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Imo, the only solution is every device with an antenna must be legally required to put a manual off switch.
Cell service, wifi, Bluetooth, any future service. If it broadcasts it needs a physical off switch.
If I sold my car to a government official and they found out I had hidden a camera, microphone and GPS in the car, I’d get a visit from the FBI. Yet companies do it with impunity. Does the CEO of Subaru have recordings of Bernie Sanders driving in his car?
The current generation of the ford mustang Mach-e has its mobile telemetry cellular antenna wired to an isolated fuse that you can just pull out to kill it. I was astonished to learn how straight forward the process is supposed to be.
I don’t trust that they won’t save the data and upload it during a servicing.
That’s a good point. A Lemmy user claimed that happened to him with his Ford.
A link would be better than hearsay
I don’t know why you care. It’s still hearsay because as I said, it was another Lemmy claiming it.
And each type of communication needs it’s own switch. Don’t let them pull some BS trying to make you enable all the hardcore tracking via a cell network just because you want to connect to Bluetooth.
its* own switch.
For phones, Pinephone is very nearly this. The only thing is that GPS and cell service are on the same switch (because they’re handled by the same chip on the board)
There’s always the carefully applied soldering iron.
If only I knew where.
Right to the temple of anyone who decided it was OK to do this kind of data collection.
Somewhere in the piece of plastic we somehow call a car. They don’t make them like they used to
They sure don’t, cars continue to be safer, more durable, and require less service every model year. The median age of the automobiles on the road gets older every year.
I’m not that nostalgic. Everything about my new car is better than my older cars. My 2023 minivan has a better 0-60 than my old V-8 Mustang while getting 2x the MPG. The only thing that is bad is the tracking.
For phones, Pinephone is very nearly this. The only thing is that GPS and cell service are on the same switch (because they’re handled by the same chip on the board)
I hope people realize that the solution isn’t really to just not buy one, especially since this is the way the industry is heading. The solution is regulations, strict regulations.
Stuff like this should be a slam dunk for congress but we all know which side they are on.
Agreed. It’s really hard to understate how ineffective “voting with your wallet” can be. The fact is simply that nobody honestly cares. Even if you get 100 people to boycott a company, would 100 out of millions of consumers really make a difference? Of course not.
And of course, you always have cases like this where everybody does it. Same thing goes for TVs - if everyone spies on you, the only real solution is to not have a TV. Yes, I know there are exceptions here and there, but bad practices like these force buyers into making compromises that they shouldn’t have to. Capitalism should be predicated on companies offering the best product to earn their income. It should not be about companies having the least bad product and trying every terrible thing that they can get away with.
(Of course, we all know that capitalism is a farce.)
Well you are voting with your wallet, the only problem is you’ve been out voted. Honda makes good automotives and part of the “price” now is people giving them their data. People just don’t understand/care enough to not want to buy a Honda. If this were really a big deal to people it would open a place in the market for new automotive companies like Rivian, Lucid, or Polestar to gain massive ground by not doing this.
This is an education issue. We need to inform people about the dangers of a lack of data privacy. If they still don’t care, then so be it.
If they still don’t care, then so be it.
it’s not that they don’t care; it’s that they don’t understand the impact it has on their life and i’m convinced this is true of everything.
I’d say a little yes and a little no. I educate every new user that comes into my company on infosec awareness, with a big segment on data footprint and information leakage. I show them where their data is, how easily and with how many ‘channel partners’ share social, history and other data, and where they’ve been exposed in real time. I’ve done this with a few thousand people. The overwhelming majority say: “I’ve got nothing to hide.” Or: “if I get better deals, it’s fine.” not getting that by being tracked they’re probably getting worse deals.
For the “nothing to hide” folks, I ask to see their wallet or purse. They’re all scoffs and brave mugs initially as they show how unafraid they are as I start rummaging through at the front of the class. Then I start pulling out cards and ID. And they’re still OK as I glance around the room. Then I pull out my phone and tuem my back - then a lot of nervous shifting in seats starts happening as I look over my shoulder while taking pictures of the floor with the shutter sound turned on. That’s the point where I ask if they truly have nothing worth protecting.
And at the end of all that - after setting up and teaching them how to use the comped corporate password manager, 80% still make passwords that they’ve used before. THE SAME DAMN MORNING as these exercises.
I don’t think people care. And they certainly don’t know. But they don’t want to be bothered by the nuance of it all. It’s just too much, which is why we need a congress with a goddamned backbone to pass some legislation with teeth to protect customer’s data.
Did you just read the last sentence? Lol. AFTER proper education about the risks of lack of data privacy, if they still don’t care then so be it.
The thing is, nobody can be educated on everything. It’s impossible.
Nobody can know every part of a supply chain, how every aspect of everything they buy is made or how it works or the ramifications of all of that.
It is impossible for a person to do this stuff.
This is why regulations need to be part of the equation.
I agree that people can’t learn everything about every market. But what people care to learn about and pay attention to counts for something.
Imagine your friends are trying to decide on a place to eat. You suggest a very healthy restaurant where all the food is listed with ingredients and their source farms. But then someone says, “Eh, I wanna save money. Let’s do Taco Bell.” You explain that that’s an objectively worse decision. That food health is really important. That in the long run, eating unhealthy actually costs more in medical bills. But they decided to go to Taco Bell.
Putting your foot down and demanding the healthy option might objectively be the “right” choice. But in reality, they’ll just get Taco Bell on their own time and resent you for taking their choice away. People have to be presented with the information and decide for themselves or they’ll just resent the institution enforcing the choice.
But people’s choice won’t be taken away. Honda will still exist even if they have to abide by stricter privacy laws.
If educating and voting with your wallet actually worked, we wouldn’t have needed laws to put seatbelts in cars.
You can’t vote with your wallet when there is no choice. Companies will not willingly take the risk of reducing revenue.
A system with the goal being best or even optimal for all involved would never be called capitalism, even if capitalism didn’t exist.
Even if you get 100 people to boycott a company, would 100 out of millions of consumers really make a difference?
There’s definitely an economic impact to a vehicle looking or driving like shit. And I’m sure you’ll see some amount of consumer migration higher than 0.01% of the retail base.
But there’s also a lot of obfuscation, deception, and outright lying in the automotive sales industry. So its less a question of “Will consumers reject this feature?” and more “Will consumers even be aware of this feature?”
Capitalism should be predicated on companies offering the best product
What happens when the retail customers have be commodified? What happens when the product is Surveillance and the real big money clients are state actors and private mega-businesses that benefit from tracking rented vehicles?
As we move closer to a full Service Contract economic model - one in which individuals don’t really own anything and have to continuously pay to access even basic features of their home devices - I can see a lot of financial incentives in the system that preclude car dealers from leaving these features out.
Imagine a bank that simply won’t finance vehicles that can’t be tracked. Or a rental company that won’t add vehicles to their fleet without these always-on internet features. Or a car lot that uses continuous tracking to manage its inventory.
Very quickly, the individual consumer becomes a secondary concern relative to these economies of scale.
yOu ALwAyS HaVe A cHOiCe, sO It’S oKaY!
I read somewhere that the thought that you can vote with your dollars makes you feel good and empowered to make choices, but is overshadowed by the fact that doing so means that whomever has more dollars has more votes.
Regarding Congress, I was really hoping that this big fear of TicTok would result in some sort of GDPR type laws which empower the individuals to take control of our personal data, which could also be used to prevent our personal data from being used against us by foreign countries.
You made the mistake of believing TikTok was anything more than a paid hit by other Social Media corporations.
You’re saying that it was a threat to the incumbents who then sent their lobbyists to demand a ban in the name of national security? It’s plausible.
I’d be pretty confident that it’s not. There have been lots of companies that show up in the space, and they haven’t been clobbered by other companies via the regulatory process. Those haven’t been owned out of China. Those companies aren’t gonna care about the ownership of a competitor.
And the US went to extreme measures to ensure that China didn’t control 5G infrastructure via Huawei, considered it security-critical, and the competitors there are out of Europe, Ericsson and Nokia. And the US did some local restrictions on Huawei phones (and two other state-owned Chinese phone companies) being sold to military members at bases, but not on other Chinese competitors.
And there are a number of prior restrictions that the US has placed on companies owned out of China company. For example, I know at one point a Chinese holding company bought a solar farm directly overlooking a US naval weapons testing facility and the US mandated that the owners divest.
Like, agree with them or not, I think that it’s pretty safe to say that the US government has very real security concerns specifically about Chinese companies.
I mean, I can believe that Google is probably enthusiastic (is “Youtube Shorts” the closest equivalent? Maybe there’s someone else who does similar things), but I don’t buy that Google fabricated this. If that were the case, you’d expect to see a bunch of prior China-related restrictions, but would expect to see a lot of Google-related restrictions, but what one actually sees is the opposite.
So you think personal use carries the same weight as critical infrastructure? The government has a legitimate interest in protecting the power grid and Internet back bone. It does not have a legitimate interest in telling me what I can put on my personal devices.
TBH ending car dependency is a major part of any long term solutions. We should “regulate” this violent and planet wasting catastrophe out of existence replaced with rational and sustainable infrastructure.
I’m all for reducing the number of cars on the road but IMO this is a poor attitude to have to a problem that exists right now and is ballooning out of control, but has a very easy solution.
Moving away from cars will take a long, long time. Infrastructure doesn’t come from nowhere, and some places are so sparsely populated that public transport can be a very difficult proposition, or even an impossibility. Those places in particular will be stuck with cars for a while. Banning predatory data gathering on cars can happen right now if there is the political will to do so.
I know it’s easy for some to say “well I don’t care, fuck anybody who drives a car, they’re evil and I don’t like them. Why don’t they simply be rich and buy a house in a city where public transport is usable?”, but I think everybody has a right to privacy, and the default shouldn’t be for our tools to spy on us and report it back to the OEMs. Particularly when a lot of car drivers don’t have any choice but to drive!
You can work on strengthening public transport while at the same time improving privacy laws for cars. It’s not one or the other.
Not to mention that even if everyone were to switch to public transportation, you’ve still got the issue of RFID cards that track every trip you take on the system. Far cry from subway tokens for privacy concerns.
Then your E-Bike is going to require an online sign in every time you want to use it.
Cars are far from the only product that is actively destroying individual privacy in the name of corporate profits
Reducing the number of cars doesn’t fix the root problem.
The solution is regulations, strict regulations.
Regulation by whom? Dems are already deep in bed with the automotive industry and Republicans hate the government on a purely ideological level.
Who is supposed to write (much less enforce) these regulations? Nobody in government wants the job.
The solution is -besides regulations for that - have governments push for much MUCH more bicycle roads and same for public transportation. With great public transportation and bicycle roads, most people won’t need cars to begin with.
I mean, if we are imagining government doing it’s actual job, isn’t it easier to pass regulations then to change how North American cities work?
Like I support walkable cities, I’m just convinced (majority of) regular people don’t actually want it.
They don’t want it because they haven’t experienced it. The Dutch used to be super car-dependent, and now they’re known world-wide for good infrastructure, and it improves every year.
The problem is we keep getting half-measures, like a few lanes here and there, and maybe a cycle path for recreation that doesn’t go anywhere interesting. We need a big investment into infrastructure to show people what they’re missing. But when all you have is a hammer (car), everything looks like a nail (more lanes).
My area is super car-dependent, but people love our train infrastructure and want more. But we only want that because we were essentially forced to build it to host the Olympics (I’m near SLC). Before that, we paved over a lot of our tracks because cars were getting popular, and that was before we had any traffic issues. Now that everyone needs a car to get everywhere, traffic sucks.
Well a few things there:
1: yes they want it, most people don’t know what they’re missing. Everyone always asks me why the Netherlands is so friggin nice when they go there. Limit cars, bignoaet odnthe answer
2: even if they don’t like it, we’re at the point of “do or die”. Climate change keeps beating expectations in that it’s always so much impressively worse than expected. Just now I read that CO2 dumping into the atmosphere actually is increasing, we’re actually making it worse faster. Soon we’ll be at the point of “where do we get fresh water” and “all our crops are dying”. Then the wars start, not for “I want that oil of yours” but “I want that food of yours”. It doesn’t.need to be that bad, we still can fix it if only we wanted it.
3: bicycle infrastructure and public transportation infrastructure is so so much cheaper than all the car crap we’ve been building for the past 7 decades. Cheaper to build, cheaper to maintain, It’s quieter, it’s healthier, which lowers healthcare costs for nations, it’s prettier, cleaner and solves an enormous part of climate change. If only car and oil companies could stop
bribingpushing our politicians
In the USA, that boat sailed long ago… most cities are too spread out to pedal anywhere
My city is just too hilly. Cycling around is one thing, and they just put in new bike lanes (they’re not good ones, but still), but doing that with a grocery run or 60lbs of cat food and litter? No thank you.
Wife and I bought e-assist bikes, it makes it so you don’t really have to work much even when youre carrying groceries
Weight speeds you up downhill more than it slows you down uphill. The trick is to not coast - keep pedaling downhill, use the momentum to get up the next hill.
Wat? The law of conservation of energy tends to disagree. Commuters are generally starting and ending at the same elevation so there’s no trick. We’re not going to convince anyone to carry heavy loads on bikes by saying “pedal more downhill to smooth out the power requirements if you hate grinding it out on uphills”, the answer is just ebikes.
I’m just relating my experience - when I was younger, I commuted 20 miles round trip every day, and I worked at a bike shop with weenies that were always trying to shave weight off their bikes, so I did whatever I could to add functional weight (so no filling the tubes with lead, that would be cheating) including building up a dually, two rims side by side on a Sachs 3x7 hub. My average speed was higher when commuting (lots of rolling hills, but overall uphill in the morning, downhill going home) than it was on days off, when I was mainly riding around town where it was flat.
And it certainly wasn’t because I wanted to go to work…
I appreciate your lived experience, but at the same time the rest of us will seek answers in basic physics concepts, none of which help explain such phenomenon. Is it possible you just got stronger or subconsciously tried harder because you wanted the heavy bike to be faster? Did you add weight but also make sure your bike was well tuned? Tire pressure and a greased chain go a long way. I certainly agree that the weight weenies can go way overboard though.
Nah, it’s never too late. All you need is the will, the rest will come.
We cannot stop collecting data about you because collecting the datum that you want to stop having your data collected failed.
I wonder if the situation in Europe is different, where such bullshit is illegal.
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How dare they have an election system that lets them elect politicians that are actually doing what the people want instead of having to choose between bad and worse! It must be some forbidden knowledge for sure.
Don’t get your idealism in a frenzy. The EU has been passing some interesting privacy laws recently, but politics is politics and the EU isn’t immune to lobbying, corruption and incompetence.
Still way better than the US, i’ll give you that.
We have the same choices
We shoulda never left for Plymouth Rock!
Are any of you even able to afford new cars? Who the hell’s buying this shit? I probably won’t have a new car ever.
Also mind that soon these new cars will be used cars with the same bullshit.
Buying a new car never really made sense to me even when you could afford it. 2 - 3 year old model is effectively brand new but a lot cheaper. Why pay more if you can pay less?
Mostly social signalling
Fuck social signaling.
2 - 3 year old model is effectively brand new but a lot cheaper.
I’ve always heard this, but where is this actually true? When I bought a Camry like a decade ago, I could get a brand new one for $19.5k or used ones with 50k miles on them for…$18k. so yeah I paid the extra 1.5k to not have to deal with potential random shit.
When my wife bought her car a few years ago it was a similar situation. The only used cars that were “a lot cheaper” had like 100k miles.
Total new vehicle sales has remained roughly static for a little less than two decades. So yes, people can afford new cars.
For most, they can afford to finance them, but the rates aren’t looking too good lately
https://www.statista.com/statistics/290673/auto-loan-rates-usa/
Well yeah, they follow the prime rate.
Yeah rates alone have made financing a new car pretty stupid. Save as much cash as possible and spend within your means
It made sense to me when I could take advantage of a tax credit for EVs in 2017. Now that car companies/dealerships simply jack up prices to eat that discount, it doesn’t make sense even in that case.
Yes
People are buying new cars. I’m guessing it’s mostly leasing.
People who have a college education and well paying jobs.
✅ well paying job
✅ Dropped out of college and went full time
I have a college education and a well paying job the monthly payment on a new car has doubled since I bought my last one in 2020. No way am I buying a new car at these prices/rates.
Fair enough
back in my day Spock had small hair
With my last raise I’m over 130k a year and I still don’t buy new cars. My 2010 Audi is still running just fine.
That’s great, but the question from that OP was “are you able to” and your answer should be yes. I make less than that and I definitely am able to. But I’m waiting on the market to correct first
Though it also depends on how you define “able to”. Like I could fit a car payment in my budget but it would eat up most of my disposable income and I’m not willing to give that up, even if new cars weren’t so enshitified. I bet there’s a lot in this “technically capable but it would be a stupid financial move” group.
That’s probably a sound decision
I feel like not buying a Honda would be a pretty good way to opt out. In fact since the majority of car manufacturers are doing this bullshit I feel like simply not purchasing a new car is a great way to opt out of this.
Plenty of older not smart cars that are perfectly usable or fairly easily restored no reason to go dropping the money on a brand new one that’s not only a privacy disaster but a repairability disaster on top of it.
I think my favorite is how almost all new cars now come with a sealed transmission with absolutely no way to replace the fluid in it with the claims of it being a “lifetime fluid” there is no such thing as a transmission fluid that can last and do its job forever, what they mean by LifeTime fluid is that it will last long enough to satisfy the warranty. And what they have deemed should be the usable life of the car.
Shit I hadn’t heard about that sealed transmission thing, that’s fucked up. Transmission fluid replacement seemed pretty important on the maintenance schedule of all the cars I’ve had
It’s been happening for a long time, even some cars is far back as 2012 have a supposed lifetime fluid. Although they at least still have the drain bolt so that you can say yeah that’s cute and do it anyway. But lately the drain bolt has gone away and they are completely sealed meaning you can’t change it even if you want to
Just today I said goodbye to my 2012 chrysler minivan because of the “lifetime sealed transmission.” Now Chrysler minivan transaxles have always been garbage, this is known. But mine said in the owner’s manual, “lifetime, sealed transaxle” “no fluid fills or dipstick.” I worked at a Chrysler shop and asked the service manager - “nope, don’t need to do nothin’.” OK, all good.
Yeaahhh… That’s not entirely true. 160k on the odo and it lost the desire to ‘go’ in drive (no forward progress in drive despite the little engine trying it’s best), a hell of a scream coming from the engine bay and a light show of errors on the dash. Limped it home and the code reader said that gears 1 & 3 had a “ratio mismatch” which should only happen if they lost teeth, and a couple others I don’t remember. Figured it was scrap. Had a mechanic friend look at it; he popped off a tube, fingered it a bit, sniffed it and said to try changing out the filter and as much fluid as I could. Did that, dropped about 5qt in (with no goddamned dipstick, how do you tell how much it needs?) and the thing ran great for another 3 months. Until today when it started making the whining noise again. Dropped it off and said goodbye.
Fuck “sealed” transmissions. Sorry, I had to rant. I loved that van - no tracking, had a Sirius radio that has 50 song and 50 artist alerts and 300gb on board mp3 storage, and the 2 screen DVD system (great for parents that don’t want their kids on tablets but still want to occupy them on long trips)
I believe Honda started this in the early 2000s because they found that transmissions were compromised at earlier mileages at a much more frequent rate from leaks, bad fluid changes, or missing the intervals, than were actually failing from use. So they designed the cars for how they were actually being used and maintained. It’s kind of a non-issue unless you’ve got 300k+ miles on your transmission, at which point you’d expect to potentially replace it anyway.
Cars are just catching up to HVAC systems… In the last 3 years I’ve had to replace both inside and outside fan motors because their (maintenance free) bearings failed.
It’s sad that you can’t replace the infotainment unit in a new car with an aftermarket unit anymore. I imagine 10 years from now we’ll have a fleet of cars with outdated infotainment systems that can’t connect with whatever future version of bluetooth/carplay/android auto anymore. Imagine driving cars with giant but useless infotainment screens that can’t do anything but playing mp3 off a USB stick because its outdated system can’t connect to your new phone.
can’t do anything but playing mp3 off a USB stick
i’d rather that then spyware
Playing MP3’s off of a USB stick is literally all I do with my car’s stereo, and in fact all I want it to do.
i like the police warnings and the apps that automatically look for a better route in real time when there’s traffic; which means i’ll be keeping my already 16 year old car until i die or parts run out, i guess
Car infotainment systems have always been outdated.
As long as it can play tapes, I’m okay. Still using a tape adapter to connect my mp3 player :)
Haven’t seen a new car that can play tapes in nearly 20 years. Got bad news, boss.
Yeah, I hear you. I’ll settle for an aux port when I get a new car…
I got bad news for you, boss…
I replaced my car’s stereo with one that had an auxiliary 1/8" stereo jack.
Aux port is precisely what I’d look for when getting a new car. Even though by the time I do, perhaps my last Sansa Clip mp3 player will be dead and I’d get a new model with Bluetooth.
I don’t have to imagine, because I refuse to buy such type of car.
What happens when all new cars do this and the older used cars dry up? We need laws to prevent this, but i just don’t feel like that’s going to happen unless China is the one doing the data collection.
Let’s start our own company!
useless infotainment screens that can’t do anything but playing mp3 off a USB stick
i had a similar thought a while ago and it feels like we’re regressing back to the 90’s
I liked my recently departed 2012 chrysler infotainment system quite a bit. The sirius/xm radio kept 50 favorite artist and 50 favorite song alerts, had 300gb of storage for mp3s and the DVD system with headphones for the kiddos while we could listen to something else. No newer car I’ve driven, borrowed, or owned had the favorite alerts, and I’m going to miss the hell out of that feature.
Oh, it did have an aux jack and USB input as well. It was the cat’s ass. For a grocery-go-getter, it rocked
Yeah, it was almost a rite of passage in my teen years - getting a decade-old used car and immediately replacing the crap factory system with some overmarketed, overpriced, but really cool kit. Of course nowadays the factory systems are better sounding at least, but you’re spot on regarding the out dating of software and protocols.
It’s even worse when you have a new-ish car that can handle any size USB stick, but will only load the first 8000 files it sees…
Yup, sadly you just have to replace the entire car. You certainly can’t attach an entirely new system with speakers and everything to any surface inside the car, just impossible.
I do agree that it’s not good, but it’s also going to be far less of an issue than you think.
Who wants to buy / drive a 10 yo car though…I feel those get shipped to the 3rd world anyway where people have different needs than the latest connectivity
LOLWUT, I only buy cars that old or older. Why would I spend an absolute fortune on a new-ish car that I barely use anyway when I can get a perfectly reliable older car fir a fraction of the price?
My current car doesn’t have an infotainment system or any kind of connectivity. It has a 6 slot CD changer.
And if you want connectivity or infotainment you can just install an aftermarket system, still not anywhere as near invasive as new cars integrated ones
i’ve learned the hard way that the aftermarket makers have learned that planned obsolescence makes them more $$$ and going for similarly aged infotainment systems work longer than many of the new stuff
I have no experience about more complex infotainment aftermarket systems but if it can connect to android and add functionality that way they not obsolete as fast. But pretty much all tech nowdays has planned obsolescence which sucks
Have you seen a car lately? Whist I’m sure it could be taken out (leaving a raggedy, jagged, odd-shaped hole in the dash…) you’d lose half the functionality of the car with it. These aren’t the single or even 1.5 DIN chassis of yesteryear, and I doubt Crutchfield has a conversion kit that’s going to replace the dash elements, backup camera, steering wheel controls, climate control, vehicle information center, and, for some bizzarro-world reason, the instrument cluster setup options.
I really can’t stand the modern "everything’s gotta have a big-ass tablet interface with no tactile landmarks. Particularly when I’m hurtling down a narrow corridor in a 1.5 ton metal box and trying to avoid hundreds of other idiots doing the same.
Bring back buttons!
We were talking about old cars with high likelyhood of DIN size standard radios.
But you are not wrong, car manuafacturets started to make uniquely shaped radios and later infotainment systems that you pretty much can’t install aftermarket ones, and having all controls in the single unit is dumb, and touch screens are even dumber, i never want that to my car. I love my buttons!
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Who wants to buy / drive a 10 yo car though…
I do. Less built-in obsolescence, let spyware, less vendor lock-in. More durability. Ain’t ditching my '97 Fiat anytime soon.
add to that list better gas mileage than most new cars of the same type and i feel the same way bout my '08 ranger. i’ve had to upgrade the infotainment system 3x already because of the planned obsolescence built into them.
My '14 RAV4 is amazing. Gimme CD player or give me death!
The very same model, yes.
So along with all those positives you listed, the big negative being it’s a death trap.
Yes, newer cars are safer, there are tradeoffs. No, older cars aren’t deathtraps but you can collect your comission from Honda now.
Dude im driving a 33 year old car as my daily. Sub 100 thousand miles and gets better mileage than quite a few modern cars, gotta love government fleet cars. Anyways take your classist shit and shove it, just cause you can and your ilk can buy a new car every other year doesn’t mean most people can, will, or want to.
Buying is the first mistake. I’ve never done it, I don’t know anyone who has. Leasing is the way. A depreciating asset like a car is the perfect thing to lease.
Leasing is you paying the estimated depreciation of the lease period. The 1st 3 years is when a car depreciates the fastest and you have nothing to show for it.
That’s all rentals, just much much cheaper than a true rental. And no, leasing rates are completely flexible and much more goes into them than just a basic calc of depreciation. I’m not here to say that all leasing offers are great, probably most are bad and screwy. But if you look for a while you can find great lease offers. For example if a new model of a car is about to be launched, the maker will try to get rid of all their stock of the previous model. Like happened with the Audi A4 a few years back.
Coming from someone who sold cars via a dealership (sorry): leasing is a perfect way to get fucked in the ass every day of the year, and twice on renewal day. Yes, it is a titled asset. Yes, it has a depreciating value. BUT - the only way leasing makes financial sense is: 1) you can expense the lease payment to a self-owned business (and it needs to be a pretty big percentage), or 2) accept that you are paying a gobsmackingly large amount of money to eat the absolute shit out of the depreciation you’re seeking to avoid, only to do it again in 3 years, for the ability to drive that new car off the lot on the regular.
Yes 1. is the norm and of course you have to look for good offer and not just get the first one you see - same as with buying. For example, I used to lease a $90000 car for $240 / month with no money down, and including all-risks policy. It’s almost too good to be true, but possible because the maker had a “lease our cars” campaign running when I was looking for one. Meaning this price is subsidized by the maker for marketing reasons for a limited time. But I had to compare offers for about 1 week and had to be flexible with the choice of car, if you want to lease your “favorite car” regardless of campaigns and special offers, then it’ll be too expensive as you say.
You’ll have to pardon my skepticism on that claim of a $90,000 lease for $240/mo, even subsidized to the moon. Combined with the earlier statement that they were all employer-provided.
Never said all. Used to, and current, are different things. Also I’m not living in the 2nd world but a country with consumer rights.
Depreciation is a myth. A car is a tool not an investment. And if depreciation is a real worry for normal people then why do houses not depreciate? They don’t last forever. In fact on average they only last 50 years. But their prices never go down. Not until they get condemned. Why doesn’t the price on a 5 year old car go up instead of down? It’s got 10 more years in it easily and it’s proven not to be a lemon.
But you know what the real insanity is? Paying 400 dollars a month for years for a car with extra restrictions and then having to turn it in or pay even more to own it. Subscription cars need a lot more consideration, like full warranty, maintenance, and insurance for the entire lease period. Upgrade deals at the end. Because the way it is now you’re just giving shit up to keep paying a corporation.
I’m not paying the lease, the company is. Don’t know anyone who pays for transportation
Where the fuck do you live that everyone drives company cars? Where I live the closest ya get is company trucks with the water or electric company.
The only place I’ve heard of everyone in the company driving company cars was in California, a water manager was stealing water and selling it on top of some other scams. He spread the spoils around to keep people quiet it took over 20 years before he was caught.
Tanzania
So you have a company car. And you think that’s normal?
It is where I live?
“Americans are keeping their vehicles longer than ever. According to new data from S&P Global Mobility, the average age of cars and light trucks on U.S. roads is a record 12.5 years this year. That’s up three months over the 2022 analysis.May 18, 2023”
and here i was thinking that i was ahead of the curb with my 16 year old car because it gets better gas mileage than most new cars of the same type.
Ahead of the *curve…
Good troll.
I don’t think I’m going to ever buy a car made after 2020. Maybe earlier. None of the new features really appeal to me, and there are a lot of things like this that actively turn me off from wanting a new car.
If they could just give me an electric version of a 1985 VW Golf I’d be happy as a clam. But they want to put me in some lumpy, heavy, clumsy CUV with tracking technology and all the touchscreens and I don’t like it.
EV conversions are definitely a thing. And the Golf platform seems to actually be one of the most popular.
After a quick Google, it looks like there are even some premade kits for the Golf specifically, even with installation available. Although I can only find UK/EU links quickly. May be more built-it yourself in the US.
For those who haven’t yet bought a Honda:
- you have the option to buy from alternative brands to say fuck you using your wallet
They’re basically all doing it, so make sure to research who is doing it the least.
Or at this point, the one whose tracking is easiest and safest to avoid or circumvent.
How easy is the telematics unit to remove and whether disabling it affects the functions that are important to you.
The only car makers that give data deletion options are Dacia Renault:
Only two - Renault and Dacia, which are not sold in North America - offer drivers the option to have their data deleted
Good news! Has the time finally come for us to buy a Dacia Sandero?
10-15k for a new car where do I sign up?
I’m never buying a Honda again after buying a 2018 Civic model. Less than 10k on it when I bought it and the A/C went out. There’s an issue with the condenser on the 2018/2019 Hondas. They offered to pay HALF of what it’d cost to fix - I’d still be out more than a thousand. And from research online, apparently the replacements tend to fail too.
Pretty much every time I see the same model I ask if the owner has AC. They always have the same problem. It’s going to be real wonderful driving when it gets to the 100’s this summer…
So we were told: “it may be covered by this recall, if it’s the parts that are covered by the recall that are the cause of the loss of A/C. If those parts aren’t the reason, it won’t be covered, and the diagnostic to determine that would then be $1,000$.”
So we have to take a $1,000 gamble to see if our 2018 car is covered under a fucking recall. Fuck Honda in the ass with a rusty anchor.
And yet the AC still blows cold in my 2004 Honda that’s not ever had the AC serviced… Sad to hear Honda reliability is going downhill.
2018 civic owner here. Had the same issue with the A/C. Has anyone else had the paint flake off on the mirrors/door handles?
Damn that’s unfortunate. I had my 2023 Honda for over a year and a bit over 20k miles. Been lucky so far that everything works fine, I’ve driven it up a mountain a couple times when I’ve gone camping too.
Simple, just buy a new Honda… Motorcycle /s
18 crv checking in. Have it now.
You can opt out by simply not buying one :)
Remember when gov’t banned Furbies (sp?) in some places? Seems like they would make the same decision for a lot of people in important positions regarding their car purchasing.
I’m sure they’ll have a separate government configuration. I’m pretty sure they already do for fleet vehicles.
I guess when/if I buy another car, I’ll look into gov’t fleet auctions.
Pulling the fuse that includes OnStar at least keeps it from calling home. But there’s usually some collateral damage.
What kind of damage?
Personally I’d call that a safety issue. A few years ago my wife and I were driving a rental car that was rear ended on the highway by a drunk driver. The impact caved in the left rear wheel and spun us 360 degrees across 3 lanes of the highway. Within a few seconds of coming to a stop an OnStar person was talking to us, asking if we were ok and confirming our location.
We had no clue ahead of time that the rental car had one of these services, but at that moment we were very happy it did. I honestly have no idea about the privacy ramifications, etc. but having been through that experience I’d think long and hard about disabling it outright. I do take my privacy seriously, but I’d have to weigh that against the safety of me & my family in that kind of situation and disable it only as an absolutely last resort… Just my own personal $0.02 on the matter.
I think my car only came with a free trial for that service, I think you needed to pay after a certain amount of time. Cell phone works well enough for me.
sadfsdfasfasf
I estimate that the probability of injuring my arms and that no one else is around to call for help is low enough to not be worth the monthly subscription.
sadfsdfasfasf
I just take rentals for vacation.
Low probability, high salience. Know the difference.
I judge based on probability and severity, and the probability is small enough even though the severity is high for me to not be concerned.
You’re not alone on the road.
It’s incredibly unlikely that you’d be in such a bad accident that you couldn’t call for help; while simultaneously being isolated from the public to the point nobody saw your accident and started calling ems/police before you could.
That’s not to say it doesn’t happen; but I definitely wouldn’t be worried about it.
You obviously don’t live or drive in a semi-rural area at night with larger wildlife that tends to dart across the road in front of cars. All it takes is hitting a deer or javelina hard and going into a ditch.
sadfsdfasfasf
Playing devil’s advocate, in a crazy accident you may not be able to get to/reach your phone, or even be responsive. If you use the personal assistant function on your phone, it’s no different than using OnStar, in terms of privacy.
All of this said, last I heard OnStar was pretty expensive for the average household income. I don’t have it, and I don’t worry too much about it.
With how everybody and their mother have smartphones in their pockets, I wouldn’t be too worried.
Depending on the crash you could be unable to reach for the phone.
No! I mean everybody else! Someone else is going to call for help.
That depends a lot on where you drive. I’ve been in situations where, if I had hit a moose, there would have been no one around to call for help except the moose (assuming it had survived the collision, but they often do if it’s a smaller vehicle). That stretch of road didn’t get many passers-by on snowy Sunday nights in January. Maybe a half-dozen vehicles an hour. Combine that with poor visibility, and it could have been a long time before someone noticed and called for help. Fortunately, I never did have an accident along that stretch.
Of course, if you’re only driving in built-up areas or along major transit corridors instead of in awkward parts of northern Ontario in the middle of winter, your chances of having someone call in for you are much higher.
Does OnStar even work in far out regions like this? Is there even any cell reception? If not then that point is pretty irrelevant.
And if it’s so far out, would emergency services even arrive in time to save you anyways?
Don’t make life choices based on outliers
A hammer is great for hammering nails… and heads.
Humans, eh?
OnStar never knows where you are. It only knows where YOUR CAR is.
Think about it and decide whether your car’s privacy is worth the cost.
Oh, true. Luckily I never go anywhere in my car so none of my positional data will correlate with the car’s.
My car microphone stopped working
That one is easy: do not get a new Honda.
Don’t buy a new car, there, FTFY.
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I think there needs to be more government involvement and protection in how data is collected
There’s plenty of government involvement. They have access to this data, they can either buy it or simply request it. They don’t want to go back to the days of the pesky 5th amendment standing in their way, that’s why this will never be regulated out of existence.
you should use the term government regulation, not involvement.
The us government LOVES being involved in our lives.
I’m missing something. How is the data actually collected? How does it get out of my car? My car doesn’t have any cellular features other than CarPlay. It has wifi, but I’ve never used it.
Potentially when you put it in for a service, could also be using bluetooth
People take their cars to dealership garages? Fuck that noise lmao
I hear you, but wiith new cars its often a condition of the warranty to use official dealers
It seems a lot of the new ones have a cellular modem. On the surface it’s to let you remotely access the car or do a remote start. Even if you don’t pay to subscribe and use it for your purposes they can utilize it to transfer out the data.
Cellular is usually how the vehicle provides Wi-Fi, it is effectively just a cell hotspot like you would get from a ohone carrier, but tied into the vehicle. So I think that would be the common way they get the data out.
