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Comment by brewcejener | Hacker News Reader

Why not skip a few steps and just electronically limit the top speed of all new vehicles? Too much revenue lost??

A: they do already. Either electronically or via gearing and rev limiting. B: you may want to exceed the speed limit to escape danger. C: not everyone uses their vehicle on public roads and there are places you may want to do over 100 mph, like a race track. Side note, some vehicles know when you're at a track. Sometimes that feature doesn't work. D: it's not practical. What top speed would you set? In NY, it's 65. Montana is 80. Texas has a highway where it's 85. What about Germany? A maximum speed does not keep someone from doing 60 in a 30.

Dynamic restrictions would also be a problem, either by forcing location tracking into every vehicle or relying on (eventually) outdated database or flakey computer vision (cameras can get dirty). Then you need to consider what action to take when a vehicle is exceeding the speed limit. Are you going to disable the throttle or apply brakes? How soon and how hard? Keep in mind that older vehicles don't have this system, so braking may cause an accident. Disabling the throttle might also cause an accident either by upsetting the car with unexpected weight transfer or indirectly because the car could not get away from danger.

As an aside, what new cars don’t include location tracking?

My experience is they all have satellite connections and require some level of telemetry. My car throws a persistent check engine light and error message on the radio if you disconnect the telematics control unit.

I don't have this info unfortunately. I can say from personal experience that you can remove tracking from the 24 and older Subaru BRZ for about $50 usd, or less if you make your own passive adapter. I can also say the 24 and older low trim brz does NOT have tracking installed from the factory. From my research before buying the brz, many if not all Subarus of this era use the same hardware. There's an older version of this hardware as well that can also be deleted (and should be deleted because it's an older cellular tech that is no longer active and leads to battery drain while the car is unused).

The only problem my car has now is an occasional failure of Android Auto with a time sync error. There's an ota update for the head unit available that may or may not be related. I don't plan to install it. I only put 1000 miles on the car before removing the cellular connection so they could log the engine break in period as being done correctly for warranty purposes, so I'm not sure if it was an existing issue or related to removing cellular.

Afaik, having built in gps is not an issue since it's a receiver and doesn't transmit. The tracking issue is because of cellular.

I would check if the low trims exclude telematics before buying a car. If so, you can probably remove it from the higher trims but do your research.

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