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Comment by jimmiles | Hacker News Reader

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

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".

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.

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 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

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