I LOVE HAVING CAR DEPENDENCY. I LOVE PAYING FOR LESS EFFICIENT TRANSPORT AND ALL OF MY OWN MAINTENANCE AND FOR THE PRIVILEGE OF HAVING MY DATA SOLD. I SPEND EVERY MOMENT NOT DRIVING WISHING I COULD BE BEHIND THE WHEEL AND DOING NOTHING ELSE BUT FOCUSING ON DRIVING WHILE ON MY WAY TO [CONSUME] AND MAKE DATA FOR [BRAND]. PLEASE, NO PUBLIC TRANSIT, I LIKE MY FREEDOM THANKS.
I have zero desire to own an Internet-connected car wherein I can’t “own” it without abiding by the rules set forth by the auto manufacturer. BMW recently killed their subscription seat heaters but who knows what Egon Smells is cooking up at Tesla.
In my defense, my 13 year old car died earlier this year and I needed a new car fast. I was completely unaware these systems had gotten as bad as they have until after I bought it.
I figured we’re not going to have much choice in the future. We’ll be driving cars under End User License Agreements that already send tons and tons of data about us back to the manufacturers.
As much as I love technology, I hate the way it is being used. Car companies don’t make enough money selling cars so they need to collect and sell driver data? It’s dystopian.
They make plenty of money, they just want more money
Capitalism requires obtaining more capital than ever every quarter or you’ve failed as a company. They’re getting to the point they have to violate the customers privacy in order to chaise ever growing profits
Capitalism only works in a growing company in a growing market. Once you’re reached a plateau it maxes out your client base you can’t go any higher other than artificially.
Hey friend, you are not the one who needs a defense, IMO-- You’re just the end user caught up in the nonsense. Enjoy your new car as best you can, and just make decisions that make the most sense for you.
Don’t you love it when it makes you read a disclaimer and click “accept” literally every time you get into the car if you want to use your infotainment center? Who’s the asshole who came up with that brilliant idea? Whoever he is, fuck him!
My Subaru and every other car I’ve been in the disclaimer goes away if you don’t click it. I have clicked accept in two years.
Our Honda puts up a notice that essentially says “I understand that I need to keep my eyes on the road”. Yeah, no shit, Honda. But what’s dumb is that it won’t go away until you tap accept, so it ends up causing you to have to take your eyes off the road and pay attention to this stupid disclaimer screen if you forget to close it before you start driving.
There are electric cars built by corporate oligarchs that are not Nazis. More disconcerting you missed that memo.
Egon Smells
I dislike the guy as much as everyone else but i really wish this stupidist name bullshit would die.
Shit like that annoys me as much as “tRump”.
I despise him, hope to never see him near DC again, and will be happy to see him found guilty. But when you say things like that it just makes you look stupid.
“tRump” is just lazy.
It’s not lazy… It’s extra effort to intentionally show one’s disrespect for these despicable motherfuckers.
Sometimes the updates aren’t even worth it.
Toyota said my prius needed an update so I installed the app for it. All the update did was remove fucking features that were usable in the car. Used to have the option to use Pandora from the console but it got removed randomly by an update.
Then they installed an Alexa search page that glitches my console if I every select it.
Basically I’m saying FUCK TOYOTA
For bonus anger.
Amazon pays Toyota about $1 per vehicle that Alexa is installed on.
So you made Toyota an extra dollar for your pain.
Where the FOSS cars at?
Exactly. Just slap a few electric motors on those wheels and maybe an inflatable horse for the lulz and you’re good to go.
I really REALLY hope someone at some point starts a gasoline to electric car conversion company at some point.
I love my car because it has just the right amount of technology: Bluetooth connectivity for calls and music. That’s it. That’s all I need.
Yup. Unfortunately, since most people seem to prefer the dystopian futuretech, all auto manufacturers are going to employ it. Just like with cell phones. The last phone I know of with 16:9 aspect ratio and no blighted hole punch or notch was in 2018. There’s a market full of us luddites who prefer the old ways, but we’re invisible to manufacturers because it’s more profitable to make something that more people want to buy, and we’re forced to buy that garbage as well anyway.
Honestly, I figured that they collected data. But I didn’t think the extent of it would be stuff like my sex life and genetic data. How the hell do those work?
They track you and then different kind of tools are trying to profile you based on your data. Similarly how ads work on the internet. Saying your car collect data of your sex life more like means they collect absolutely everything about you and then they run it through different software to profile you then sell all this data for extra profit. If you daily drive to a school they will assume you have a family and kids. If you go to a random apartment complex once a week after your kids went sleep they will assume you have a mistress. Its all based on location data and the stuff you enetered during registration.
I’m guessing if you talk about that stuff in your car, it send that data home.
Oh that makes more sense.
My mind went to a completely different approach, collecting your data when you fuck someone in the car. Length of sex, moaning volume and pumps per minutes is what I was thinking of.
Now we all know who is a bubbler and who blasts ropes
Hahaha I like that idea better.
While I like driving. I hate all the shit modern car manufacturers put in modern cars. Sure they’re more efficient on fuel than older ones. But we should be able to have that without needing the car to be tracked and data collected, we have in the past.
I feel like all these driver aids are also making people worse at driving. They need to do less, so they pay attention less.
On top of that, can we ban touchscreens in cars? Physical buttons give physical feed back, you can feel for the button you want and press it without taking your eyes off the road. A touchscreen gives you none of that, and means you have to look away. It’s somewhat mitigated when they put buttons on the steering wheel, but not all buttons can fit in that spot.
Sure some cars have google assistant, Siri or Alexa. But I actually get so frustrated when trying to tell my phone to navigate somewhere or just simply change the song. And that’s just the phone! The amount of times I have to pull over because it glitches out, or just fails to interpret some or all of what I’ve just said (sure it’s better than voice assistants used to be, but it still breaks regularly) is still too high. The amount of times I regularly tell it to do something, only to find it was still processing the activation voice command, and therefore was initialising the VA screen, and not listening to a word I said after the initial activation is infuriating.
I love technology, but the technology has no place in cars if it detracts or distracts from the act and safety of actually driving the car.
/Rant.
Which car manufacturer ? So that I can avoid it.
This looks like a Subaru. That being said, from what I’ve parsed, their privacy policy looks better than most. My 2021 hasn’t had any obnoxious OTA updates. The worst it does is push easily dismissed service notifications. No secret codes on how to reset a light.
How does this update even happen? Are owners connecting their car to internet?
It is a Subaru. I know it has a radio in it but I don’t pay for the service. I actually don’t know if it’s using its own radio or the connection on my phone. I’ve had the car for most of the year and this is the first update I’ve seen. It took about 10-12 minutes. As I have no patience, sitting in my driveway waiting for it to finish drove me nuts, but for the most part it was painless. It’s definitely something I don’t want to have to get used to.
All of them, soon enough. Light bulb companies realized a long time ago that selling quality products is a self-defeating game, you want either planned obsolescence, or sell a “service” through a permanent subscription model.
Light bulb companies realized a long time ago that selling quality products is a self-defeating game
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
(☞ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)☞
Yes really. Educate yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
Edit: shit I didn’t see that was a link!
After watching it, my point very much still stands. That video is completely misconstruing the whole argument.
You can’t download a car, but you sure can brick it.
I’m waiting for the day we have linux cars
It’s not Linux, but there’s an open source project available where you can build your own engine ECU with an Arduino https://hackaday.io/project/4413-speeduino
My car is the same. I want to install a map update in my Ford, but it’s 22GB and according to the manual it’ll take 1-2 hours.
Why tf would a map update be 22GB? What is it, a CP2077 patch / DLC?
Map of world, and world’s language packs so you can use voice instructions in any language.
Which will be useful to roughly four or five people out of their userbase!
Literally downloading the map of the entire world.
Why the fuck would the engine be on?
To ensure that the update process finishes without interruption due to weak battery - if that happens it can brick your car. Tbf you can also just connect the battery to a power source and keep the engine off. Depending on update and car updates that take a few hours are not unheard of
This is such extremely poor engineering that it throws me into a rage. There is nothing to prevent them from installing the update in the background progressively while driving and then just switching to the new version in one swift atomic operation (like changing the name of a directory) when it’s ready
That’s additional work. Easier to tell people to run the engines.
“Please do not turn off the engine during installation”
Tell that to my empty gas tank.
That’s the most ridiculous part to me. Why isn’t this able to continue off the car battery? It should be do not disconnect car battery if anything. I hope there’s some sort of fail safe to prevent it from bricking that doesn’t involve a factory reset or dealer visit.
I’m extremely curious what would happen if I just shut it down and left it as usual while it is updating but I’m not ready to test it out yet. Lol
So that sort of happened to me on the previous gen of this infotainment unit.
I used the app to turn on the car and it keeps the car on for a short time, I started the update but it took way longer than I expected and the car shut off halfway through.
It seems to me that the unit is kept in some low power standby mode, when I turned the car back on, it just continued from where it stopped.
This might be “unpopular opinion” territory - but I kinda like that my car is better now than it was when I bought it. 🙃
(Due to over the air updates.)
Depends on your definition of “better”.
Lots of OTA updates remove features only to replace tem with something less user friendly.
I’m sure the manufacturers love all the new data they can collect on you every update
And this entire post is why i will never own a car in my life, miserable pieces of junk that you pay thousands and thousands for so they can spy on you and make your life worse.
Mopeds are just better in every way that matters, if i need to travel further than that i’ll take the train.
Buy an old car idiot.
Still thousands of dollars…
Even better, buy an old car then convert it to an EV.