Silvaire wrote:
I’ve been aware of the automotive data harvesting situation for a while and learned that it really started to kick in with non-EV manufacturers in 2019 or so.
That is a useful guideline datapoint to have. It’ll be a while before I need to buy a new vehicle, hopefully at least five years and perhaps closer to 10, but when I do I will make sure that it an early enough model to avoid these ‘features’.
Right now my vehicle, a 2009 Honda CR-V, is performing brilliantly during a particularly wet walking holiday in Exmoor. You simply couldn’t do what we’re doing this week with any sort of EV (I’ve not seen a charger anywhere) nor any new-ish and expensive car where the state of the interior mattered or you had qualms about driving into hedges to fit past oncoming traffic It’s a sort of mobile offroad-capable forward staging post for various days out, variously functioning as a dressing room, canteen, wet dog accommodation and storage for large quantities of wet weather gear.
Pretty sure Honda don’t know where we are or what we’re doing with it.
My 2017 car has none of this stuff.
Obviously the Venn diagram between a lot of this invasive nonsense and EVs includes a lot of overlap. Tesla is front and center.
More and more it is looking to me like EVs won’t accepted by most people, and I will for sure be one of them. My problem with that (assuming authoritarian government continues on course to outlaw real cars) is that I drive a lot, and want to drive a lot. That means I’ll continue to wear out cars – they are nowadays made for a fixed lifespan, after which everything fails. So worst case I’ll need to buy a series of low mileage used replacements. As with light aircraft, this will become expensive as production slows and used car prices rise. I should perhaps start looking now, or maybe a refurbishment industry will arise for ‘daily drivers’. Or I look for the unusual used car that nobody knows they want, as is possible with used aircraft. I might already have done that 
Silvaire wrote:
That means I’ll continue to wear out cars – they are made for a fixed lifespan, after which everything fails. So I’ll probably need to buy low mileage replacements. As with aircraft, this will become expensive as production slows and used car prices rise.
A little research will probably yield a sweet spot in terms of year of manufacture which nicely balances modern features and conveniences against a lack of built-in obsolescence and/or things which can’t be fixed or replaced when they break. That sweet-spot year may be a fair way back.
Yesterday the UK government announced that their 2030 date for no new ICE cars has been pushed back to 2035. This was totally unsurprising, although perhaps surprising that we didn’t get closer to the date before kicking it back. In any case no-one was really sure what it meant, and ‘no new’ was widely thought to refer to not type-approving any new models for the manufacturers after that point, rather than actually stopping sales of what they were producing.
Silvaire wrote:
So worst case I’ll need to buy a series of low mileage used replacements.
Not unknown as a strategy. I know people who when they stumble across a particular item of clothing or pair of shoes they really like, they buy a dozen or so examples of the same thing and store them for future use as each one wears out. That’s evidently based on an expectation that they won’t be able to buy it again sometime in the foreseeable future, so perhaps much as you foresee here for cars.
I see car and bus fires in the news quite often now. These were very rare earlier.
Is this the result of more electrics, and complexity.in hybrid vehicles?
I never heard of a fire on the old pre-1939 buses I travelled on until the late 50s.
Silvaire wrote:
Yes, for data upload by the car manufacturer of which the owner is typically totally unaware, the manufacturer pays for it. It’s really quite amazingly invasive. If asked the dealer will claim it is a benefit because they can unlock your car remotely if you somehow lock yourself out.
Has anyone been able to locate a list of cars and models which actually have this? I understand it’s pretty much all “new” cars but form when on?
I bet that millions of people are totally unaware that also their maybe 5-6 year old car has this but they were never told. The only ones who are pretty upfront with that were Tesla who even boasted with it, but everyone else keeps the spying to themselves.
Silvaire wrote:
Me too, unless I make sure 100% it is disabled. There is always a way.
Not in Teslas apparently, they simply shut down if they can’t call home to momma once in a while. And apparently this is the trend all of those people move towards.
Yeah but if you buy a Tesla you must expect this, because the thing is so new and so complex that it will need a huge amount of software patching for years.
Anything “self driving” will need permanent connectivity in reality.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
I understand it’s pretty much all “new” cars but form when on?
Silvaire will know more, but I remember GM-owned OnStar advertising heavily in the the early 2000s for their subscription model. I think it was designed in the 1990s before cell phones were common, to call for help after a breakdown. Also, if an impact is detected and the call centre can’t contact the driver, they send an ambulance with information like which airbags have been deployed or if the car is upside down. Now it offers a whole package including remote diagnostics, vehicle tracking, and (if reported to the police) ‘stolen vehicle slowdown’ and ‘remote ignition block’. Also remote unlocking, gps navigation, wifi, connected apps etc.
Peter wrote:
it will need a huge amount of software patching for years
Actually, 100% of the software patching on a car that just works is entirely unnecessary. The same applies to almost all software patches for almost everything, unless it fixes (a) a critical bug or (b) introduces a feature I really want.
Case example – recently i did a bulk update on apps on my iPhone – maybe 100 individual updates which took ages. A couple of months later – 48 updates pending! None of which I care about in the least.
And on my Tesla – if anything, updates made it worse. Lots of small incremental improvements to the UI which are nice but nothing to write home about, (the equivalent of moving switches around on a non-screen driven car), loads of visual gimmicks on surrounding traffic and signage so they can predend they have made progress on their self driving capability and which I find irritating so I turned them off, but new phantom braking when using the adaptive cruise control preposterously called “Autopilot” and collision warnings if turned off.
Ah yes, they have introduced autoparking which is so bad that any learner driver on their second lesson would do better.
So simply put if I had somehow disabled connecetivity altogether on day one, I would be no worse off except of course that the built in nav system needs a data link.
The problem is that pre owned cars in good condition and without.all this nonsense are going to become classics due to demand outstripping supply. And that.will happen quite quickly as many classic car owners will testify (they do have skin in the game of pushing prices up).
A used Aston Martin DB4 GT Zagato would have cost you between £3000 and £6000 back in 1970. To buy that same car now will cost you in the region of £2 million to £3million.
A Jensen CV6 could be had for £100 now I believe you are nearer £100,000.
My old Citroën DS is now fetching far more than I originally paid for it £1300 and sold for even less. Today for the Maserati version I would have to buy it back at nearer £50,000.
On top of all this it is only enthusiasts who keep the parts available. Clubs by the tooling but even then the materials have now become more difficult to get. So there is an industry in refurbishing old parts, but that industry is getting smaller in.the same way as the number of GA mechanics is getting smaller.
A refurbished alternator for Grahams’s Spitfire now costs around £400 if you return the old one.
Not long ago they were £100 brand new. In fact when the Triumph Spitfire first came out, you could buy the whole car for £1800.
So there is no doubt in my mind that many basic VWs and BMWs will become classics as will and are several Hondas. Even the Citroën Saxa is a classic to many, although they usually end up being pimped.
All half way decent cars with not too much in the way of electronics will rise in price. History has shown us this. But there will be less and less of them and eventually all, who drive regularly will be forced to drive the daily driver that the manufacturers have stuck something in to tell them what faults they are detecting, where that car is at a given time and how fast it is going etc etc etc.
The little man very rarely wins.
