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> Did you know Orange dash error lights are non critical?

Your car will happily display an orange light while a bad fuel mixture is poisoning your catalytic converter to the point where it needs replacing to meet any kind of emissions test. Same with other signs of engine stress.

Don't ignore dash lights unless you know what they mean or you're willing to pay the cost of disposing of your car.

Of course many places won't even allow you to disconnect all the antennae as a non-functional TPMS makes your car unroadworthy in various jurisdictions. You could quickly reconnect everything and clear the error codes before testing, but I'm not sure if the hassle is even worth the illusion that of being untraceable.

>TURN YOUR PHONE OFF. Your phone does more than track you - the Bluetooth and wifi beacon scanners are always running. When you come across another person, most phones track the intersection of your beacon with theirs making a new data point that compromises both individuals privacy. Now consider sitting at a stoplight; you and and the 10 phones around you have now correlated the time and position you were sitting there. The person jogging by with no phone(but a set of Bluetooth headphones) is also tracked by their Bluetooth signature. Terrifying.

All phones nowadays have bluetooth/wifi mac address randomization, so it's basically useless for tracking, not to mention google/apple conscripting every phone into a wardriving network will kill battery life. Moreover all this effort in avoiding being tracked doesn't really mean much when all cars have a very visible and unique identifier that's mandated by law (ie. license plate).

And Flock Safety will gladly fingerprint the vehicles without said license plate, and distribute everyone’s location histories nationally.

See also (222 points, 19 comments, 14 days ago):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945960

> All phones nowadays have bluetooth/wifi mac address randomization

Source?

> Moreover all this effort in avoiding being tracked doesn't really mean much when all cars have a very visible and unique identifier that's mandated by law (ie. license plate).

I agree with the first half, but not this. The difference between people seeing your license plate and your car/phone/etc systematically recording and storing your exact position is the same as the difference between someone on the street seeing my face vs. a facial recognition camera identifying me and storing that data point forever. People don't memorize or care about your plates. The police could take note of them or even put it on some record, but the number of cops is so low (and the number of cops that would care about my license plates is even lower) that whatever scraps of data are recorded would probably be pretty useless - and besides, that data isn't sold off to private entities, at least where I am.

> Ignore your car's complaints and error messages. Did you know Orange dash error lights are non critical?

"Tire pressure low" is one you should probably check out on a regular basis.

Yeah that's terrible advice. Learning to ignore safety warnings is an amazing way to wind up stranded or with a destroyed car because you decided to ignore a warning light

The first 100yr of automobiles didn't have TPMS and it was mostly fine.

I mean if you consider that death rate per mile driven 'mostly fine'

Check your tire pressures when you get gas, along with your oil and other fluid levels. Eyeball the tires every time you get in the car. These habits are not hard to develop and they will work even when the sensors malfunction (which is not infrequently).

All that these sensor-based systems do is train you to be an inattentive car owner.

Throughout my entire life, I don't know if I have ever seen anyone measuring their tire pressure or checking their oil at a gas station. Visually assessing tires can be quite misleading as well - my TPMS indicator was just on, visually it looked like one tire (its pressure was fine), and the tire that was 10psi low looked normal.

Falling back to an attitude of not needing automation and instrumentation is a cope, and often a poor cope at that. The problem isn't the dash warning lights of the past several decades, it's the built in corporate surveillance hardware of the past single decade (and the corresponding violation of user trust in favor of corporate control).

>Falling back to an attitude of not needing automation and instrumentation is a cope, and often a poor cope at that.

A lot of modern automation is not really automation. A washing machine is automation: it takes a task which would have wasted hours of your day and reduces it down to a few minutes. A lot of modern "automation" doesn't save you any actual time time, but just saves you from being attentive:

- Checking your tire pressure doesn't take much time, but TPMS is a privacy problem and an added maintenance cost that you cannot opt out of.

- A power rear lift gate actually takes _more_ time than just shutting it with your hands.

- Power windows don't go down any more quickly than power windows. The only only benefit here is that you can open all 4 windows simultaneously. However this is a luxury, not something which saves you time. You never _need_ all 4 windows down. So maybe people like it, but it's not like the washing machine that actually saves you labor.

- etc ....

People think that needed to do or attend to anything is wasting time, but often modern automation saves no time whatsoever, and has other downsides. (privacy, maintenance cost, vehicle weight, etc.)

It takes real time to get out a pressure gauge and check the pressure on each wheel, no? Furthermore, attention itself is a limited resource.

For example, power windows were always handy when getting on/off the highway and coming up to a toll booth where I'd have to give/take a ticket. It's much easier to hold a button (or even have a latching button) while spending my attention on actually driving.

I have one car with TPMS that's entirely done through the ABS controller measuring the relative diameters of the wheels. That's not a privacy or cost problem. Furthermore the privacy problem where wireless TPMS sensors are interrogatable is better framed as a security vulnerability in their design, rather than something intrinsic.

Weight is a red herring as I'd guess the fuel savings from having properly inflated tires outweighs the fuel spent on the extra mass.

As someone who grew up in the pre-power-window 1970s and 80s, they absolutely do save time. You have to remember that manual crank windows went along with a lack of air conditioning. Being able to quickly roll down the windows (especially all four at once) in a hot car mattered.

My 2003 s-10 has AC and crank windows, my 2007 Ranger did too. Power windows sure are nice when you want to talk to someone out the passenger side and you don't have a passenger though. Or if you want a breeze regardless of AC.

> Power windows sure are nice when you want to talk to someone out the passenger side

Presumably the fundamentalists think you just need to yell louder. With neo-luddite opposition like this, its no wonder the surveillance society is winning.

I mean, I could always stick my torso out my window and talk over the cab, I guess.

maybe an age thing? When I was in high school I worked at a gas station where we would pump the gas for customers at the "full service" lane and also check their oil. The game was to upsell people an oil change. Point is, everyone saw people getting their oil checked every time they filled the tank.

And checking tire pressure was a 1x/week thing.

My point was that this is not any sort of widespread normalized behavior in the US in the past few decades. I was responding to a comment preaching as if this was routine behavior, and that people not doing it are simply being "inattentive".

I do get that it used to be a thing in the past. But that was also when oil was rated for 3k miles (I think? maybe it was even lower) and engines would routinely burn oil (ie consume it without leaving a drip spot on the ground). Whereas in the modern day, 15k synthetic exists.

FWIW, I probably do more of my own maintenance than the median HNer. I'll admit I can let intervals slip more than I'd like and I'm working on that, but this idea that everyone is checking fluid levels all the time just seems wildly off base.

I don't see it often either, but my government has been very active trying to get people to do bi-monthly tire pressure checks at the very least.

I don't think most people know how to do it, to be honest. Partially because people seem to think reading two pages in a manual is some kind of sisyphean task that no mortal should ever be cursed with.

It's pretty crazy how little people care. Even if you don't care about the safety aspect, keeping your tires inflated well saves you a ton on fuel and tire replacements.

Tire pressure management was one of the striking differences between my experiences in France and in the US.

In France, we'd check tire pressure at gas stations on nice machines that had built in dial gauges and were free.

In the US, I had to use one of those hand gauges and the air pumps needed quarters (in most cases, especially if you weren't also buying gas).

In Portugal now, the gas stations also have free air and pretty good pumps.

Many new cars have a tire repair kit instead of spare tire nowadays. At least there is a compressor in the kit which you can use to inflate the tire.

> the air pumps needed quarters

I landed at JFK and was looking for a stroller to stack my suitcases on. The kind of stroller that is free in every single airport I've been to.

I was shocked to see it costs $7. The guy who (I presume) worked there sardonically exclaimed "Welcome to America."

Presumably you mean a “trolley” not a “stroller”, because strollers are for moving children not luggage

But yeah, free airport trolleys are are an easy marker of evolved civilisations, and the USA fails this test.

Countries that have passed this test for me that I can recall: Australia, Greece, Singapore, China, UK, Thailand, Italy, Spain…

You don’t see people checking tire pressures where you live?

Checking oil at once universal full-service gas stations used to be extremely common. Think it pretty much went away in late-70s petroleum shortage in the US. With modern cars, it just doesn't make a lot of sense given any semblance of scheduled maintenance adherence.

I (again) have a low pressure warning on one tire (getting colder in the Northern Hemisphere). It looks fine but I'll get my compressor out tomorrow and make the computer happy. A lot of modern tires can look pretty good even if, as you say, they can be quite a bit below recommended limits.

Many modern cars have no way to manually check oil or any fluid levels. Only way is to check the reading from the sensor via main screen.

Plenty of cars don't have a transmission dipstick. But do cars really not have oil dipsticks anymore? Other than EVs ;p

Sealed radiators? No way to look for winshield washer fluid? No translucent reservoir of brake fluid?

Right! There is only a cap to refill. Computer will tell you when you are low on windshield fluid. Or low on oil etc

All these low profile tires do make it a lot harder to eyeball your tires to an acceptable level and tell if they are low. But low profile tires are just in general kind of crappy already.

Nonsense. Information is good.

I do have a walk around the car before I set forth, but stuff happens.

Some drives are very long -- hours and hours between stops. I've had tires that aired themselves down during a drive. TPMS can alert me to that issue before I get an opportunity to have another walk-around, so I can stop and address it before it becomes a safety concern.

It's fine if someone want to live in a world without monitoring systems; anyone is free to drive an old car with points ignition and a carb if they want (or mechanical diesel! with an air starter, even! no electricity needed at all!).

And sure, there's a certain joy to driving something of relative mechanical simplicity.

But I like modern cars. And I like things like temperature gauges, closed-loop electronic fuel injection, oil pressure indicators, ABS, traction control, backup cameras, and [I dare say] tire pressure monitoring. I like cruise control. I like headlights that turn themselves on when necessary, and off again when they're unnecessary.

And as one might correctly surmise: It doesn't have to be that way: There's other ways to live. A person can also choose to walk, ride a bike, use a horse, commit to a lifestyle that is centered around public transportation, or whatever. The world is full of options.

I've chosen my path, and you can also choose yours.

(And no, that doesn't make me inattentive. My path involves both a belt and suspenders.)

Nonsense. People are still driving cars without TPMS, they can feel the difference while driving and do tire pressure checkups regular intervals depending on run. No issue.

Of course. A skilled driver knows their car very well, and can note by feel that the car is pulling somewhat to one side and correctly identify that this is due to low tire pressure instead of an external effect like road condition or wind, and then decide whether to address it or keep going.

A skilled driver can notice all kinds of other stuff using their senses, too.

For instance: When there's a plume of coolant coming out of the hood in front of them, they can deduce from observation that the engine temperature may be very high. They can also identify low oil pressure by observing the clacks and bangs of an engine that is starved for oil and tearing itself apart, or even by the silence of an engine that has ceased.

Or: Information. A light can illuminate on the dashboard the before these conditions are pronounced enough to feel, and the driver may then elect to use this abundance of information to take action before it snowballs into something that may become expensive or dangerous.

Information is good but the number of "slow leak on a long drive" failures made less inconvenient by TPMS almost certainly pales in comparison to the inconvenience of maintaining the system for the average consumer.

Acting like all this is a safety concern is just textbook internet comment section lying through ones teeth type behavior. Yes, anything can be a safety concern at the limit but even tire failures on the road to not typically elevate to that level. The following framing of "well just drive an old car if you don't like it" is more of the same sort of dishonesty with a veneer of plausible deniability on top. There's no reason these systems need to be built in a way that they can't be disabled and leak PII. There's no reason just about all the systems you're trying to frame as a "bundle" have to be bundled in the first place.

Low tire pressures are a safety problem. Low tire pressure increases the likelihood of catastrophic tire failure. People can (and do!) die from catastrophic tire failures (and from complications of them, like being run over while changing a tire on the side of the road).

I'm not acting. This is not a performative display.

But yes: While I'm happier in a world with TPMS, I'd be even happier yet in a world where it was a quick and simple job to disable it in a reversible way. (Perhaps in some manner similar to the incantations used to disable the passenger seatbelt chime in many cars.)

Tyre pressure sensors have done nothing to affect that.

Frankly? I do. Remove alcohol and drugs from the equation, and driving is an absurdly safe activity. Those intrusive features have very little to do with safety.

I hardly doubt a low tire will mean a death sentence, usually you can tell when a tire is too low way before it is a problem, same as many things in the car, just pay attention to it and you’ll know when something is “off”.

it may be better to code out TPMS anyways. I had a BMW that wouldn't allow you to enter Sport/Sport+ when TPMS light was on, what a drag.

Does TPMS have any connection to BMW traction control?

No it does not. There’s a wheel speed monitor sensor (that works via a magnet and little ridges… and is a pain to replace). That’s what the DTC (and probably ABS) uses

Thanks for the answer. Safety shouldn’t be lame and repellent.

TPMS, at ~400MHz, is a potentially valid input for traction control in certain cases, and potentially, a road quality and location signal as well.

Once all the data is available, tested, analyzed, and applied, there isn’t going to be much left to do but smile, smile, smile.

But in exchange for being tracked we've been saved from the scourge of occasionally checking our tire pressure. Why, I'd give up almost anything just to be slightly more comfortable.

Yeah that’s great if you’re a CIA intelligence officer but what normal person can do this and still function in the modern world? Do the people who say this stuff leave their homes regularly?

And what’s the benefit of it all? Fewer targeted ads?

> Do the people who say this stuff leave their homes regularly?

Nope.

Leverage over your insurance provider sound good to you?

I am not sure how that works. I guessed I missed the technoparanoid discount.

But I would value the time and inconvenience involved in this at more than my entire insurance bill.

>Do not give in to the mirage of convenience.

I sympathise. However, being able to start de-icing my car while still in bed at 5:30 on a January morning is a powerful feature. And I'm the kind of person who wraps his tin foil hat no less than 10 layers thick.

Ideally this shouldn't involve the internet, because the car is in wifi range, but what can I do about it?

People are suggesting all over these threads what we can do about it, but we (as a population) aren't. When my 2009 car dies, I'm going to deliberately NOT buy a new trackingmobile, and try to find another 2009 car to keep running. Yea, that means I occasionally need to take 30 seconds to scrape ice off the windshield. Big deal.

Why 2009? I've been driving the same 2003 Audi TT all my life, never failed me.

The number of cars from 2003 is already dwindling and it's only going to keep going down. It's certainly much easier to find cars from the late 00s-early 10s right now if your only priority is not being tracked or bound to a web of different digital services and subscriptions.

I have this with my keyfob.

later vehicles "helpfully" removed this in favor of online remote starting (with added telematics)

You could probably get a 3rd party remote starter, however that is going to certainly cost you extra and probably won't be as simple as old school remote starters.

I like the rest of the comment, but...

>Did you know Orange dash error lights are non critical?

That's not even remotely true for most cars. One of the most critical alarms you can get in a car is a flashing check engine light, which are usually orange.

Those are usually red, although I don’t know if it’s actually SAE standard or not, I’ve only worked for one automotive company (and we made them red)

I’ve driven a lot of different cars around the world and nearly all check engine lights are orange. Almost all the Google image search results are orange. To be sure I checked the most popular ICE car models worldwide: Toyota Corolla, Toyota Rav4, Ford F-series, Honda CR-V, Chevrolet Silverado. All of those use orange. In fact, the only red CEL that I’ve ever seen is on Minis and BMWs - not the actual physical indicator (which is orange!) but the mini-LED screen warnings.

Ah, interesting! Yeah I worked for BMW (which owns Mini Cooper now). Guess my experience was not universal.

> Remove the antennas. Do not give in to the mirage of convenience.

ERROR: unable to start engine.

Please drink a verification can.

Actually I wonder if cars will just adopt "oh-you-need-anti-theft" like phones do. To prevent auto theft, all cars will be tracked and all parts must match serial numbers.

> To prevent auto theft, all cars will be tracked and all parts must match serial numbers.

Well, I suppose that's one way to end third party repairs. Just refuse to turn on if the chip in the new part doesn't match up with a code in the ECU. Like printer ink, but for every major component.

'Error, cannot start engine: Authorised mirror not found. Please visit BMW for an authentic replacement. Driving with non-authentic mirrors may harm user safety.'

In case of Subaru its "we are sorry your battery died trying to aggressively reconnect to the mothership, no we wont be paying for the replacement"

Ok stop with the panicking.

What's wrong with GPS in vehicles? If it's not connected to the internet, there is no issue.

What's wrong with playing music from the phone on Bluetooth or Aux? Did you also know you can ride a horse instead of a car?

Bluetooth and WiFi isn't running if you turned them off. Bluetooth also isn't really used for tracking unless someone is looking for you or you're part of some service like AirTags.

> Ignore your car's complaints and error messages. Did you know Orange dash error lights are non critical?

What? Worse advice out there regarding cars.

If it's not connected to the internet, there is no issue.

It's connected to the Internet. Every car has a SIM card now.

>It's connected to the Internet. Every car has a SIM card now.

Maybe every new car, but the average car is 13 years old, and the OP made no clarification on whether his advice was for only new cars, or for a 2015 econobox as well.

Most people don't know, and will never know whether their car is connected to the internet, so it's better to assume it is unless you have specific information. The app or phone you connect to the car could also be a major exfil point of this data.

My car is older than that and came with an embedded SIM card. Quite a few navigation consoles had "live traffic updates" (often in trial format, but sometimes "lifetime") that basically consisted of 2G clients occasionally updating traffic data along planned routes. Not quite bottom of the line at the time, but also not uncommon at that point either. It's probably slightly worse than the dedicated satnav screens people were buying back when the car was new, although neither compares to what a smartphone will expose passively from just being inside of a moving car.

Probably the only good thing about this country shutting down the 2G and 3G networks now is all the spy devices that will go permanently offline.

On the one hand, they won't be able to communicate with the home base anymore. On the other hand, they'll light up the map like a Christmas tree if someone ever turns on a stingray in their vicinity.

There's other ways to get local traffic data, too. For instance: Traffic Message Channel, which can be broadcast with RDS on an FM station, exists.

As long as stations persist that transmit the data (it's sent over RDS), then it will continue to work. There's no subscription involved (or at least, there isn't for my car -- it works where it works, and there's no mechanism by which to pay for using it).

The Wiki has some further reading on the technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_message_channel

>What's wrong with GPS in vehicles? If it's not connected to the internet, there is no issue.

The GPS module is usually on the same board as the cellular module. Disconnecting the board (usually in the shark fin) disconnects the GPS module too.

>Bluetooth and WiFi isn't running if you turned them off.

BT and WiFi are running when turned off, at least on Android without extra opting out.

No, I will use all this stuff and do so gladly.