As a bicycle and old motorcycles user I am gobsmacked that so much people accept that the vehicule they are using is connected or regularly phone home to the manufacturer. I guess if you share all your life on facebook and instagram, why shouldn't you also give away all your errands to any third party.
Is there at least a license agreement you are showned at and have to agree to upon delivery? Can you operate those vehicules offline by choice?
It may be preferable to have some automated system that fines you for excessive speeding versus the alternative: police with guns. At least in the United States.
I don't like this type of advice as everyday technology gets more evil. It's shifting the blame to the consumer instead of the makers of the evil, and it's nearly impossible to follow. I'm a software developer/tech nerd and couldn't tell you which cars do and don't track you, and we expect the average purchaser to know..? It's not like the window sticker will say 'hey this car tracks you', that detail will be in the middle of a 30 page dense legal speak document that almost nobody reads.
It's very similar to when a large food conglomerate does something terrible and people try to boycott. I'm completely aware of the terrible things food company x did and try to be at least somewhat informed with my purchasing, but food company x has 50 subsidiaries who have 50 subsidiaries, etc. I don't know about you but when I go shopping I don't have all day to google on my phone if the specific product I'm looking at is 4 levels down from evil company x. And I have a relatively large amount of free time in my life at the moment - it's a completely hopeless endeavor for someone with kids or other responsibilities that significantly cut down on their idle time.
If only our government would step in and you know...stop companies from getting away with evil things.
I am not really surprised people don't care, they mostly want technology for either status or convenience and I don't think I can blame them for the latter
I do know you can drive the car while the computer is rebooting (when it's rebooting the screen is completely black and you have to gauge your speed by comparison to other cars the road), so in theory it seems you don't need the computer for basic driving, which would suggest maybe what you say is also possible, if there's a setting for it.
I haven't checked because I like the benefits of being connected — starting and stopping a charge remotely, seeing the state of charge while it's charging somewhere far away, opening / closing windows, unlocking the car, flashing lights or honking horn to locate car, preheating, and coming soon, seeing car's location on a map when it's being driven by someone else, viewing live dash cam (sentry) footage while the car is parked remotely, etc. etc.
I mean I do see your point but I've listed some of the benefits, and life is full of tradeoffs. I'm not saying that the takeoffs that work for me would ever in a million years work for you.
It would also be great if all of the above could be done through a neutral third party or through one's own server. But as a startup that was struggling at the beginning, that probably wasn't the low hanging fruit for Tesla to work on, and there are benefits for Tesla to having the connection be to Tesla. And some of those benefits accrue indirectly back to consumers through safer cars, better accountability for accidents, and better data for future self driving software.
> seeing car's location on a map when it's being driven by someone else, viewing live dash cam (sentry) footage while the car is parked remotely...
I'm concerned these features in specific may be used by abusive spouses to track and control their partners (or extract revenge upon them). It's honestly pretty grim when you can't even use the "shared" (abuser likely would be the sole 'owner' on the title) vehicles to escape an abusive situation. Any upside of this kind of feature is very must overshadowed by the abuses enabled.
Additionally, I'm sad that if I do something stupid in a parking lot (say I fall and hurt myself) that the video can be recorded by any number of vehicles and posted to facebook/youtube/etc for yucks. Nothing can be done about it, there's no way to stop it. I hate it, though, and I hate that people are excited for these terrible slipshod "features" that won't help them as much as they hurt others.
Agree about the abuse / tracking thing. Again, tradeoffs. Keep in mind these cars get updated over time and it can get better.
Management of driver profiles
is still a work in progress for example. Some things work great and some features simply aren’t there yet. For example I have issues with music handoff between two different drivers on one family Spotify account (where each driver has their own Spotify account using their own distinct email). They could easily make it so that it knows by phone proximity which driver is in the car, and play only their music, but they haven’t gotten to this yet.
Anyway, in addition to stuff like music profile improvements, I’d expect privacy options to get better too.
The parking lot thing, I don’t see the harm really until the day when the likes of Google has a car gathering these recordings.
At least with the tracking, thieves are now using Apple Air tags to track and plan carjackings. With a Tesla, so much focus being on the app and connectivity, it is more likely that a person would be aware of this tracking or at least the capability of it. FWIW my wife knew about the location finding, she just had never actually followed me driving around.
She found out when I used it coordinate a birthday surprise at our place, I could tell when she left her office and was about 30 minutes away.
Why would I want so? I want to warm up/cool the car before i get into it, listen for the music without plugging my phone every time , have a decent gps that is free, notify me about traffic, tell me if the charging station i'm going to is busy, alert me if someone is breaking in into my car. Heck I can even check the camera's from my App so I don't need to run if this is false alarm. I can even say something to this person to scare him away before he/she broke the glass.
Thank you but no. Tesla sales are skyrocketing because people want smart car that makes their life easier, safer. Legacy car makers also trying to keep up with trend.
It's a typical misconception. You were young back in the days the car didn't have all this amazing features. Not having this features doesn't this car magical just because of your sentiments about you been young. Driving a dumb car will not make you younger either.
I'll surprise you, most of tesla owners pay extra money ($10/mo) to have a better connectivity. Not the other way around.
For me it's about control. I'm fine with having whiz-bang features on my equipment, so long as I am the final authority on anything and everything about them.
About a year ago I took my fancy EV on a ferry. I kept it on and ran the air conditioner because it was hot outside. Partway through the crossing I guess the suspension sensors interpreted the boat rocking as "something is seriously screwed up," and it locked the brakes and wouldn't release them when it was time to disembark. I had to sit there in my fancy EV looking like an idiot while everyone filtered around me and I took another trip across the water with cones around the car.
When I frantically called the dealership in the middle of all that, they said, "Sorry, your car has decided that it isn't safe to drive. You'll have to get it towed in so we can take a look at it. Oh, and since you're on a ferry, our roadside assistance won't help you. Good luck!" When I asked the ferry staff what I should do, they replied, "Uh, usually we just ask the owner to shift into neutral, and we push the car off." Only the car decided for me that this wasn't a possibility, and the brakes remained engaged with no way for me to disengage them.
The next thing I did after I finally got back home was research which cars I could still buy today with manual transmission and an emergency brake attached to a lever and a cable. It's not at all about holding onto my youth. It's about being the final authority over my own goddamned property.
it's a problem of your car brand, not the EV's. My EV still has neutral. Let me guess, you probably choose a legacy brand EV car, that has no culture on how to buy electronics, because you know I can trust this brand better since they are so long on the market. The same automatic problem could be on the car with manual transmission nowadays. Since they all required emergency braking and many other items are mandatory e.g nothing to do with EV itself.
> it's a problem of your car brand, not the EV's. My EV still has neutral.
True that I bought a brand that doesn't have a long history of EV tech. However it does indeed have a neutral button. It's just that after throwing itself into some exception state, "shifting" into it by hitting the button on the console would highlight the "N" letter as if it acknowledged my "request," but some logic in the car simply refused to actually fully execute my "request" to shift into neutral. There was no "STFU and do what I say; I don't care what your logic thinks about the situation" because the product managers and/or engineers who built it had the hubris to believe they had thought of everything and there would never be any need for that mode of operation.
If I can physically pull a manual transmission stick into the neutral position and release a brake cable, my car will roll. After my experience on the ferry, I no longer want any software logic at all being able to prevent my car from moving when I want it to move. "Just find a car brand that has better logic that you can probably rely on" isn't the solution I'm looking for. Software systems in cars are way too complicated, and there will always be corner cases. I demand a failsafe manual override. I am the one driving the vehicle, and I make the ultimate judgement call on what it does and doesn't do.
One car I found that has manual transmission and a pull-lever emergency brake is the 2021 Subaru Crosstrek. The manual transmission Crosstrek reportedly doesn't have EyeSight, and hence there's no automatic emergency braking (AEB).
Imagine you live in Texas, there is a massive power failure that also affects cellular towers and the car you need to use to save your live does not work because it is so smart online, but too dumb or not working at all offline. Then pay extra 10$ for that.
There was a story of some rental car that couldn't be unlocked again on some remote parking lot, because it was out of range. The customer did nothing wrong. They ended up having to tow the car in the end, if I remember correctly.
With actual possession of vehicles going down, in favor of leases (or leases-to-buy) and short term rentals/"ride-sharing", and with ever more permanent monitoring, the future seems to go into a direction where you're required to have a constantly available data connection in your car back to the car company or lease company, and they will be able to remotely disable access if you don't pay up. And they will probably consider loss of such connection as "tampering" and disable the cars until it gets online again.
There's a difference between owning something or renting it. When you rent something, there's a contract you sign that specifies what you can and can't do. You generally expect the owner to have the technical capability to enforce the contract in case you breach it. But when you own it, then no one else should retain any sort of control over it, period. It's yours only. (You obviously don't own something if you got it on a loan, not until you paid it off.)
Agreed, but with DMCA (and probably other laws) our concept of ownership is gone. Any music one buys that has DMCA, isn’t owned it’s just rented, and yet most people don’t realize that. So there’s a precedence for thinking we own something when in practice we just rent it. I can see that happening with cars. For example the law that was just passed that new cars will have to come with alcohol detectors https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2019/10/16/bil.... Whether we think this would be good or not, it’s eroding our concept of ownership.
I'm specifically talking about the old-school, physical kind of ownership. Whether one could "own" infinitely copyable information at all is highly debatable.
> For example the law that was just passed that new cars will have to come with alcohol detectors
On the one hand, this is a welcome innovation because one is free to do whatever they want as long as that doesn't endanger others and drunk driving does endanger others quite a lot. On the other, if you own your car, what's to stop you from bypassing the detector like some people would bypass the seatbelt beeping thing?
I suspect that's what the OP meant. (I'm also not sure anyone sells digital music files with DRM anymore -- books and movies, yes, but not music. But I think it's kind of become cemented as the go-to example in a lot of people's minds.)
> But when you own it, then no one else should retain any sort of control over it, period.
Right. But there is another issue especially with vehicles... You need insurance to operate them on public road. And insurers like to monitor things now that the tech is available/becomes available...
And the current US government wants your car to monitor your "impairness" as well[0] and brick itself if it considers you impaired.
All the data is stored in the car and next time during regular service it gets transferred to the manufacturer using wired connection? Have no proof for that, but it sounds very reasonable and technically doable to me.
Well all my bikes are "muscular bikes" for one thing, and I build most of them out of spare parts. And I haven't jumped on the electronic shifting band wagon either. I don't necessarily see all these technos as bad but I spend enough time in front of my computer and I want my bikes to stay part of the analog world.
Is there at least a license agreement you are showned at and have to agree to upon delivery? Can you operate those vehicules offline by choice?