The size of the title on that article is insane on a monitor.
Anyway.
Companies are quick to flaunt their privacy policies, but those amount to pages upon pages of legalese that leave even professionals stumped about what exactly car companies collect and where that information might go.
Does anyone remember that report about the university researchers who studied one of these smart thermostats and concluded that you would have to sign more than a thousand legal disclaimers to properly consent to have it in your home?
Call me an asshole but I think giving driving habit information to insurers is great, so long as good habits are given discounts and bad habits are punished.
I'm one of those people who would love automatic enforcement of driving laws as well as user reportable incidents of other drivers (given you can provide footage of something you're reporting.)
If people don't like living under the law... maybe the law shouldn't exist. "That's the way it is" is a terrible excuse for fucking anything.
Oh, and make audit trails for this shit public record. Someone creating AI videos or fake reports? Punish that too. It'll never happen though. People want laws for others, not themselves.
who picks what habits are good and what are bad? who decides what happens to data beyond this? can you going to mcdonalds twice a day be shared with your health insurer? can you going to that rally be shared with the local police? with your landlord? are you comfortable with everyone knowing everything? because there's two things you do with data: analyze, and sell.
I mean they use the data to decide what actions are high risk. Someone tailgating and tapping their brakes constantly is inherently less safe than someone leaving proper distance.
Privacy theft, I get it. An opt out should always be available and easy to use.
If you truly have an issue with insurance deciding what is or isn't safe there are organizations that can take over that such as ASTM or NFPA.
Honestly it doesn't really matter what you or I are really in favor of when it comes to privacy and surveillance. Today we're already tracked everywhere. Data privacy is a nice idea and even with all the laws in the world there is no transparency to make sure companies follow them. Our car tracking us is annoying and all but we all carry these things called cell phones which have GPS in them and we keep them on all the time. How many people have apps like facebook installed which harvest all kinds of data and then sell it to whoever is willing to pay? Speeding is already going to be seen with just that data. Even if you turn all the tracking off on your phone the fucking cell company knows where you're connecting from and that data goes right into a little database in a three letter agency.
The US Government today can legally get whatever data they want from anywhere in the US and most of europe. Maybe not your local cop, but someone, somewhere, taking orders from the US government in the name of something like terrorism has access to everything. Corruption is everywhere and everything can and will be abused. Opaque systems like we have today only proliferates corruption.
Technological solutions can absolutely be developed that are transparent and don't give exceptions to cops driving personal vehicles. We absolutely can develop systems where senators, representatives and even billionaires are not above the law, but today in practice they essentially are.
But hey, like I said. My opinion doesn't matter. Yours doesn't either. We don't get any say in how this stuff works. The idea that enforcement of our laws might be applied consistently across the board is terrifying to people because we all do illegal shit all day long in our own little personal corrupt universe. We just want to believe the cops will stop "the other guy" more than us and that we'll be able to be smarter than the system. It's fucked and nothing will change. The owners of the US just want the cops there so they can punish the ones who act out in the order of things in a way that might hurt them or their friends and family, and that's how it's gonna work.
no thanks. i hate the entire concept of insurance (especially lawfully forced insurance). there's no way i want them spying on me.
there are parts of the west where there's not another car for miles. why should i be punished for minor infractions on a lonely country road when i put no one but myself at risk? this is the same as getting ticketed by a camera for running a red light in the middle of nowhere.
if the law and technology becomes a tool of oppression, it no longer serves a useful purpose for mankind.
i think that if i am going to be forced to purchase a product from the market, then the government should just provide the product. add the damages to my tax bill if i get in an accident that's my fault.
but don't make me buy shit just to function in society.
it's a scam. the money you pay in is always more than they pay out. it's a for profit industry that i'm forced to fund. it's a racket, no different from organized crime.
Our government will forcibly insure you if you don't have one, so technically you don't have to buy anything. It's just more expensive than anything on the market.
Yeah let's encourage citizens to report their neighbors for every legal offense, this kind of thing has always gone well throughout history
Say, I'm pretty sure I saw you invite a couple folks into your home the other day, and I never saw them come out. Oh would you look at that, the SS is here!
Similarities to fascism aside, this is still an awful idea. Have you ever dealt with automated rule enforcement? It's an awful way to enforce rules. But even if every single report had a human follow up on it, there's also massive, unprecedented privacy issues. You may be totally fine with my insurance company knowing where I am 24/7, but I sure as hell am not. I'm super not okay with a government (which we have) gaining free access to that information for anything they want (which they would). Oh hey, we're back to fascism
Your an asshole. I'd highly recommend looking into this topic, you might be a victim of it aswell.
If you have ever driven on the road, you would know that not everyone drives perfectly, and do not drive as other drivers expect them too, and shit just happens that we cannot control.
While we all share the same road, we do not share the same page. That leads to people needing to hard brake/accelerate quickly/ect,ect,ect. Or other things happen that requires a driver to stop/accelerate/serve. Where I live we have a lot of deer and moose, and they cause alot, and I mean ALOT of accidents.
Or if you have ever driven in a modern car, most of them will tell you the local speed limit, but sometimes what the car says is the speed limit, and what the legal limit actually is are different, so say your in a 70 zone, but the car thinks it's a 50 zone, the car think your speeding, when your actually not.
So anyways, what insurance companies are doing, are using the cars data and increasing insurance rates for people who have had hard breaks or "speeding" and other things that would make then a "risk". Insurance companies have no fucking clue why the car did what it did, but for them it's a reason to increase rates, when what probably happened was the driver prevented an accident from taking place.
Without absolute transparency and total accountability it's going to be abused, but we already live in a surveillance dystopia. Have you ever seen what happens to whistle blowers today?
I really don't understand why going EV seems to be synonymous with "collect all the data." The only differences should be in the drivetrain, and they don't need to collect any data to switch that to an electric motor from an ICE or Hydrid drive system.
The sad part is that manual transmissions are going away, which means I'm completely SOL if the electronics die. But I guess on the flipside, there's no transmission to break, so that's nice.
I think competition is pretty good right now, the main issue is range. Toyota is claiming to have much longer range battery tech in like 3 years (they've promised before), so if that materializes, we could see really compelling EVs in like 5 years.
I suspect that it's because they are marketed to be as much of a tech gadget as transportation. An iPad on wheels. So they figure that they can slip in this crap.
Yeah, and I really don't want that crap. I just want something to get me from A to B that I can fill up at home. Give me something cheap and reliable and I'll buy it.
I think there needs to be more government involvement and protection in how data is collected, shared, and consumed; however, I also think people don't realize that their perception of 'privacy' has always had the major benefit of being from the perspective of an individual that largely is unprofitable.
Many celebrities would very likely tell the public that 'privacy' is largely a myth and the reason their perspective is that way is because their lives, activities, and actions are viewed as profitable to someone. A lucrative paycheck from acquiring that salacious photo in a vulnerable position, etc is a big motivator, and if the celebrity gets mad at the paparazzi, there's even more news about how the celebrity lost their shit for all the world to see; however, if the celebrity embraces the media and tries to work with them to conserve what little 'privacy' they have, there is negative news about how the celebrity is fake or too controlling about their image. At the end of the day, these celebrities simply want to have dinner out with family or friends and they can't.
The general public isn't used to the idea that someone cares enough about every nuanced detail of their decisions that it would matter... but it does. Sadly, a celebrity must spend thousands of dollars to secure their privacy, and even then it isn't a guarantee... what hope do we have? In today's society we use debit or credit cards, but all of the transactions are data mined by the banks and privacy is non-existent; however, with cash you have some built-in 'privacy' because at its core it is not easily profitable to track.
And that is the point; Data collection is slowly bridging the gap between a celebrity's reality and normal everyday human perception of 'privacy'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My analogy makes it clearer to highlight a point. But you're right that Honda wouldn't shut down if these regulations are passed. But It could be that the companies they're partnering with are giving them a cheaper rate on infotainment systems for a cut of the data that's collected. If we made Honda produce two Civics. One that steals your data and one that is just $200 more expensive, then we fully educate people on why the more expensive version is better. And then they STILL chose the cheap data miner. Then taking that option away with regulation is wrong. I might not agree with consumers here. But the reality is that they might just not agree with us about what's important. Enforcing a choice because we "know better" isn't right.
If the majority of people come together to push a regulation because it's something we don't even want to consider when purchasing electronics, then great. I'm just not sure that's the case. And I think we get into trouble jumping to regulation on every issue because often what people say they want, isn't really what they want.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 bribing pushing our politicians
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.
The newer model CR-V doesn't need an app, it's just a toggle in the car settings. That icon at the top like the article shows is definitely annoying and I agree in calling it a dark pattern.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 saw elsewhere you're in Germany. Most countries do not have a rule requiring companies to provide cars for work. It's only available for executives or workers that often have to travel without being near a company office. That's why we're all so incredulous that you consider it normal.
There are no such rules here either but if a company wants to keep you from quitting, you have the leverage to get a car.
Most high level execs automatically get a car. Not required by law but just a usual part of the compensation package.
Ok, that fucken explains most everything. I dont know how folks over in Germany do things, but im gonna presume that theres a decently functional public transit system available in most regions. That doesnt exist here in the US for the most part, need to get anywhere you'll probably be driving, and if you need to guarantee that the vehicle will work then you will probably own your own car.
No, you're right, the US sucks in a large way, in many, many areas. What we're all a bit put off by, and maybe it's the time zone difference, or a cultural communication difference, is that we're having g a discussion, receive information that doesn't fit the pattern of our experiences. For example, and I'm not quoting your words, just how I received them: everyone I know leases, oh, and the company pays it, oh, and this is in Germany. This Information wasn't presented initially, and I suppose it is on us and our assumptions, but the reader had to sus it out over several threads and we are lambasted as insipid when we're not in possession of all the relevant data.
As stated, perhaps that is our fault. Maybe when first presented with an outlier claim, we should ask: "oh, wow - that's amazing - what country do you live in?" and that would promote a more upbeat dialog.
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.
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.
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.
"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"
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
I was just thinking yesterday what car I would get if I had infinite money and while I'm sure such one probably exists I couldn't came up with one that I'd like better than my -07 Nissan Navara. I mean yeah I would ofcourse do a total overhaul on it and add a bunch of offroad accessories and such but the truck itself basically has everything I need and switching to a newer one would just add stuff I dont want.
I like cars and trucks but I'm extremely uninterested in most of the new ones. Something similar happened with them as with smartphones when they turned from tools into fashion accessories you use to show off to your friends. Can't we just have ones that are decent looking and come with the basic necesary features and nothing more? I want it simple, reliable and easy to fix. I don't want a computer on wheels.
Must be. Reading the article, most of the problems the writer was having would be highly illegal in the EU. A company like Honda would definitely be aware of that
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.
There isn't much of an alternative. All major manufacturers have been doing this for a while, we are approaching the point where you'll need to buy and maintain a classic car to avoid this type of data collection. Unfortunately, most people simply do not have the time, money, and expertise to do that. Nor should they have to.
