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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately cars are becoming like smart TVs in this respect.

I'll never buy a car manufactured after about 2014 for this reason. I'm planning to just keep getting repairs & upgrades done on my model year 2006 for at least the next 10-20 years. By then perhaps I will want to switch to electric, but I'll do it by electrifying something older.

Cars from around 1998-2014 usually have side curtain airbags & adequate rollover durability. The only improvements since then that I'd even want at all are better EV batteries & marginal efficiency gains for IC engines, but those can be retrofitted &/or aren't worth the anti features they also added IMO.

If car companies want my business they'll have to remove the telemetry & automatic updates.

I don't care if I end up paying more to drive an old car eventually, but this approach has also been saving me money so far.

ESC is pretty good for safety. I would not want a car without that. Cars from 2014 do have it of course but not those much older.

FWIW I have two 2018 models with zero “smart” features.

No thank you. I will take predictable handling and a steering wheel that responds to my inputs. Loss of traction situations are exactly where I don’t want any systems helping. I need to countersteer and feel the car. Speaking as someone who was raised in winter driving and encouraged to find the limits of handling in snow and ice covered parking lots.

Of course if you are one of those drivers who removes their hands from the wheel in a stressful situation (there are many), these systems will help somewhat.

It really depends on the situation and the car. I’ve had it really help and not take over too much (very modern Porsche in the mountains), and systems where it was actively making the situation much worse by alternately locking the brakes on individual wheels. That was down a long hill which turned icy a third of the way down in a borrowed 2013 BMW F30, and I still consider it luck that I kept it on the road and nothing was coming the other way.

This is the same reason why we haven't bought a new vehicle. Our 2013 Toyota is fantastic.

I've got a 2013 Honda Fit that I love. It's just worked nearly perfectly with only routine maintenance since we bought it used in 2016.

I have a car from 2017 that is perfectly dumb. It had been a rehash of a car being produced since 2010 though. All other models of the same year by the manufacturer had telemetry, mobile app start etc. All those models are now dumb though since for those earlier years they used 3G wireless which is now a dead spectrum.

It's not feasible for everyone, but between grocery delivery services, telehealth, etc - if you work remotely anyway, it may be surprisingly feasible to get rid of your car altogether and only Uber/Lyft as needed, at least until robotaxis expand into your area at a fraction of the price of traditional ride-hailing apps.

I work remotely, my gym is downstairs as well as a convenience store with some fresh (overpriced) items, a bar and an (overpriced) restaurant.

My barber and grocery store is a $9 Uber Ride each way. So I could get away with a car easily where I live now. My wife and I have been down to one car since Covid.

But when I was in the burbs if metro Atlanta where everything wasn’t so close, it would have been over $100 easy going from one side to the other or basically anywhere besides the grocery store.

My car insurance is only $176 a month for my wife and I. It doesn’t make sense not to have a car, even if you include the minor maintenance on a car that would be hardly ever driven. Even at a theoretical $400 car payment + $176 in insurance, it still easy to come out ahead.

Only a $9 ride in 2025? What is that 1-2 miles? Just bike.

Yes because it’s completely safe to bike everywhere and how would I bring the groceries back?

I live in a tourist area where there are a lot of drivers causing the prices to be low. I noticed it in Las Vegas too.

The only reason I know is I use Uber to run errands close by when my wife has the car on the weekends.

> Yes because it’s completely safe to bike everywhere and how would I bring the groceries back?

Pannier bags. I did this for years. Before I got panniers I filled a big camping rucksack and cycled, but I wouldn't recommend that. Use a small backpack in addition to panniers if you have to, but having just the panniers feels the best.

However, in terms of safety you are unfortunately right. I didn't have a car so I went everywhere by bike but I was essentially a third class citizen in many places. Felt like I could just get wiped out and nobody would even care. There were no people around, only cars. I hate cars, so I had to get a car too :(

That's worse? I don't want my car to track me, I'm def not going to volunteer that information to Uber.

That’s a lost cause between tag readers and if you carry a cell phone.

Your car is tracking much more than rideshare apps even can. Uber, Lyft, whoever gets point to point trip information, maybe audio recording in the car. Modern personally owned automobiles are getting everything, all the time. It knows when you're home, when you're not, many record all audio all the time, some are recording video, some are tracking your sexual activity in the car.

At this point, I treat rideshare like public transit: I assume I'm being watched, but I get to skip the permanent always-on tracking for the other 99% of the time that I'm not in the car.

Also, if you own a car, the state knows where you're going and when, per ALPR systems. With Uber or Lyft or a robotaxi, there's a layer between my personal information and the state. It's not an insurmountable layer, as rideshare / robotaxi services can always be subpoena'd, but adding a layer of extra work for the state is a net gain to my privacy.

Also, for what it's worth, you don't have to use same service on each leg of your trip, you don't need to have it pick you up at your front door, and you don't need to have it drop you off at your exact destination. While for some people, these are admittedly imperfect improvements (you can't really effectively conceal your destination as easily if it's, say, an airport, there's also absolutely nothing stopping you from calculating the cost of your full trip with an equidistant destination, ordering a short trip (not to your final destination), and offering your driver a reasonable amount of cash to take you the rest of the way. Uber/lyft themselves are con artists charging riders WAY more than they pay drivers anyway. You can get away with paying a fraction of what the app would charge you, paying the driver way more than they would otherwise receive, and cutting the parasite (the multi-billion-dollar corporation providing zero value after connecting you with a driver) out of the middle.

There are still 2025 model cars where you can just pull the fuse for the modem and telematics module with no real ill effects.

Can you pull the fuse for the stability control? For the radar brake that gives false positives? For the damn steer by wire and throttle by wire?

Clearly you’re not actually interested in a modern vehicle regardless of capabilities, so I don’t think that there’s any real point in detailing which of those things can be disabled.

What capabilities are gained from having steering in 8 bit instead of a direct linkage?

Then you have to carry a phone, which is even worse.

You just need to pull the fuse or physically remove the telematics unit. In some cars you need to partially disassemble the dash to do this, but there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube. An independent shop should also be able to do this, although dealers will generally refuse since they are among the ones benefiting from the "telemetry," aka spyware.

Is there a device category that isn't becoming like this?

Vote with your wallet while there's still a chance

US government already decided for you, sorry.

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