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.
vehicle … cloud
Flying cars sure turned out differently than we imagined in sci-fi.
Why are you buying things you don’t own?
Sooner or later that might be your only choice.
Get a ninth gen Corolla and you’ll have no problems
Can’t find any near me, I’d have to fly to another country to get one that’s not full of rust holes and decommissioned due to failing safety inspection which doesn’t allow for perforation.
it bricks permanently.
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
We need a Stop Killing Cars movement
I counter: [email protected]
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.
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…
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.
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.
We’ll see if we get to, given how controlling corporations are rapidly becoming over necessities of modern living.
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.”
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.
With OTA updates eventually they could FORCE you into buying a new one.
I hate the privacy nightmare cars are turning into.
Or it’s just incompetence, short sighted planning to please the shareholders
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.
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/
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.
Yup, lost a battery to that (2019 Impreza). Pulled the fuse for the modem, and it’s been fine ever since. I never used (or wanted) any of those features anyway.
Yep. My toddler hit the starlink button recently. Absolutely killed my outback.
Crazy the bull shit I had to do to start it again.
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
You buy a new one so the c level can buy another yacht
I’ll never but 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’ve never seen a car like this. Mine was made in 2021 though so I must have caught the last
shipcar out lol. What kind of things do cars even use the internet for? I’m struggling to imagine itYou’re getting downvoted, but I’m in the exact same position. Car made in 2021, no connectivity at all. I cannot start it remotely - why would you do that? Is it really more convenient than turning a key or pressing a button once seated? I guess people really do like it, I just find it hard to imagine.
Starting the climate control from a distance sounds comfortable, the first few moments of driving can be too hot or cold.
I don’t have a built-in GPS, but if there was one I don’t see a benefit of using my phone to control it.
Windows? What?
You start it remotely if you don’t have a preheater. Not that idling is great for a car engine, but at least you’ll have clear windows by the time you get in the car.
In the summer you can use it to have a cold car to sit into.
Remote climate control doesn’t work on ICE vehicles without Remote start or auxiliary preheater.
Remote start, even if from the FOB, is a life saver where I live. Leaving the car out on a 90⁰ sunbath and just getting in the car is pure torture.
Yeah it seems strange to me, but it must be popular for some people.
People here often assume I’m being disingenuous or acting in bad faith, I’m not sure what causes that to happen though. Maybe it’s the way I type?
Posted 38 seconds ago and already downvoted. You might have a downvoting bot following you.
I remove my own default upvote from my comments because I’m a weirdo. Maybe that contributes? People see it’s already at 0 votes and join in?
Edit: in my client I can see both up and down votes separately. So in this case it’s a controversial post with currently equal up and down votes
I am so going to follow your weird moving forward. Didn’t even know I could do that. I’ll downvote this one manually now and go search for that setting.
Edit: that will teach me not to get on Lemmy before having coffee. My brain thought that was a setting in Voyager. Thanks for this anyway, I’m going to (try to) remember that until it becomes muscle memory.
To add, my vehicle (2011) has its date display (as in the date & time) no longer accurate because it’s somehow integrated with the GPS, which has since stopped updating the date, and cannot be set manually. I now keep a little clock in my car that has the date on it to make up for the loss. It’s not that big of a deal compared to what others have mentioned, but it was still a shock to me when I found it.
Wow that sucks… in my car the time is off by an hour half the year because I never bother to update it for daylight savings. I assume it keeps a timer running somewhere to keep it on track
Remote start, lock/unlock doors, HVAC, windows, and alarm for basics.
All things that have worked just fine on cars for like at least a decade before the internet was ever invented. You are describing the exact functions of a key fob. They can even open the truck without the Internet!
They make it go through an app and a cloud service on purpose these days so they have an excuse to upsell you on a subscription.
Not all brands sell these features as a subscription.
I chased this up with Ford over my car. They said we get them for free for the life of the vehicle, and as long as the 4g it needs to work exists. That’s got atleast 10 to 20 years left in it.
Some don’t sell them as a feature immediately. I think Toyota has an 3-10 year ‘free trial’ for some of their services. So one day your decade old car will just behave differently unless you start paying for the subscription.
Crap like this makes me want nothing to do with service connected vehicles at all. I don’t want to have to dig into all the software policies and durations for every brand I might be interested in a model of. You absolutely can’t trust what a salesman says at the dealer. I’ve shown them in writing that what they just told me was a flat out lie on multiple occasions.
The vehicles in my garage are currently 10-57 years old. People replace vehicles far too frequently.
I’ve never seen a fob be able to set climate controls. Either way, I’d rather control my own cloud for the car through home assistant
The closest I know of is some VWs and Hondas allow certain click patterns to do things like roll down all the windows or open sunroofs maybe.
Accords and Passats I think maybe Jettas have done it for decades.
Same for remote start. Which my 10 y/o Subaru does with a fob and as long as I set the heat to the right settings before getting out, works a treat on subzero mornings.
Some high end models of years and decades past had a fob with a little lcd display that acted as a remote for the heating and cooling.
That’s exactly what I use remote start for. Just leave your car set to 68 or whatever and then when you remote start it will come up or down to temp. Even on my cheapass Chevy that’s 10 years old I can remote start it (including the HVAC) and also hold the “unlock” to start the defroster. Now I can’t actually change the temp the system is set at without getting in the car, thats true, but that’s a real edge case for me when I can just leave it set at room temp pretty much year round. Even the seats and steering wheel will heat up if I left that on beforehand. But maybe you do have a real need to tweak the temp and A/C values on the daily where you live, rather than just have the car resume where you left it at, I wouldn’t know.
That doesn’t need the internet though right? Like a button on your key fob would achieve the same effect?
I have two cars made after 2020. Both have a phone app where you can set the internal climate settings in the car. You wouldn’t practically be able to do that from a keyfob.
Both also allow remote starting from the phone, with a setting for how long to let the car run before it turns off again. From a keyfob it’s normally set to 5 minutes with no option to change it.
Both are quality of life features that aren’t really required, but I do use them pretty regularly. If the internet stopped working on either car, they’d act just like any older car that didn’t have those features.
nah, pretty simple. set the preferred settings in the menu in the vehicle, then have a fob button to activate it. flash the lights to signal acknowledgement, just like locking and unlocking.
although maybe don’t actually flash the lights, since everything is stupidly over bright LED now and it’s rude af to be using those unnecessarily
Wow a whole app just for your car? That’s pretty fancy. I don’t see the appeal personally, but going by the vote ratio I must be in the minority. I like my stuff to be simple
My car has a timer to set the cabin at a given temperature by a given time, do you know if your car has a function like that?
That’s not the same, though. I don’t necessarily know what time I’m going to be done eating dinner when I’m dining out. I can start the car from my phone while I’m waiting for the check, though, even if it’s a block away.
It’s done with your phone without line of sight or proximity of your car. The cars with built in security cameras, you can also remote view as well. I don’t know of any fob with a TV screen on it.
GPS, telematics(the driving data your car collects and sends back to the automotive company who built it), over the air updates, some SOS style features like OnStar, maybe satellite radio.
Edit: Maybe apps, and stuff like updates to the onboard owners manual (because some cars don’t come with a paper one anymore). Oh. And using your phone as a key.
Sounds like I’m not missing much lol. I just use my phone for that stuff
keeping the navigation database up to date is one. no way to update maps in my Taycan without paying $27 a month for Porsche Connect, which I have never paid.
and I dislike relying on Android Auto given the surveillance inherent in enabling it. it’d be nice to not have fucking subscription navigation maintenance
Not sure why you think Google would exploit your navigation data but Porsche wouldn’t. I guarantee both are finding ways to make a profit by bundling and selling the enormous amounts of data users are feeding back to them by using their systems.
I’m not saying I trust Porsche at ALL with my data. Far from it. In fact I at least trust Google to have better software engineering standards, even if their software is inherently surveillance evil bullshit.
But I haven’t been able to confirm that Porsche actually DOES log and exfiltrate location or navigation data. Certainly not in my Lexis Nexus report, and there’s been nothing I’ve seen reported about them when a bunch of other automakers have been called out for selling surveillance access.
What I do know is that Google is confirmed to be doing so. Unless I’ve missed some reporting or leak, I can’t confirm that Porsche is collecting, exfiltrating from my car without an active data plan, and selling GPS and nav routing data from it.
Oh for sure, I just meant for those people that do subscribe to Porsche Connect, Porsche is very probably finding some way to monetize all that sweet sweet location and navigation data. I feel like any car that generates telemetry data and has a data connection to the manufacturer, those companies are packaging up and selling off that data to someone. But that’s really just speculation on my part.
Problem is, even tho I don’t subscribe, the data connection is still there, and it’s still used to deliver some OTA updates, and a recall on the battery involves some remote monitoring that, so even tho I don’t subscribe I still don’t feel entirely safe from being surveilled.
I’ve thought a bunch about seeing if I can just pull a fuse and kill connectivity without killing anything else, but the battery recall thing is reason enough to avoid that for the time being. Besides, Flock (and other) surveillance cameras popping up everywhere are such a bigger problem anyways that it kinda kills my motivation to bother
I was mentioning this issue with my weird little car in another thread.
My car is old enough that it uses a 3g radio to connect to the internet so that things like the NissanConnect app will work. I don’t know how many 3g towers there are, but the app functionality definitely doesn’t work. The rest of the car works fine, all the accessories work, but the app doesn’t.
The car is a 2018, which i think is before the push for subscription heated seats.
As a side note, heated seats suck, I don’t get the appeal. It makes me feel like I’m wetting myself.
What car is it?
I don’t want to dox myself, sorry
What? 🤣
I’m curious what you would pick today if you had to.
Something from 20 years ago
Yep… that’s what I was talking about
I guess I assumed we were talking new or newer cars.
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.
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.
The 2029 Slate Wagon, Vaporware Edition
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‽
Slate Auto: “Cloud? Oh, you mean that completely optional telematics thingy that’s intended more for business fleets! Yeah, that’s excluded by default on our vehicle.”
“Don’t be evil…” - Google
Y’all don’t learn.
I preordered one. I think I might see how to use meshtastic to add remote start. Should be able to have bidirectional status and huge range.
You have my attention… but with Meshcore and a repeater magnet mounted to the roof.
a repeater magnet mounted to the roof.
What’s a repeater magnet?
Meshcore uses a Repeater & Companion Node setup where as Meshtastic is more peer to peer.
Here’s a quick video showing the concept I had in my head.
The magnet is the antenna mount type, but I personally would use one of the roof rack screw points, to act as structure and a ground plane connection.
It’s an electric truck. You don’t need remote start.
I presume you mean remote climate control.
Yes but Kleenex and Google. Its a generic term for turning your car on away from the “start” “ignition” button.
Sort of like the gas pedal in my leaf.
…but they’re building a fleet truck…?
It’s crazy that “local first” has to apply to cars now.
