Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Just get whatever car you want, disconnect the cell network antenna, and connect that wire through a resistor to ground. The car will forever think it's outside of cell signal range and will operate with none of the connectivity features, none of the spyware, none of the 'emergency' controls.
There's maybe still a bit of concern about your car preserving data on its internal storage that you'd rather it not preserve, but other than that, this is a simple fix that solves all the 'car is too high tech' issues. If you don't know how to do it yourself, I'm sure you can find some independent mechanics who will do it for you.
Ah congrats, not only have you voided your warranty, but your insurance company now refuses to insure your vehicle, and it cannot be legally driven.
That is where this is headed.
Where it's headed? Maybe...
But that's definitely not where it is now. A small, reversible modification like this won't void your warranty in any meaningful way (unless you then go in to make a warranty claim about your connectivity features not working). And no insurance company is going to care whether you've disconnected the internet connection antenna -- even if they wanted to ... how would they know?
The insurance companies already have dongles that "give you a discount" (read: price-gouge anyone not using them) for snooping on your driving. I'm sure they're very excited for that functionality to be built into all cars so they have an excuse to make it mandatory for providing coverage.
Insurance wants the data so they can use it jack your rates up and have even more excuses to not cover claims.
I bet they got a failsafe for that too. Like 2 weeks to a month later, you get something of a hard fail error that shuts everything down and forces you to contact the manufacturer for maintenance...
Possibly, I suppose. Nothing is stopping them from doing that. Though it would be a huge dick move, and it might end up exposing them to a lot more warranty claims than they planned on if something goes wrong with that 'car kills itself if it goes too long without cell signal' system.
Like ... suppose a perfectly normal owner leaves his car parked inside an underground parking garage or a metal shed while he goes on vacation ... and then comes back a few weeks to a month later and finds out that his car won't work at all? Now the dealership is on the hook for towing fees, half an hour of technician labor to reset the system, and maybe even the use of a loaner car for a day. That potential cost seems to really outweigh the 'benefit' of preventing any owner from purposefully disconnecting their car.
Anyway, if you somehow end up with a car like that, then you might need to be a bit more creative in the solution: instead of connecting the antenna wire directly to a resistor, you'll need to connect it with a 2-way switch. One position on the switch connects it to a grounded resistor, the other position connects it to the original antenna. Then you just have to remember to occasionally turn the car's spyware on for a few minutes every month or two, just long enough to reset its internal self-destruct timer. (Though it is possible that it might be collecting data while disconnected and then sending that collected data once the connection is reestablished. In that case, this isn't a very good solution, though it would at least prevent them from fucking with you in real time.)
Media players for cinemas have something broadly similar - if a clock in a media board drifts too far (outside about five mins) it requires a tech to hard reset it. You get two of these a year.
Outside that it permabricks $20,000 of equipment and you can go fuck yourself.
There's probably a fuse you could just pull instead that shuts down that entire system
Possibly... But it's likely that the internet modem is integrated together with the car's radio head unit, or at least pulls power through the same fuse. Since it's fairly unlikely that they have a single fuse that only powers the cell connection, the fuse-pulling approach is likely to disable other things as well, possibly some pretty important things.
Going after the antenna wire ensures that you only disable the internet connection, nothing else.
I'm doing both. I want these systems totally offline. If I could, I'd tear them the f out of the car entirely. This shit is evil.
Fwiw your second paragraph is reality. Mechanics automatically upload the stored data when they jump through the licensing and computing hoops to clear codes, update serial numbers for replacement parts, etc