You buy a new one so the c level can buy another yacht
My car is so old it makes its own cloud!
Time to switch to an EV
True. But actually I don’t have a car. My last car decades ago, had a cassette player. But that had Auto Reverse. When it reached the end of the tape it would play the other side without you having to eject the tape and turn it over!
Time to switch to a CD
F that noise. 8 track for the win!
String quartet squeezed in the back seat or GTFO.
Look at the queen of England over here with a car quartet! We just had a couple hillbillys with banjos in the rumble seat of our jalopy AND WE WERE THANKFUL.
Luxury! We had a kazoo strapped to a unicycle and we were glad of it! All 15 of us!
I’ll never buy a vehicle that requires cloud connectivity for anything. Not a problem!
Well, most cars don’t REQUIRE it, but most cars lose features if it doesn’t have network connectivity.
Good luck finding a car made after 2020 that doesn’t have at least one or two features that require the Internet to function.
I got a used 22 reg hybrid last year. It’s never had to connect to the internet.
Like the person I responded to who thought needing an app to find a charging station was an improvement over just having them all over like gas stations.
I’m curious what you would pick today if you had to.
Something from 20 years ago
I guess I assumed we were talking new or newer cars.
Oh, we definitely were. If you don’t want something connected to the cloud, your options are:
- buy from a very small company
- build yourself something, kitcar style
- buy something from 20 years ago
Everything else is a rolling data vacuum
I feel the same way about the new cars which is why I’m still driving a 2012. I genuinely have no idea what I would get if I wanted something newer.
Yeah, I love my 2015 Sonic.
I’m rocking a 2006 VW Polo. Thing’s a beast. Almost no power, endless tiny things wrong, but I got pushed off the road by a cement pump truck…and I mean…yeah it was “written off” but only because popping the dents and repainting it would be more than it’s value. Most of what’s gone wrong I’ve been able to fix myself for less than £100, and going to my friend’s place to use his garage and big jack.
I’ve had to pick a new car in the last year. I chose a 2012. fuck new cars. fuck their headlights. fuck their spying. fuck their complexity. fuck their non-ownership. fuck their cost. fuck their bloated sizes. fuck their blind spots. fuck their driver assistance that interferes with my control of the vehicle. fuck their touchscreens that are absolutely useless in sunlight.
Yep… that’s what I was talking about
The 2029 Slate Wagon, Vaporware Edition
Do you not read what you write?
Yep… thanks for pointing out my typo, tho!
In a sane world, there would be a law that forces certain types of features to always work.
Cloud connectivity can have benefits but honestly, 95+% of a car’s feature does not need the internet
Most cars throughout history have had zero need for the internet. I just hope it does not end up like video games, where they can sell an unfinished product and patch it later. Though there are benefits to that model, but recalls exist for a reason.
I just hope it does not end up like video games, where they can sell an unfinished product and patch it later
Tesla has been selling a “full self driving” subscription for years.
And if Musk hadn’t bought a president, they would have been prosecuted for their crimes.
I just hope it does not end up like video games, where they can sell an unfinished product and patch it later.
Too late. This is already the case, I don’t know of a single EV that wasn’t buggy on release and still buggy a year or two afterwards as the manufacturer hunts bugs in a leisurely pace. It already is like in the gaming industry. Don’t buy an EV that isn’t at least one year old on the market or you will become their free of charge beta tester…
Anacdotaly I suspect most car software bugs aren’t hunted or patched at all, unless an exec at the company happens to run into the bug in their personal vehicle and flags it for the development team to fix.
I’ve heard too many stories of car software issues where the dealer gives it back with a note “reset the battery and tested good” but the bug is still easily reproduced.
We need a Stop Killing Cars movement
A lot of people don’t realise SKG is a foothold in exactly that fight. If you establish precedent on something as “frivolous” as video games you can use it on much higher value thing too.
I still don’t understand why people call the biggest entrataiment industry “frivolous” especially when some stories are better than many films i saw
Just part of a long trend of devaluing all artistic pursuits.
In this case it’s an advantage. If your enemy has a blind spot you exploit it.
It’s a disadvantage here though, it means less people supporting it and politicians ignoring it more
I counter: !fuckcars@lemmy.world
In response to some customer concerns of a dead battery resulting from the DCM continually trying to access the 3G cellular network, which is no longer available
https://www.theautopian.com/why-subaru-batteries-are-dying-all-across-the-country/
WOW… we were trying to hunt down why my buddy’s forestor’s battery kept dying…
We even disconnected the wire that tells the alternator to stop charging the battery…
Affected Forester
2016-2018 Forester 2.5i Premium 2016-2018 Forester 2.5i Limited 2016-2018 Forester 2.5i Touring 2016-2018 Forester 2.0XT Premium 2016-2018 Forester 2.0XT Touring
Wtf that’s so recent
Yep. My toddler hit the starlink button recently. Absolutely killed my outback.
Crazy the bull shit I had to do to start it again.
So you’d also get screwed if you routinely are parked somewhere without any cellular access? Nice design.
Just picture it - You drive your Subaru, the off-road adventure car company, to a camp site in a remote area. You wake up after a few days of hiking and camping to return to your car.
The battery is dead. If you camp too close to the car, the key fob being close to the car will leave it in a “standby” mode which drains the battery on top of the car pinging the server for updates.
vehicle … cloud
Flying cars sure turned out differently than we imagined in sci-fi.
Is this article presuming that this isn’t part of the plan? Auto manufacturers think our brains work like “oh no, my connected service was end-of-lifed. Guess I gotta buy a new car.”
With OTA updates eventually they could FORCE you into buying a new one.
I hate the privacy nightmare cars are turning into.
People already have been brainwashed on “how many years of security updates does this smartphone model have?”, and being paranoid about older-than-a-few-years devices, so you’re not far off.
(Not trying to diminish the necessity of software security updates, but at the same time I could not find any Android exploits that do not involve users installing malicious apps, supply chain attacks, or state actors)
My phone has access to my bank app, my car does not.
… yet.
Or it’s just incompetence, short sighted planning to please the shareholders
This is what the GPL was meant to fight against. Having boxes running software that is still under the control of the manufacturer.
Instead people complained that it was hard to use the code at work. YES. THAT’S THE POINT.
Sure but that’s also the reason stuff like this isn’t GPL. For-profit software simply isn’t going to use the give-away-for-free license.
You know it might make sense for automotive. The car is the product after all. The quality of the engine is ultimately what drives sales and most of the entertainment is traditionally third party. Making the on board stuff open helps them make a platform for third parties that are safe from manufacturer trying to push them out or collect fees. That environment also helps the manufacturer in its own sales as their cars are where the cultural impact is.
In my opinion it should be illegal to shutdown as long as they have cars. I would not buy any device that requires internet access to work with basic functionality.
Basic stuff like connecting vehicle to WiFi and apple play should be enough imo. Adding internet to a car is just an added cost
Not if they can harvest your precious data.
I meant cost to the consumer
We’ll see if we get to, given how controlling corporations are rapidly becoming over necessities of modern living.
You can’t really write laws that just require people to offer a service indefinitely though. That’s how you end up locking some poor bastard in jail who honestly tried to start a good car company up, did the best they could, and then saw it all go under. No one would ever start a car company, lest they risk imprisonment if the thing went bankrupt despite their best efforts. Starting a car company is already a hugely risky endeavor. Now you’re asking people to risk imprisonment if the company fails. I’m generally in favor of locking up more CEOs. But there are plenty of ones committing real crimes. We don’t need to be inventing new ones to trap otherwise innocent people.
The way to do this right is to mandate a long but still limited period of cloud coverage, say 20 years. And require companies to put up a bond to cover the cost of third-party hosting these ongoing cloud service in the event they go bankrupt. Then also require all essential functions to work without cloud connectivity.
I have yet to own a vehicle made in the 21st century.
I’m terrified of having to get a vehicle that requires software updates that eventually will stop receiving support. I’m also terrified of getting a vehicle with just generally shitty software. My gf’s car has awful software and there’s nothing she can do about it.
Just give me 90s era cars again. They last forever and they’re easy to repair on your own.
There’s lot to be said for physical safety features like side and curtain airbags, or better crumple zones that don’t crush your feet, but those were pretty much standard by 2012 so you can have those without all the computer nightmares.
You can get cars as late as 2016 for this
I wonder how much cheaper a car without any crap in it could be today if they still manufactured them at scale
I know I may get flamed for this since it has funding from Bezos but take a look at the Slate Truck (https://www.slate.auto/). Not cellular modem so no tracking (other than app based things. They say like charging and whatnot but you never know). No carplay or android auto, not entertainment dash at all. Hell the windows are old school cranks for rolling up and down.
This, but as a compact and without Bezos.
The cloud? I’ve owned many a vehicle who’s company doesn’t exist anymore XD No car should be tied to any cloud or connectivity crap for use
Saturn enters the chat.
Pontiac says “hello” and Oldsmobile is hitting on Saab.
Holy shit how did this comment make me feel so old. Saturn was the only one that came to mind but I recognize all of those.
Daewoo is the one I wish was still here.
Fun part about Pontiac, they were where most of the Saturn people came from. So those people got to watch gm kill two of their dreams.
It’s crazy that “local first” has to apply to cars now.
We must create some legalisation on this else a buch of smart cars are going to turn into dumb bricks.
In contrary to what many are saying I don’t think going back to plain cars is the solution. I think an open standard would be the solution here to provide an option to self-host or connect to provider.
Doesn’t even need a technical solution. Could just be some law that in order to sell a vehicle:
-
A company has to maintain any cloud support for at least 20 years.
-
They have to put up a bond that will allow such services to continue even if they go belly up before those 20 years are through.
-
All vehicle features where cloud connections are not essential to their function must be operable without any cloud connection. So it’s fine if after 20 years you can’t pull the contacts from your google account to display on the car’s screen, or if GPS map updates no longer work. But the door locks or seat heaters better not be cloud connected.
Enforcing 20 years of support would be difficult since they’d presumably be going bankrupt/closing anyway so they don’t really have anything to lose.
Bond.
Big automotive conglomerates won’t go bankrupt.
If they do, your tax money will bail them out.
-
My car is a 2009. I’ll be keeping it for the foreseeable future. I’m pretty handy, so as long as the engine doesn’t wreck itself (interference engine), I’ll just keep changing out parts, oil, fluids, etc…
my 2008 is now a piece of shit and things keep breaking that I don’t bother to fix, but I’m considering keeping it alive even though I bought a 2012 to replace it. might want to start investigating that misfiring and why it’s eating oil…
after fixing most of the issues required to get the 2012 safetied, I’ve come to the conclusion that I got a bit scammed and the vehicle might have been partially flooded, so who knows what else might go wrong. every task I’ve started on it has had a hiccup, even just replacing the license plate light bulbs - the brackets the screws for the bulb cover going into disintegrated, so I had to remove the whole trim piece to replace those. since when do things like that rust out‽
My new vehicle has remote start, but only via the app. It’s a useful feature but frustrating that my trim level doesn’t also have it available via the keyfob. Once the manufacturer ends support for my vehicle I will lose the feature out-right.
Sounds like you own the vehicle and can make whatever modifications you want to it in order for it’s features you purchased to work.
Yeah but that costs extra time and money they shouldn’t have to spend
My father’s Avalon will never show turn by turn navigation on the infotainment screen ever again because the mobile app it requires is dead. Car is 9 years old.
This is why screen projection should be required by law.
You bought the vehicle. Do y’all not see that? Despite how you as a consumer is treated you fucking bought the vehicle! I really do feel like I’m taking crazy pills…
What’s the alternative? Not buying a vehicle? If I wasn’t in the US and actually had good public transportation available to me I certainly would forego vehicle ownership. As it stands, it is frustrating to think I will one day lose the remote start feature, but it’s not a deal breaker.
Buy any of the other vehicles out there that don’t pull that bullshit?
Lol it wasn’t a choice between that car and walking. That’s a massive false equivalency.
Basically every new vehicle made in the last 5 years has connected features. That’s why I said “not buy a vehicle” I was using hyperbole to point out that the options are limited if you want a new vehicle without connected features. Options are even slimmer if you have specific requirements for a vehicle outside of basic transportation.
The point is that you shouldn’t buy a new vehicle. Buy used.
Works until it doesn’t. Connected cars go back almost 20 years now. better to research the car and ways to remove telemetry. Base model cars tend to have less telemetry, or none at all.
Those are separate, but equally concerning, things. Connected features are what this article is about, but telemetry is a different issue. On a new vehicle, you might disable the modem but lose several “features,” perhaps ones that you effectively have to have.
On somewhat older vehicles that don’t rely on connectivity to the same degree, disabling the modem only prevents telemetry data being sent to wherever-it-is that that data goes. That seems to be the sweet spot for me.
The people who buy new vehicles usually do it for the warranty that lasts several years so the cost structure of ownership is entirely predictable.
You can also buy a 25 year old Volkswagen 1.9 tdi. Some years your cost of ownership will be fuel and oil changes (and those cars basically take no fuel), but at some point you’ll need new unit injectors costing 2-3x the car’s value for a set. Will it be the month after you buy the car, or will it be in 5 years? It’s a lottery and you’re better off replacing all 4 when it comes to that, rather than doing one at a time.
Cars in the range of 5-15 years of age are even worse because they’re more complex and some of the parts are super expensive. And it takes around ~10-15 years to know if an engine or transmission design is truly reliable (if it has big problems, we might find out sooner).
I’m going to use German cars as an example again because those are the ones I know best, but for example when BMW had the M57 diesel, that was basically the best modern diesel engine. 500k km? 700k km? No problem whatsoever. Only real issues would be the occasional injectors, turbo and maybe some coolant hoses, but those usually started surfacing after 300k or 400k km, at which point you expect SOME issues.
Then N57 came out as its replacement and a few years later we knew about the potential chain and valvetrain issues. Kinda sucks, because they’d also moved the chain to the rear of the engine, but you can get it done for a few hundred euros yourself, or somewhere between 1500-3000€ at a shop. But it took nearly a decade before we knew about the crankshaft issues and those are an engine killer. I’m talking a full rebuild of the bottom end with a NEW, not re-ground crankshaft since these have a special coating from the factory IIRC. Prepare around 10000€, which incidentally could be more than the car is worth by the time you find yourself doing this work.
Now that engine’s replacement, the B57, has been out for 8 or 9 years and as far as is currently known, it has nearly no typical issues beyond some plastic coolant pipes that get brittle over time. But we don’t know what other common issues might start surfacing as more and more of those engines reach high mileages.
Now if what you’re thinking is “just buy a Toyota and you’ll have no trouble”, well, Toyota has made absolutely horrible engines in the past, for example the 2.2 diesel. Head gasket failure was notoriously common. Again, something that you wouldn’t necessarily know when you’re buying a 5 year old car because the issues haven’t started surfacing en masse yet.
I have my eye on a new (to me) vehicle in the next couple of years. I’d gone from planning on buying new but have now settled on the lowest mileage 2019 I can find. New enough to be nice and safe and have physical buttons, old enough not to have all these objectionable “features.”
I refer the newest style of vehicles as “spaceships.” Call me old fashioned and old guy yelling at clouds, but I want my next vehicle to be, you know, a vehicle.
There’s a difference between “has connected features” and “REQUIRES connected features” though. Again, you’re making a false equivalency.
Yes, pretty much every new vehicle has some sort of connectivity, and almost all have some sort of paid subscription to use those connected features in the app.
That’s entirely different than requiring you to have a subscription and use the app. Most new cars do NOT do that. They still have all the basic functionality without using the connected features, and the features are literally extra features so you can do things outside of the range of the fob, or add some extra things that the fob can’t do.
There are plenty of vehicles that have this feature without requiring an app to use it.
Old vehicles? No you want status and convenience.
No in want reliability without massive amounts of maintenance and repairs above all. A 20+ year (pretty much how far back you need to go to avoid telemetry) old car is not going to give that, regardless of what anyone says. They will require lots of time at the mechanic way too often, or lots of hours from yourself.
That’s convenience…
The entire point of cars is convenience…
Our society is built around the automobile… It’s a necessity. Jesus…
