Why the sideways fuck did they even have location data to begin with? It's like the checklist for buying a new car starts with figuring out what circuit drives the cell modem and pop that fuse out before taking a test drive to confirm it doesn't brick anything critical. Fucking ridiculous.
Repo isn't a customer's concern and is thus irrelevant. Incidentally I walked to the window and I can see where my truck is without my phone. Is there really no limit to the bullshit folks will allow themselves to be convinced to install on their phones?
Those are mostly things that require the car to know its location. They don't require that the car share the location with the car's maker except possibly sharing what region the car is in.
The region sharing might be needed to efficiently update things like the map and the speed limits.
None of that requires cellular connectivity. It can and was accomplished using only wifi sync at home. Live traffic information is (was?) broadcast on AM radio.
was it ever AM? info I can find points to traffic info being encoded in FM broadcast, as "audio" but above audible frequencies, 57khz, same as any metadata you get with modern digital radio - station name, song name, artist name etc.
Oh! Maybe it was FM. I always thought it was on the same band as the "Tune AM <whatever> for traffic information signs" but as you say outside the audible frequencies. Regardless the point is that the relevant information can be broadcast publicly and does not require location or cellular connectivity to function. My 2010 BMW knew about traffic jams but had no cellular connectivity to my knowledge.
It had the ability to call emergency services. But I don’t think it got map or traffic data through the cellular radio. If it was getting data through the cellular radio it wasn’t very much data.
