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Comment by axegon_ | Hacker News Reader

This is part of the reason why I don't want a new car: I don't want to be involved in this directly. A guy from work got a brand new Hyundai(I think), and the first thing that popped on the navigation was "Create an account with Hyundai now". Nah. Nah. Forget it. I have 3 issues:

1. I should not have to authenticate or have connectivity to a manufacturer unless I want to once I've paid for a physical good(cars being physical goods).

2. I don't want my personal data to be sold off to anyone - I've been in the tech industry for long enough to know that "I don't want my data to be shared with third parties" is worth as much as the power used to light up the pixels on the screen.

3. I don't trust anyone to have done everything carefully and by the books to prevent any potential leaks.

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Auto manufacturers lost me when they began being so hostile to people wanting to maintain or repair their own vehicle.

Much of my 80s model pickup can be disassembled with a basic set of screwdrivers and wrenches. If my Chevy Volt bricks because the battery has an aging cell, it has to be towed to Chevy to pay $200 for them to turn of a software alert and allow it to charge.

I do like electric vehicles but its insane how absolutely terrible they are when it comes time to work on them.

> I do like electric vehicles but its insane how absolutely terrible they are when it comes time to work on them.

Yep, they are like hermetically sealed devices like a modern consumer phone. The user can get into them and repair if they really want to and have the skills/tools... but it's nothing like the previous era of phones or vehicles.

Is there a market for taking newer models and stripping them of their connectivity?

Probably not large enough to pay for all the engineering needed to pull it off. Some of us would be interested, but it's no longer easy. There are too many useful things from connectivity too. My car for example shows me the current speed limit on all roads and when the speed limits change it gets updated because it has connectivity. That is a useful feature but it comes with all kinds of other things I don't want and so just stripping out is a complex work of stripping out just the parts I don't want while keeping the good.

If you'd asked in 2010, well yeah, just pull the fuse for the modem and done. since all it does is a little bit of connectivity and there's nothing else useful from the, from that, I wouldn't care. But now connectivity has useful parts, that I don't want to lose.

> My car for example shows me the current speed limit on all roads and when the speed limits change it gets updated because it has connectivity.

Yours does this via data? Most cars do this with a camera.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic-sign_recognition

I don't know. Perhaps it is a camera - but it should be be data because the law changed and the default when nothing is marked is wrong

Both approaches are fraught with issues. Vision based systems fail to read sings properly, don't know about default limits, struggle with or don't evaluate conditional speed limits, etc. And map/data based systems can struggle with locational accuracy, temporary changes to speed, conditional speed limits, etc.

For example, my car's vision based system always shows the limit on a school zone speed limit sign, even when it is not in effect. It also fails to read speed limits which are posted on signs it wasn't trained on, like digital signage.

And map based systems e.g. smartphone maps are often wrong in work zones, and areas with variable speed limits.

I drive a 13+ year old car with retro-fitted android navigation from a now bankrupt Chinese manufacturer so no updates in the last 4 years at least. I have really gone to great lengths to leave the bare minimum (given that I self-host everything except for maps). It easily took a day of fiddling about with the navigation and OpenWRT alone and I don't know anyone else that has gone as far as I have. In fact, just about everyone I know doesn't care. If I had to guess, I'd say the answer is a firm "no".

I'm really curious about this setup. Can you elaborate a bit more on how you're self-hosting and have incorporated OpenWrt with your vehicle?

I don't know, but there is a small market for something similar: taking older cars (often oldtimers) and building in a new electric motor. My guess is that those cars will have little privacy problems.

I would love new open source cars by the way, that would be really cool

Its surprisingly difficult or impossible depending on how they set it up. I had an Chevy with firdt-gen OnStar, disabling it was as simple as unplugging the OnStar box under a seat.

In a first gen Chevy Volt that's not possible, the computer and screens are so integrated with OnStar that physically disconnecting it leaves the car effectively useless.

The connectivity may not be fully disabled in a 2025 Acura Integra, but there is a way to disable data sharing. You then have a permanent yellow "nag icon" top right on your infotainment screen, but the spying is "disabled." I mean what this other commenter in this same thread found via GDPR after doing this very step: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49955366

Depending on the car, how you disable it may not really disable it at all. Connecting your phone via Bluetooth or taking the car in for service will often let the car upload a backlog of data.

You generally have to completely remove the power from the DCU - which can have as many as three different power sources (including a backup battery with days of power in some cases!), and often disables features in your car like the hands free microphone, built in gps, etc.

And that's not all. I used to work with a guy who spent a large portion of his career at a famous car manufacturer. I can't say which one cause their operation and output is rather small(niche, hyper-wealthy customers that take their international passport when they go for a drink across the street, "just in case"). From what he told me, their cars have 11 individual computers with full operating systems on them for various reasons. While compute has become more expensive over the last few years, courtesy of slop, small, embedded ARM devices are still inexpensive and incredibly powerful. I also spent a short time in the automotive industry(where I met the guy I mentioned) and modern cars are an absolute integration hell and even their engineering teams can't say fully what's in them in terms of hardware and it's magnitudes worse with software.

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