: "Oh no! Was the driver alright?"

$OLDGUY: "Yeah, he seemed fine. There wasn't an ambulance or anything." [beat] "Man, they don't make them like they used to. When I was young, cars didn't crumple like that - it was much safer!"

Ugh.

>When I was young, cars didn't crumple like that. We did.

That old truck will pollute less in its lifetime than the amount of energy it takes to produce a modern automobile, let alone the cumulative energy spent to sustain a consumer base ready to sign a new lease every 36 months for the latest and greatest in aggregated conflict minerals + spyware on wheels, it just does it all over the poors someplace else instead of where you live.

Not true at all: 80% of pollution from an ICE vehicle is from driving it (fuel and servicing).

are you counting the energy that went into producing that old truck in this statement?

I don't believe this.

In France, we have mandatory car checkup every few years where they test the pollution from the back of the car.

My old car, made in early 90 barely emitted more pollutant than regulation allow.

Ended up buying a Volkswagen Passat, very impressive it emitted a lot less. Then dieselgate happened... Now it's barely under what the regulation allow.

Keep your old polluting car, in the grand scheme of things it is better than buying a new one that end up polluting much more to build than what you would gain in everyday emission.

your theory assumes that everyone is lying about their emissions and then later assumes that your old car is not, in fact, lying about emissions. also that you can just keep an old car running indefinitely on a limited budget.

there wasn't much pressure from regulation to have low pollution emissions in car during the early 1990, beside the car i'm speaking about, a golf 2, has such a small diesel engine that it makes sense it would pollute very little compared to the much heavier and much more powerful passat (at least compared to the whooping 50 horse power the golf had !).

i can still remember avoiding road too steep lol.

Beside, when i am saying that keeping the older car is better for environment, i am not theorizing but speaking about things that have been studied.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.13190

> Specifically, researchers find keeping older fuel efficient cars on the road longer reduces CO2 emissions significantly more than speeding up the global transition to green technology.

So? Not the consumer's fault that those improvement are bundled with user-hostile bullshit. Some of it government-mandated bullshit too.

https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bymodel/1994_nissan_truck.sh... https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bymodel/2024_Nissan_Frontier...

my headphones just popped up an alert on my phone that turned out to be an ad for a nascar race. that got their app uninstalled. if they ever realize that they can start shoving ads directly into my ears that's when the headphones themselves get taken out back and smashed with a hammer.

Before I bought my most recent vehicle, I did my research and figured out how to physically disconnect the modem / telemetry unit.

Is this actually feasible for some decent percentage of cars nowadays? If so, where did you research?

YouTube. I think in most cars it’s gonna be a discrete component that can just be unplugged. The big question is what functionality you lose, and whether you can live with that tradeoff.

Anecdotally, my 2023 Kia's infotainment unit is one big plastic box that I was able to access by just prying up some plastic and undoing a handful of screws.

I was applying some dielectric grease to the USB port used for Android Auto (in order to prevent intermittent disconnects while driving) but I wouldn't be surprised if one of the many other cables plugged into it led to a cell antenna on the exterior.

There are also software options; I was able to disable the "telematics" in the same vehicle by inputting a (frankly schizophrenic) combo of rolling back the date, touching random invisible trigger zones in menus, and entering a leaked PIN to access the appropriate service menu on the infotainment unit.

Figuring all that out was unfortunately quite difficult, although I imagine you might be able to get "official" help if your local dealership is friendly and willing to bend the rules. I had to settle for a lot of keyword massaging on Google.

> I was able to disable the "telematics" in the same vehicle

This is only sufficient if you trust software, which you shouldn’t. Hardware disconnects are reliable. Cut the power.

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