I can imagine people sticking to their old cars or opting out of data gathering. Or hacking their way out of it. Nice business opportunity for good nerds.
The manufacturers will disconnect your car from data gathering if you request it, firmly and repeatedly. The dealer can’t do it, you have to call the manufacturer directly and work through a layer or two of people. It seems to affect most cars from about 2018 or so.
I guess the more direct way would be to remove the antenna.
Does anyone know who pays for it?
It must be GSM i.e. GPRS 3G 4G 5G. So the vehicle either has a physical SIM or an e-sim. And you can get data-only contracts for 2-3 quid a month. That is non roaming. But it’s unlikely to have been intended “for ever” even though on a 5 digit priced vehicle it obviously could be.
Internet connectivity is nice for updating the car satnav. My car has a 2012 database which is practically useless, and that is true for all but the most recent cars. Even if I updated it, it will not do audio warnings of speed cameras 
but phone apps can do that.
And telemetry is the price you pay for a usable satnav.
And telemetry is the price you pay for a usable satnav.
Do people really use the built-in satnav? I never do. It’s out of date, clunky and has no real time traffic info (though it bizarrely makes up “warnings” on no apparent basis at all). Whereas G is guaranteed to be up to date, even showing short-term road closures, plus it has real time traffic, and a much better user interface.
There are IOT plans which are very cheap compared to what you pay for a normal SIM card for a phone. See e.g. T-Mobile IOT data plan where you pay less than 15€ for 10 years. Obviously for very low data volume per month but I am sure that if you buy hundreds of thousands of these SIMs and in addition can make money off your customer’s data it will pay for itself.
Historically, a bigger concern than data volume (which as you say can be limited to some very low levels like 1MB/month or even much less; telemetry in phones runs to 10s or 100s of kbytes per day) has been number exhaustion. Here in the UK, the telcos aggressively killed off PAYG SIM cards used in low use applications (burglar alarms etc) and while there are workarounds (e.g. I did a product which sent an SMS every 2.9 months to prevent expiry) they are only temporary, until the telco kills data usage and allows only voice, etc.
I guess with the number of new cars with telemetry, this has been addressed. Maybe there is no number associated with the card.
johnh wrote:
My little Zoe with the insane and silent acceleration is actually ‘fun’, as much as driving is fun in the first place.Are there ANY modern cars that are fun to drive (excluding exotica like Ferrari etc)?
Airborne_Again wrote:
I wonder how…Come on, we all were young once and the backseat is as good as any other place.
Peter wrote:
Does anyone know who pays for it?
The manufacturer sells the car with something like 3 years of data and cloud services included. Then the owner pays (to the manufacturer), ostensibly to get cloud services from the manufacturer (including OTA updates), but that also gives the manufacturer income to pay the telco for other data transmission, like telemetry. Whether:
I’m not actually 100% sure
And telemetry is the price you pay for a usable satnav.
The $85 forever installed satnav in my ‘new’ 2021 car is not connected to the internet and works adequately well. I generally use Google Maps on my company phone if I need traffic info or high fidelity directions, the same system I use in Europe on the motorcycle.
I’m not aware that the manufacturer ever stops sucking data off your late model car unless you make them do so. It’s interesting to imagine if they’ll still be paying to do so after say 25 years – my wife’s daily driver is that old and most new car owners are not paying to be connected to the manufacturer in any way.
Silvaire wrote:
I’m not aware that the manufacturer ever stops sucking data off your late model car unless you make them do so. It’s interesting to imagine if they’ll still be paying to do so after say 25 years – my wife’s daily driver is that old and most new car owners are not paying to be connected to the manufacturer in any way.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a car sold today would just stop working after 15 or 20 years. Maybe it won’t be totally dead but at least crippled, maybe it’ll still drive but will continuously sound an annoying warning tone to remind you that a critical (for certification) component has stopped working because it’s software license or crypto certificate has expired. It has already happened with all kinds of cloud connected gadgets where either a company went bust or wasn’t willing to pay the running costs for their servers any longer. Sonos and Nest and some others come to mind, and of course smartphones. Car manufacturers have to guarantee availability of spare parts for at least 7 years IIRC, that’s it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a car sold today would just stop working after 15 or 20 years
Or just the “avionics” have worn out. I had a 2003 Audi TT VR6 that I absolutely loved in the US. I had to sell it when we moved back to France, but it already had gradually advancing senility – various dashboard functions no longer worked correctly. The garage told me that the dashboard computer needed replacing. It would cost about $12K but it was irrelevant because Audi wouldn’t supply them any more anyway. The day it was collected, the remot eunlock stopped working. I’m sure that another few months and it would have become undriveable and good only for scrap.
So I guess that in 2050 sought after vintage cars will be older than 2000 or so because the newer “collectable cars” will have died. While my 1965 Jaguar has plenty of issues, I doubt that the electronics will wear out, because it doesn’t have any – not so much as a diode.
