I think antique car restoration and modernization is going to be a great business to be in for the next 20yr or so. At least the demons in older cars can be propitiated with minor rituals like a fetish hung on the mirror or the occasional blood sacrifice.
This shit is going to lead to hilarious scenes of cars flocking places because of a node.js bug.
edit: i forsee "car leashes"; probably something in the nature of a parking boot so make sure the car stays immobile or becomes nonviable. And there's always the trick of jackstands and hiding the wheels at night.
I was just joking about this with a friend, an engineer at Cruise. You don't pay and GM can tell the car to drive off. He laughed like it wasn't that far from the truth.
Uhm, it seems like the auto industry is still letting its imagination run away with self driving cars.
I don't see how a patent like this can be granted if we still generally don't have working self-driving cars. Even Tesla is getting forced to admit that "Full Self Driving" isn't really full self driving.
Not quite true. They will stop you from patenting a perpetual motion machine (typically by saying that you have not provided enough detail for someone to replicate your work).
Except they can only do that if a patent clerk (who is usually not a physicist or engineer) can TELL it's a perpetual motion machine. After millions and millions of patents, there are bound to be a bunch that should not have been granted, even if those patent clerks are 99.9% good at their job
Patent examiners (the modern term for patent clerks) have at least a bachelors degree in a technical field relevant to the subject they review. That might be physics, engineer, chemistry, or something else. Examiners are assigned to specific art unit (e.g. an examiner with a degree in chemistry might be assigned to art unit 1710 and spend their entire career examining patents for chemicals involved in "Coating, Etching, Cleaning, and Single Crystal Growth").
I'm sure some things do get through on occasion, but examiners are most certainly subject matter experts.
Patent examiners are being moved to a system where they are "automatically" assigned applications to review that may or may not have anything more than superficial in common. I've got a parent that's a patent examiner and they have been complaining loudly about the move because they often don't know much about what they're reviewing anymore.
That's not really true. It has to at least be plausible. Usually.
One exception that comes to mind is a couple of patents some physicist working for the US Navy created that probably aren't real technology. Anti-gravity devices and the like. Why they admitted those? No idea, but possibly this was done as part of some sort of hearkening back to the cold-war-era strategy of 'waste the enemies resources on a goose chase' kind of thing.
They do care -- but there is no requirement that you prove it works (such as by providing a working example), so there's lots of room for error and fraud there.
Patents don't need to be safe. You can patent a transportation device that works by firing a human out of a cannon, or a self driving car that simply runs over pedestrians, or even just a method of killing someone.
> You can patent a transportation device that works by firing a human out of a cannon, or a self driving car that simply runs over pedestrians, or even just a method of killing someone.
Can I patent a self driving car that runs over pedestrians so that I can sue any company whose self driving car does it that hasn't paid me a license fee?
It might be my conspiracy brain acting up but "multi-ton machine without manual override" sends all the red flashing lights and klaxons off in my head.
Political assassination via cyber attack/backdoor? ezpz, find a tree, accelerate into it, claim it was the car acting up.
Bug in the software? Sorry you're dying today because they wanted to repossess cars easier, your life is less important than protecting capital.
We're in a world where deregulation has planes either falling out of the sky or attempting to. I don't trust any soft handed regulation on cars without manual overrides.
My car has a push start, but also a manual transmission. I know if something goes wrong and my engine stops responding to the electric throttle I can just pop out of gear and coast.
Your thoughts are likely not very far fetched, but in this case, to the best of my knowledge, IC and LEOs seem to be more worried about stopping individual 'bad guys'( quotations, because I hate this term ) from causing damage with ICE machines hence solutions like mandated remote off switch and so on.
On the political assassination front, wasn't there a story out about one such attempt or did I dream it?
There was a suspicious "political staffer dies from freak single car accident" events shortly after the first Jeep Cherokee was remotely taken control of. That's what stuck with me.
LEOs are also notoriously corrupt and difficult to keep tabs on. Imagine police harassment when they have the ability to remotely shut off your car.
Manual transmissions are almost entirely extinct in new vehicles (in the US at least) and even some manuals have an interlock that can prevent you from taking it out of gear if the power-train control module decides it needs to stay in gear.
That's why I jumped to buy a new one as soon as I had the money. No interlock on the gearbox, no electric seats to break, manual parking brake, but with android auto on an OEM infotainment.
Not saying they're super common, but as someone who writes software, I don't like the increasing dependency on software implementations of certain components that are fairly simple in their mechanical form.
When I read the parent comment, I thought “Am I on Reddit?”.
HN used to bury Reddit-like comments a while back, but it seems the Reddit influence is becoming more and more accepted on HN these days, as I’m starting to see them more at the top vs. the bottom of threads.
I agree. I was not sure if it was just me making this up, but I have been browsing hacker news for 2 years now, and yet I do noticed some kind of regime shift where reddit-like comments are more prominent. I dont like this development, as HN used to be a safe-space from the reddit hivemind, I wish HN moderation would more heavily moderate them.
But Jader's account is over ten years old, as is mine, so I don't think you can credibly accuse them of being a noob. I happen to believe that HN has gotten substantially worse, and more Reddit-like over the 15 years I've been using it. That said, this change is likely because more people (from a broader spectrum of backgrounds) are using it, and the site's total utility has probably increased.
They're guidelines, and they say it's an illusion. The examples linked are to accounts only a few months old, from 14 years ago. At this point, some of us have been around long enough to understand what's going on.
The total utility has increased for who? Not for me. Half the time when I want to have a more nuanced discussion or talk about primary sources it just doesn't happen.
Serious question. Are there any alternatives to HN? Been reading HN on and off since 2010 and the decline to this is painfully obvious. Used to learn a lot from reading on here but now only check or post out of habit and lack of a high quality alternative.
Yeah these comments are awful. Someone even wrote, “take my upvote.” Not a good look for HN discus quality.
Back on topic:
I find this hard to believe, what happens if it repossess itself by mistake? Gets in an accident on the way home during said repo? Especially since nowadays most Fords are just oversized trucks.
And why is this even a desired feature? Is the average Ford customer that untrustworthy? I’m curious what the expected amount of use for a feature like this is.
In any case, autonomous driving isn’t far along enough yet for this to be practical and out in the streets, so I wonder how it even got approval.
Aren't mistaken repossessions and accidents during repossession things that happen already? The used car market is incredibly predatory and full of the same car getting repeatedly repossessed from new owners.
But my comment isn’t about the occurrence of them, it’s about the muddied waters when a vehicle repo’s itself with no driver. Who’s at fault if the vehicle crashes?
The purchaser of the vehicle clearly did not crash - they may not even know the vehicle was being repo’d. So then is the dealership or bank to blame? (If so, will this add to higher premiums?) Say a predatory dealership has some stake in the game. Given the asymmetry of information, maybe they will claim the car wasn’t being repo’d at all, rather the purchaser must have caused the damage and lied.
What if no repo even occurs but the software malfunction?
I take it to mean they're writing this into the lease agreement in readiness for full autonomous driving.
Desired feature for leasing companies and as to damage after the company takes remote possession I expect the same shenanigans you get when returning rentals.
"but I won't let that bother me like it does other folk. I'll stand out on the roadside, thumb up in the air, and wait for some good passer buy to show me that they care"
And my tractor tole' me I don't matter, ever since John Deere told me to Steer clear, from them old repairs. Used to be, you could fix'em for free, now it's all John Deere IP.
Edit: And Monsanto, don't you know, told me ya'best not go, usin' your own seeds.
(no joke folks, I think there's some real potential for a satire country song here, I'm thinkin' by a Jonathan Coulton type singer)
Verse 1:
My truck was my pride and joy, it was my everything
But now it's gone, and I'm feeling the sting
Ford said I couldn't pay, so they took it away
And now I'm left here, with nothing to say
Chorus:
My truck done left me, and my heart is broke
I'm just a heartbroken man, and it ain't no joke
But I'll find a way to get back on my feet
And maybe someday, my truck and I will meet
Verse 2:
Elon says I'm lazy, but he don't know me
I worked hard every day, but still couldn't keep my truck, you see
Folks told me to learn to code, but that ain't for me
I just want my truck back, and to be free
Chorus:
My truck done left me, and my heart is broke
I'm just a heartbroken man, and it ain't no joke
But I'll find a way to get back on my feet
And maybe someday, my truck and I will meet
Verse 3:
My tractor used to be my trusty steed
But John Deere said I couldn't fix it, no indeed
Used to be, I could do it all myself
But now it's all about John Deere's wealth
Chorus:
My truck done left me, and my heart is broke
I'm just a heartbroken man, and it ain't no joke
But I'll find a way to get back on my feet
And maybe someday, my truck and I will meet
Verse 4:
Monsanto told me not to plant my own seeds
But I didn't listen, and now I'm in need
Of some help, to get back on my feet
But I won't give up, no, not me
Chorus:
My truck done left me, and my heart is broke
I'm just a heartbroken man, and it ain't no joke
But I'll find a way to get back on my feet
And maybe someday, my truck and I will meet
Outro:
My truck may be gone, but I still have my pride
And I won't let anyone, take that away inside
I'll find a way to make it right
And maybe someday, my truck will be back in sight.
With narrow AI, the truck will drive to the Austin-Bergstrom airport and launch a generative country music career. (There are venues at AUS where country music legends play.)
Taking a look at this now, for the first time in months. There's nothing in here about comedy not being allowed. It does discourage users from making comments like yours, though.
Shallow jokes to break up heavy conversations, like about our society slipping into a dystopia, are very human.
Verse 1:
I had a trusty truck, my pride and joy
Took me everywhere, never did destroy
But times were tough, I fell behind
Missed some payments, the bank declined
Chorus:
Now my truck's gone, it drove away
Left me feeling low, I gotta say
I'm stuck here on this dusty land
Holding onto memories of what I had
Verse 2:
That old truck had a mind of its own
But it always knew the way back home
Now it's gone, and I'm all alone
Sitting here, trying not to moan
Chorus:
Now my truck's gone, it drove away
Left me feeling low, I gotta say
I'm stuck here on this dusty land
Holding onto memories of what I had
Bridge:
I should have known better, I should have tried
To keep my payments up, to keep my ride
Now I'm here, looking at the road
Wondering where my truck has gone to roam
Chorus:
Now my truck's gone, it drove away
Left me feeling low, I gotta say
I'm stuck here on this dusty land
Holding onto memories of what I had
Outro:
Maybe someday, I'll get another ride
One that won't drive away, won't make me cry
But for now, I'll just sit here and sing
About the truck that was my everything.
Verse 1:
Had a pickup truck, my favorite toy,
Whiskey in console, feeling coy,
Drove on dirt roads, feeling free,
With a girl on the tailgate, in tight blue jeans for all to see.
Chorus:
My truck left me, feeling stuck,
Drinking whiskey in my blue jeans, feeling yuck,
Miss the girl on the tailgate, her pretty look,
Truck is gone, now I cry like a rook.
Verse 2:
Fell behind on payments, lost my ride,
The truck drove off, with the girl by its side,
She wore tight blue jeans, hugged her curves just right,
Now the truck and the girl are out of sight.
Chorus:
My truck left me, feeling stuck,
Drinking whiskey in my blue jeans, feeling yuck,
Miss the girl on the tailgate, her pretty look,
Truck is gone, now I cry like a rook.
Bridge:
It was just a truck, I know,
But its departure dealt a painful blow,
I'll find a new ride and try to mend,
But memories of the girl and the truck will never end.
Chorus:
My truck left me, feeling stuck,
Drinking whiskey in my blue jeans, feeling yuck,
Miss the girl on the tailgate, her pretty look,
Truck is gone, now I cry like a rook.
Outro:
Maybe one day my truck will return,
With the girl in tight blue jeans for all to yearn,
Until then, I'll sip my whiskey and dream,
Of the truck and the girl, a perfect team.
This illustrates a problem with current penalties - they're too harsh if you have 100% exact enforcement.
Violating auto speed limits is a good example. Society can't enforce speed limits 100% of the time if it relies on the occasional state trooper with a radar gun. Therefore society sets the penalty very high so that the small risk of a citation isn't worth the benefit of speeding.
100% enforcement should have much lower penalties.
There are other problems with 100% strict enforcement, in that we don't even know what laws we have.
It's a dangerous job and I don't think they give the repo folks enough information. I recently had to run one of them off as the former property owners had renters that stopped making payments on their vehicle. The repo guy was highly aggressive and was yelling at my family members. I assumed he was just some nutjob and had no idea he was a repo guy aside from the fact he was driving a tow truck without any company logo. I assumed he was trying to steal my tractor since it's is an antique.
Virtually every serious speeder I know runs laser jammers, radar detectors, and cell phone based monitoring and religiously is alert to the warnings. Short of aircraft enforcement (oh they monitor that too) it's about impossible to nab the most dedicated speeders, so most the tickets are going people like the soccer mom who went 10 over, etc. I feel like speeding enforcement is one of the biggest example of how these enforcement are designed as tax and not designed as population level risk mitigation.
Speeding was just a convenient example. Shoplifting would work just as well. So would jaywalking, or loitering or disturbing the peace.
Penalties are set high because in the US they're enforced only irregularly. If the US moves to some kind of near universal enforcement, problems will occur because of that.
Whether or not 100% enforcement is ever possible, I think speeding is penalized only because it's an easy thing to objectively measure, even if you can't get 100% of it. This is sort of the McNamara Fallacy in action.
But the really dangerous people on the highway aren't typical speeders who might go say 85-90mph when the speed limit is 55-65 mph. In traffic that isn't dense and clustered, high speeds in and of themselves are not a big problem.
The really dangerous people on the highway are those who aggressively change lanes in dense traffic, weaving in and out of traffic trying to find the narrowest possible gap to slip through where no safe passing gap exists. This is much harder to objectively track and measure unless a cop happens to sneak up on the dangerous driver and sees them firsthand.
Counterintuitively, I believe that the highways are made far less safe from speed limits because this tends to cluster up all traffic together so impatient people (who are going to exist no matter what) are compelled to dangerously weave in and out of dense clusters of cars which is the most likely thing to cause an accident.
If you made one or two lanes available with no speed limit so the aggressive drivers could be free to have their way and don't have to interact through slow drivers, I'd bet that most problems on the road would be solved. You want to create a situation where impatient people don't have to interact with the slower drivers.
It is always amusing talking to Americans about the Luddite movement. So ,any seem to think they were anti-technology when in fact they were mostly artisans who embraced technology save for when the ownership class started to exploit their labor.
And by replacing ownership with either de facto or de jure rental of any and all private property.
I have a big enough philosophical objection to the concept where we don't actually own property and may only rent it from the government due to property taxes. Now we "own" phones we can't control, "own" cars that have features dis/en-abled over the air if you pay for them.
Product managers are brimming with innovative features and benefits enabled by stripping ownership away from the public/consumers. It reminds me of the Black Mirror episode where you pay for your toothpaste $0.05 at a time from a dispenser in your home when you want some on your toothbrush.
I can easily see the argument for owning personal property like a phone, but how can someone have a true ownership claim over land?
For personal property there is a production chain with labor that went into the item, but for land it's just out there and at some point someone decided they should be able to restrict what other people do in some area. If you see that it's not legitimate for a government to do, then by the same logic it's not legitimate for an individual - a government is just a collection of individuals acting together
> If you see that it's not legitimate for a government to do, then by the same logic it's not legitimate for an individual
I see the rights of government as secondary by default with exceptions meted out strictly as necessary. There exists a very limited number of jurisdictions where property taxes don't exist and land ownership is therefore real, so there's no philosophical/legal impediment to foregoing property taxes.
My argument is that even without property taxes the land ownership isn't real - someone can have a piece of paper and a government to back them up and say they "own" the land, but ultimately it's not the same as personal property and doesn't make sense to treat the same way. As far as I've seen it's impossible to establish a chain of custody for land ownership that doesn't involve theft and invalidate the current ownership claim
Further, the government is the only thing that grants the land ownership claim, if there is no government than anyone can come along and kick you off your land, revealing that you didn't really own it to start with - you're just living there right now
> it's impossible to establish a chain of custody for land ownership that doesn't involve theft
This is a big issue in some places, e.g. I've heard in South Africa, because of legal issues arising out of confiscation when apartheid ended. Not so much in the US. There are some disputes going back to deeds with native Americans but they're very rare.
> the government is the only thing that grants the land ownership claim, if there is no government than anyone can come along and kick you off your land
The government's authority is the only reason a theory of any private property can exist in the real world anyway. Unless we're talking about super abstract theories of private enforcement in anarchist philosophy or something. In the world we live in, no government means people take your stuff, whether it's land or not.
Yeah I'm talking about personal vs private property, generally defined by movability, so like a house itself is private but the land isn't
> Not so much in the US. There are some disputes going back to deeds with native Americans but they're very rare
I think you're only talking about disputes recognized in the courts, not the actual disputes over the whole land claim which have consistently been there historically
> In the world we live in, no government means people take your stuff, whether it's land or not
Seems like we agree on this point - land ownership comes from the govt who ultimately "owns" all the land (but still through theft or some random claim)
I think a good analogy is other planets - can I say I own Mars and anyone who goes there has to rent the land from me? Without a government that's not going to happen, and with a government it only happens through force which invalidates the whole "exchange"
>And by replacing ownership with either de facto or de jure rental of any and all private property.
My theory is that as profits decline due to the tendency of markets to reach equilibrium with respect to products/services supplied that capital owners will begin to reintroduce pre-capitalist norms and practices such as landlordism as these can sustain revenues to their liking as you renter won't have any ownership rights to contest their actions. It means they can raise rental rates anytime in the majority of cases and then just evict you from or repossess what was rented. Kind of like feudalism but without the fancy hats and titles.
I wish I had a pic of it, but in a building I once worked in, there was a Ford Model T with a brass plaque mounted in a visible location on the firewall that essentially said if you violate the patents or sell the car in an unauthorized way, the title reverts to being owned by FoMoCo.
Doing an image search for "ford model t plaque" yields some examples.
Inset joke about loving my 12 year old 4runner that's the most basic car I've ever owned.
But this isn't anything new. Buy here pay here places have been throwing ignition locks on cars for ages and shut off the ignition if you don't make payments. This would take it a step further, integrate it into the car, and add autonomous features to it.
The real story here is that Ford incentivizes employees to write patents (though I doubt very much this makes them particularly unique). Beyond that, the technology required to support this functionality is so far ahead of what's available today (or likely to be available anytime soon) that it's not worth a serious debate.
I used to work for an automotive OEM. I can confirm this. We got regular (yearly) reminders to submit patient ideas for concepts we’d come up with. There was a bonus incentive once the patent was awarded (maybe just submitted) It was something on the order of $500-1000 IIRC.
Our lawyers were pragmatic about it. They were very clear that the concept should be novel and plausible, and were willing to offer guidance and help with the text of the parent. It was neat, and I wish I’d taken advantage of it.
Tech company patent programs I've worked with tend to offer that kind of money for a submitted patent application, and another amount if it's issued while you're there, plus a patent trinket (was patent cubes at one place, and patent idea lamps at another).
The inventor would submit ideas to the patent staff, if selected, spend an hour or so describing it to staff who write the patent application; the inventor reviews and clarifies, etc a couple rounds, and then it's submitted.
Lol, absolutely not. I just came back from a trip to a national park that simply would not have been doable without my car. My commute into work each day would be significantly harder without my car. I wouldn't be able to visit much of my family without my car.
I can get into the nearest city and town just fine on public transport, and that's what I do. But public transport here is spoke-hub. If you want to go somewhere that is moderately far away from a hub, it becomes incredibly difficult (and expensive).
If you live in a city, and you never leave that city other than to go to other cities, then you absolutely do not need a car. Most other people do.
- Public transport doesn't go near to where I need to go
- Camping overnight is both illegal, and less comfortable than the hotel I was basing my hikes out of
I drove there, stayed at a hotel, and hiked out from that hotel every day. It was a very memorable trip. I then drove home.
The alternative would have been to get a bus to the train station (40 minutes), a train to the south of the park (2 hours), get a bus from the train station to another town (only 2 buses a day, morning and night, so we'd have had to leave home much earlier or lose a day), get another bus from that town to another town, then get another bus from that town to another town. All whilst lugging a large suitcase, camera bag & gear, and another backpack between us. The buses would have taken another 3 hours. Then if I needed to get home in an emergency, or otherwise leave quickly, I'd have to redo it all backwards, and hope I could make that twice a day bus.
No thanks, I'll just stick with my 1.5 hour drive from my front door to the hotel.
The car may be an environmental disaster, but I don't see how it's an engineering disaster?
It fulfils the desire to go from point A to point B in relative comfort at relative speed, at reasonable cost that scales to the local economy. US market cars tend to have lots of extraneous features and not be suitable for rugged roads; less developed economies get models with fewer comfort features, but a more robust suspension for use where roads are more aspirational. Autorickshaws are common in some places and unknown elsewhere, etc.
There is no way for a human to operate a car safely over a mid to long period of time. The human brain does not have bandwidth to process all the information taken in while driving a car. Eventual the driver will get into an accident with a high probability of injury and possibly death. Cars are designed to filter information from the environment. A driver can't sense what is around them. Cars are too big and too heavy. Infrastructure demands are too great. The fuel costs are too high no matter what fuel you use. A cars fails on practically every meaningful metric.
Walking, biking, and public transit in a livable community is the only rational way forward.
Just because you're not a competent driver doesn't mean the rest of us are getting into accidents. Walking, biking, and public transit are great options for short trips with limited cargo. But none of those options are going to be viable in my lifetime for getting my daughter to a volleyball tournament 40 miles away at 7:00 AM on Saturday. Including hauling backpacks, folding chairs, boxes of snacks for the team, etc.
I've noticed that the arrogant and condescending people who are most opposed to cars tend to be childless young urbanites with very limited life experience. The rest of the country operates in a completely different way, and votes accordingly.
> There is no way for a human to operate a car safely over a mid to long period of time.
My observed injury rate per vehicle mile, per trip, or per time spent, in a car is much lower than the same rates on a bicycle. Incidentally, my largest injury on a bike was due to street car rails, so thanks public transit for making the roads less safe for bicycling. I can't count the number of times I've tripped while walking, resulting in mostly minor injuries, but nevertheless more injuries than I've sustained in automobiles (not counting violence from siblings). Lack of safety restraints on public transit mean more minor injuries from sudden stops as well.
> Cars are too big and too heavy
Autorickshaws are much smaller, lighter, and more fuel efficient. Plus they're cute!
> Infrastructure demands are too great
Infrastructure demands for cars scale. You can use cars if you can get fuel to enough fueling stations and have cleared trees and other obstacles from paths. Pavement is optional but encouraged. Parking lots are nice to have, but any cleared space works. You don't get a lot of speed, and probably not much fuel efficiency, but it works. Paved roads are nicer, and they get built because they're useful. Of course, busses and bicycles like paved roads too (paving for bikes requires a lot lower standard too).
If you can't get fuel to fueling stations, there's things like wood gasifiers[1], although gasoline and diesel are much more scalable if the infrastructure is present.
> Walking, biking, and public transit in a livable community is the only rational way forward.
This would severely limit the scope of livable communities. Or at least significantly increase transit time for many to most activities. Those are all great options, when available and appropriate, but a lot of times it's not the best mode of transportation and often it's not even appropriate. The diversity of origin/destination pairs in most metropolitan areas of a certain size makes it very hard for most users to be served by direct public transit routes, and hub and spoke routing makes a lot of trips turn into first go 30 minutes in the wrong direction, then 30 minutes in the right direction, when a point to point automobile trip would be much less time.
I can't imagine some of my recent trips working well with public transit. Especially those trips where I'm carrying sports equipment for multiple people not traveling with me. How do you take three or four sets of hockey gear on a bicycle, or walking the half mile uphill from the bus stop to my home?
In the future, my transportation may be more limited. In the mean time, I'm going to use the best option I have for my needs. If cars are gone, most of the places I've lived are uninhabitable, and I'll have to live somewhere I'd rather not live, so there's that.
I used to be a big proponent of alcohol/drug test to prevent car starting, ideally I imagined the system would be with an absolute guarantee (mandated) the information stays local (just a hardware switch preventing ignition or startup). But I'm sad to say I don't believe in any more, so much abuse to mark people as 'tries to drive while under the influence' or making you pay higher insurance because you're often 0.5g instead of 0.3g.
I really want people to be prevented to drive killing vehicles under the influence (yes even my e-cargo). I know it would bring so many other problems, such as cost, tampering, bad sensitivity, etc. It doesn't make sense to me that we don't crack down more on this specific act.
The biggest problem with an ignition interlock device today is that they're extremely unreliable. As implemented they are also very intrusive. Granted, they are currently implemented only as part of a punitive measure, so that behavior is partly intentional, but it would be unacceptable for universal adoption.
Probably be better to just make cars do realtime verification of license status before letting someone drive ... but that's only better by comparison; people who never drive drunk will bristle at the heavy regulation.
> Money spent making the device not suck reduces profit.
That may be true. But it's also possible that measuring blood alcohol with breath tests is never going to work consistently for all people. Breathalyzers are well known for widely variable results between people who have identical BAC.
It doesn't have to be the car companies that do the research and design, it can be state funded (since it will be state mandated) research, design and development and open source/patent-free to manufacture.
If it's meant to be used by everyone (I'm not thinking DUI recidivists, how many people have you seen rationalize driving after a drink or two or six) then make it usable by everyone.
I was thinking breathalyser ignition interlock but yes, probably high rate of false alarm, although we could probably make it far better if used so much, even wireless, wearable... I know higher standards (such as emissions) tend to encourage cheating but dammit I'm tired of people killing each other like this.
I'm also extremely tired of people veering into the fucking bikelane while phoning, texting, hands off talking on the phone, and sometimes (to often) just 'checking' the damn cargo with my two kids inside. So they can get to work 'on time' and spend 15 minutes at the coffee machine. Dammit.
Make it impossible to interact with in a moving object, cut the data and phone, I don't have the answer or a patent but this is killing so many people for very, extremely selfish and stupid reasons...
But since we're OK for the road being some kind of far west, Dashcam it is...
> Probably be better to just make cars do realtime verification of license status before letting someone drive
A couple in Florida was killed yesterday in the hurricane, though they tried to evacuate, the storm meant that license verification servers were down and their Ford would not start.
Well if this is how the new cars are gonna be, I guess I'll just go ahead and teach myself to be a Car Guy so that the one I have now will run forever.
It's not that I'm afraid of missing a payment. At this point I would probably buy the car outright. But after the robo-signing debacle with BoA repossesssing houses that they were never party to, the mere capability renders the machine fundamentally untrustworthy.
> the mere capability renders the machine fundamentally untrustworthy.
I've said this a couple of times before, but I find it fairly astonishing that we don't have legislation covering what manufacturers are allowed to do to a product with embedded devices after a user has purchased it.
I want to be very clear - after I have bought a product, ANY CHANGE WITHOUT MY CONSENT done by the embedded software at the behest of the manufacturer is essentially breaking and entering (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)). They have the ability to stick a "little green man" inside the car, that should not absolve them of the legal repercussions of using it without my permission.
I don't believe that sticking a term/clause into a user agreement that is not negotiable is an acceptable way to deal with this situation.
This is rapidly becoming one of my strongest political beliefs. I think the concept of ownership is at stake.
My wishlist is essentially:
1. Devices that contain digital locks MUST provide all keys to all locks to the buyer at time of purchase. The user can opt into allowing the manufacturer to keep a copy, but they must be allowed to opt out.
2. Devices that require remote services must explicitly list all services and features that depend on those services. The user must have the option to opt out of remote services.
3. Buyers of devices that choose to opt out of remote services are revoking consent for manufacturer access to the device. Any future access by the manufacturer (at all, from updating code to reporting usage to remotely starting a car) will be considered a violation of the CFAA.
4. Manufacturers must justify why a feature requires a remote service. "Profit" is not an acceptable answer.
> I want to be very clear - after I have bought a product, ANY CHANGE WITHOUT MY CONSENT done by the embedded software at the behest of the manufacturer is essentially breaking and entering (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)).
Sure - although I'll point out that technically the CFAA already covers this, it's just never applied in this manner (caveat - the CFAA can cover basically anything given the vague wording... so the value of it is up for debate)
Basically - I want a simple contract that ensures that the device I've bought will continue working as expected (assuming no use of remote/internet connected features) and that the manufacturer is unable to enter my property and change how it functions after sale.
I don't find that particularly unusual. I think the unusual part is rather than manufacturers have this new ability at all. For the majority of our legal history it was either prohibitively expensive or downright impossible for a manufacturer to embed a device that only obeys the manufacturer into consumer products.
Now it's both possible and cheap, and I'd like to see some regulation regarding my rights to purchase a tool.
A small number of places are paying at least a little attention and beginning to ban the most egregious cases of this (ex: NJ considering banning car subscriptions with a specific call out to the behavior of BMW around seat heaters).
But this is going to become a tidal wave of consumer abuse in the very near future - I can fucking guarantee it.
Why would anyone ever sell you a product when they can rent it to you and let their "little green man" be the property manager for free? They won't - not unless they're forced to.
And while I think renting can be a useful way to acquire a product - I sure as hell think it shouldn't be the only one.
Not true, at least in my state. If you buy a car with a loan, you own the car and the financer has a lien on it. You unequivocally own the car, though.
The only restrictions that the financer can put on your use of the vehicle are ones that you agreed to in the loan agreement. They can't just restrict your use of it as they see fit -- unless, I suppose, you were foolish enough to sign an agreement allowing them to.
The only restrictions I've ever personally seen have been a requirement to carry comprehensive car insurance for some minimum amount. And, of course, there's a lien on the car so you can't sell it without having the lien removed (typically by repaying the loan).
"Foolish enough" to sign an agreement allowing them to do whatever they want? Even website EULAs are all made up of the exact same "we can do everything and you can do nothing" legal boilerplate. Seriously doubt bankers are foolish enough to give people any choice in the matter. What are people gonna do when all the bankers standardize on the same non-negotiable self-interest maximizing contracts?
Huh, which state is that? Every car I've ever financed, the bank owns the title until the loan is paid off. Exactly the opposite of mortgaging a house, where I've owned the deed but the bank put a lien on it.
I'm not particularly worried about the well-being of the McDonald's corporation. I'd be more worried, if anything, about some bad actor deciding they want every car on a major interstate to wreck all at once.
Good luck buying it outright - and even if you do, new cars are all delivered with a bunch of tech that takes away your control and it gets worse every year.
Any user interface will be misused, so "click to repo" will mostly be used accidentally in error. The vast majority of cars are not repo'd and as such the vast majority of clicks on the "repo" button will be in error. The customer service rep will be trying to click "x" to close some other website's popups or they thought they were clicking "reset" but that's right next to "repo". Or the new hire is told to click "repo" on every loan with no payment last month; I made no payment last month because I made my final payment two months ago but it hasn't closed out the process.
There will be a few high profile stories of cars driving off with newborn babies strapped in the car seat, then the tech will be banned.
Weirdly enough by patenting the business method, this makes every car mfgr OTHER than Ford much more appealing, so what we really is patent trolls as a service patenting really bad ideas to make sure nobody can implement them. I don't think Ford's new invention was intended to get me to buy a Toyota. Patenting bad ideas as a weapon is an interesting concept. Other than the obvious fraud issue, what's to stop me from filing a REALLY bad idea patent, then selling the stock short, then drumming up some PR, then closing out my short position at profit? At some point this is inevitable as "the internet" along with "the stock market" and everything else becomes more bot than human.
Recently minted Car Guy here. Start with Ford or Chevy anything pre-1975, expect to spend 5000-7000 for a running older vehicle in need of maintenance and body work. PArts are ubiquitous and you'll be blown away by how simple engines can be to understand and work on without all of the ECM/emissions-era add-ons under the hood to contend with. Learn to love calling the support line @ JEGS or Summit Racing before ordering parts to confirm your fitment before you pull the trigger. Don't even bother thinking about stepping foot in a modern parts store, they can't help you.
you'll be blown away by how simple engines can be to understand and work on without all of the ECM/emissions-era add-ons under the hood to contend with
But you’ve also gotta be selfish enough to think that your pollutants don’t matter and that 1970’s era smog wasn’t a big deal. And you have to hope that older cars are still grandfathered in to pollution regulations and they won’t be subject to mileage limits as cars continue to emit fewer (or no) pollutants.
Oh I bet you're a real treat at parties. You over there pretending the vanishingly small handful of classic cars that still exist and are capable of being driven aren't a rounding error in the context of air pollution in general and global warming specifically? Let me guess, you also think eliminating dairy and meat production would result in a meaningful reduction in global CO2 emissions...
I’m not talking about registered classic or antique cars which have mileage or usage restrictions in most states that would prevent it from being a daily driver. And neither was the person you’re replying to that wants to avoid modern cars and keep his on the road indefinitely. And I’m not even talking about CO2 pollution which doesn’t form smog.
Go one step further and become a Bicycle Guy. Consider what will still be operational 100 years from now once fossil fuels have dried up and we have fully transitioned into Life As A Service.
It's not clear to me that the wireless shifters themselves communicate via Bluetooth, though the system does use that to talk to a smartphone app, if desired.
Having trouble thinking what user-facing technology cars have gained recently that I actually need. Backup cameras are nice, my last two cars had them but my current one does not. Life goes on. Heard anecdotally that new cars in US require then now, so I guess next car will probably have one again. Blindspot indicators on side mirrors are nice too, but physically turning and looking is too engrained in me to stop doing.
It seems like there has to be a market for something other than what we are getting. I'd like something that benefits from improvements in emissions/gas mileage but doesn't bolt on infotainment or phone integrations or networked everything. Zero interest in lane-assist technology. Preemptively saying no to any O.T.A. updates. I basically want what in 2023 would be considered a work-truck level of utilitarianism but in a form I can use to get my family from A to B, since throwing young kids up front on a bench seat in a work-truck is a no-go. It would be nice if it weren't actively ugly as well, but on this point I am negotiable.
Close. Funnily enough, the last car was a 2014 Subaru we bought in 2021. My spouse drives our kids more, so she staked out the claim on that one though.
Maybe the Bronco selling like crazy will convince carmakers to issue "remastered" versions of previous cars, and maybe the remastering won't be "stick a 17inch screen in the center console."
There's a lot that can be done by disintegrated systems, too.
I put cameras onto a box truck so I had reversing etc, but I used an 8-camera wired security system with video recorder and eSIM for that. The screen was optional but I found one that only had one button (to toggle views) rather than a "command console" type that by its nature gave full control over the security system. Driving around displaying the bumper-height rear camera on the screen was quite handy, normally it's a blind spot of trucks.
Likewise the GPS tracking system, I bought a stand-alone navigation system (you need a truck-specific one that you can at the very least type height and weight into so it doesn't direct you down roads you can't fit through), and obviously a separate anti-theft tracker (well, two, because the immobiliser also had one).
And of course there was a radio/CD player in the cab, no need to wire that into the one computer to rule them all that modern mobile infotainment systems have. I mean, "computers with wheels" or whatever the transport as a service companies call their devices these days.
Which anti theft tracker did you go with? Is it a standalone unit with big battery? Just asking because you mention it.
Everyone is reselling the more or less same cheap Chinese units at insane markups. Firmware seems to be mostly identical. The tracking portals never have HTTPS. I haven't been able to find anything decent so far.
Sorry, I can't remember, this was several years ago and I've since sold the truck. But loosely my requirements were 24V input to match the truck, battery life of at least a week, external antenna and ability to work without user input. I just played on ebay until I found one that looked likely, searched for support forums and found a discussion on a European trucking forum where they liked it. It was under $US100.
Access to it was either via the manufacturer website or you could configure your own server IP and it would send JSON packets via HTTP post. No verification of the server, but it was also annoying enough to configure that I thought even a thief that found it would just smash it rather than fscking with it. AFAIK no-one ever did, it only stopped working when I stopped paying for the eSIM (the new owner never took over that tracker even though I told them all about it)
The immobiliser was a whole other ball of shit. It had a keyfob, but also remote monitoring via a physical SIM. I couldn't find a DIY-able one, so I was paying ~$US50/year to some Chinese company to monitor the system and allow me to track and immobilise it via their app. That worked, as did the geographic restrictions, but it was also easy enough to remove/bypass - the new owner hated the system and rang me to yell about it before removing it. I assume they just added a bypass wire and moved on.
Ha, no worries! Thanks for responding though. All this stuff is super frustrating to deal with. I see regular posts on forums about people having to deal with old shitty immobiliser installs that have turned bad.
My thinking is that GPS tracking at least gives a chance of finding the car again if it gets stolen.
Being able to configure a server is already great. Will do some more digging.
I'm with you, I like the additional warnings, but I have no interest in a car that acts on its own based on what it thinks is best. I like backup cameras, but don't want OnStar connected or people being able to remotely disable my vehicle.
> It seems like there has to be a market for something other than what we are getting.
I might have a few small wishes, like I'd appreciate windshields and rear windows that quickly adapt to blinding headlights (or better regulations for highlights with actual enforcement), but cars have been mostly "good enough" for ages.
That's the fundamental problem with computers today: we don't own them anymore. They all run the corporation's code now and they're literally everywhere.
Funny how quickly an incredibly empowering technology became obscenely oppressive after they take the keys to the machine away from us. Sometimes I wish computers had never been invented.
I'm glad they were (and I'd say it was inevitable) but I'm sad we haven't defended our rights or our democracy enough to avoid being exploited by corporations.
Any guide I can follow as to how to become a "car guy"? I've long wanted to become one, for precisely the same reason as you, but unfortunately Google is filled by SEO garbage now that I'm struggling to find any general direction.
Actually it’s worse, it’s full self drive with an actively hostile adversary (the person that wants to keep their car). This is about as tough as it gets for AI.
> The patent also outlines a potential to lock the vehicle out on weekends only so that the driver can still access a job and might be able to come through on those delinquent payments
What if you usually work weekends which is common for a lot of the jobs people who are missing payments might be working? In that case you would be out of luck.
You would also be out of luck if you are trying to get a side-gig or pick up a part time job on weekends to make ends meet.
This is what happens when people who have no money troubles make decisions in a board room. Completely out of touch.
This technology in any car should be a violation of our rights. A corporation dictates when to access the vehicle remotely?
It’ll start with justifiable use cases. In a not too distant future, imagine something like:
* can’t access car during peak CO2 emission times because you got the cheaper monthly rate that uses a green subsidy to pay for the cheaper rate
* your incorrectly a suspect of a petty crime, your car is now inaccessible because Ford doesn’t want liability if you do something bad with their car (despite you cooperating with law enforcement)
* you’ve been categorized as spreading hate speech/misinformation/disinformation and that breaks our terms of service
My thought process was that the inherent evils were already being discussed, so I figured I would point out something that I saw in the article which I thought was interesting but not already being discussed.
>> * can’t access car during peak CO2 emission times because you got the cheaper monthly rate that uses a green subsidy to pay for the cheaper rate
This sounds like a feature that opens up a new avenue of potential financial engineering. If your car could enforce that it was in 'green mode' or didn't drive at certain times and you could get a subsidy or tax break for it, that might potentially be a good incentive to encourage more environmental friendly lifestyles and practices. That doesn't seem like a bad thing to me, I might not want to buy that feature but it allows for some interesting possibilities. The buyer would have to agree to some stuff at the time of purchase (or lease as it sounds like it would be) to enable this.
We should be mindful of potential unintended consequences of these things. There are some good frameworks in place though, despite what you're second point suggests, Ford has relatively limited liability in the case that their car is driven by a bad actor (cooperating the the police or not) the second that car starts driving on its own, for whatever reason, Ford has some liability.
I remember my grandfather being relatively upset at the idea of GM knowing his GPS coordinates when his Cadillac had onstar. Now there have been hundreds or even thousands of cases when OnStar has had a positive outcome on peoples lives after a crash or something, including times they've reported it before anyone else. His tune changed dramatically one time they remotely unlocked his car and remotely started it so he could get home when his fishing boat turned over and his car keys were at the bottom of a lake though.
I work in security and anti-fraud is the use case of last resort for terrible ideas.
When you finance a car, the vehicle becomes collateral for a loan, but it belongs to you. A technology like this means that the vehicle still belongs to Ford, which means if something goes wrong with it, or if you get sciatica from their shitty seats, you can class action sue them into oblivion.
The reason we have laws is so that people have recourse to principle, whereas when you implement something like this in hardware (a car), it's dystopian vigilantism. I realize the largest future growth market for cars is in countries without reliable legal systems, and whose evolving governments will not hamper themselves the way the US did by guaranteeing individual freedoms, but this is why discourse about tech is important, as for every innovation, there's 100 scumbags like this inventor looking to leverage it to exploit people.
Surely they would do this for leases instead of sales? Why would Ford want to do this for sales anyway, in the case of a sale, the financing company pays ford in full. The only exception would be if ford financed the car with its own financing arm. Incentives could be aligned to make leasing the preferred option for most people who are likely to miss payments then.
Also I’m not sure you’re correct about the ownership and the lawsuits. Sure you can sue anyone for anything but why would this be any different from me leasing a car from ford and the same thing happening? That doesn’t seem to have been an issue for automakers so far…
For the record, this sounds like a dystopian nightmare to me. I’m not in favor of the concept.
> Why would Ford want to do this for sales anyway, in the case of a sale, the financing company pays ford in full. The only exception would be if ford financed the car with its own financing arm.
Ford has a huge financing arm. And it will probably get bigger as interest rates rise, because they have more room to offer lower than market interest rates as a hidden discount without dropping the purchase price.
Their financing makes money on the differential between the rate they pay on demand notes and the rate they lend to car buyers. Anyone (well, US Persons at least) can buy the demand notes [1], which are currently paying 4.75%. So as long as they are lending at an average rate above 4.75% after defaults and other problems I guess they are in a good position. But they can also move money around internally, I suppose, to make lower rates possible.
I've heard people opine that motor companies: Ford, GM, Harley Davidson, etc. aren't really motor companies anymore, they are finance companies and just use the vehicle as a means to get the financing paper. They are obviously both, but it would explain why the quality of US vehicles keeps deteriorating since around 2007 or so.
It is in my experience. I used to only buy US cars until I had a brand new 2017 GM vehicle have transmission issues within 6 months of purchase. This was to replace a 2013 GM vehicle that I was having trouble with. I took the 2017 to the dealer and they fixed it for another 6 months, then the issue came back. I took it to my personal mechanic and he said I should get rid of it, so I did. GM trucks have transmission issues. Look up the "Chevy shake," for another example.
I don't know about Ford, so they might still be ok, or at least better than GM. I don't want to pay $40K+ to find out though.
I expect to be able to drive vehicles without major issues for about 10 years. I've done this in the past with GM vehicles, but after 2007, the two I owned had significant issues all the ones I purchased prior did not. I put significantly less than 10k miles a year on my vehicles.
This has been true since well before 2007. GMAC (now Ally Bank) was almost single-handedly keeping General Motors afloat in the decade prior to the financial crisis. It certainly wasn't the quality of their vehicles.
It seems like that's literally true for Ally bank, which started its life as the finance arm of GMAC, and still technically is despite being a full-fledged bank in its own right. I don't think they're owned by General Motors anymore, though.
The rationale I'm using for Ford owning it is there is a compelling argument that ownership as the effect of two factors, custody and control, as it applies to data today could apply to the car, where if Ford can disable the vehicle, it has control of it, and the custody the driver has is secondary. Leasing companies are different because they license the vehicle to you for a term, whereas loan financing means it's yours.
I'm not a lawyer at all, however much of my work on privacy and security has been about reconciling technology architecture and implementations with privacy and other laws and regulations, and security architecture is about allocating risk between counterparties in a technology solution, so from that view, this could be reasonably interpreted as a predatory technology.
> A technology like this means that the vehicle still belongs to Ford, which means if something goes wrong with it, or if you get sciatica from their shitty seats, you can class action sue them into oblivion.
Nothing prevents that from happening now, though. I'm also uncertain how reclaiming the collateral for the loan is any different in this scenario.
Granted, I think this is extraordinarily gross and consumer-hostile. Aren't there myriad of options on the table for reclaiming the vehicle? How often does someone "get away" with keeping a car, anyway? That's what the repossession industry exists for.
Doing an actual repo is much more costly and sometimes involves doing PI stuff like trying to track down the location of the vehicle. The cost of one repo easily wipes out profits on many months' worth of interest payments.
> Granted, I think this is extraordinarily gross and consumer-hostile.
It seems like a good idea for stolen autos (at least until the car can be modded to remove the ability, so recently stolen autos). As long as there are enough checks to ensure that only the owner (or law enforcement with a warrant) can repossess the car. There just has to also be a requirement that the lease holder can't lawfully repossess without a court judgement.
Repos are extremely costly. My friend let his car get repossessed because he did not need it anymore thinking that was easier than selling it and there wouldn't be any negatives other than on his credit. He was surprised to get sued for the cost of the repo, which was thousands plus they managed to sell the car for much less than it was worth.
They'll bill it to the person they repossessed it from. Someone will introduce a bill to make them liable for murder, on the grounds that they were engaged in defrauding the car company and are therefore a felon.
I don't think that's legally correct. Including automated repossession technology in the vehicle wouldn't cause ownership to stay with the manufacturer or dealer. Even if the manufacturer retained legal ownership it wouldn't change anything from a product liability standpoint. Many drivers lease their vehicles today instead of buying and so the vehicle still belongs to the lessor. If a person is injured by a faulty vehicle then they can potentially sue the original manufacturer anyway regardless of who happens to own the vehicle.
> When you finance a car, the vehicle becomes collateral for a loan, but it belongs to you
Is it not correct that the lending entity you use to purchase a vehicle is the party that legally owns it? The borrower has possession and right to use the vehicle, but the lender holds the title. That's why you get the title transferred over to your name once the balance of the load is repaid.
No. When you finance a car the lender gets a lien on the title. The title is still in your name. Usually one of the stipulations the lender places in their contract is that they hold the title for you in what is effectively "escrow" until the loan is paid off. Then they release the lien and send you your title.
The reason they do that is because a lien gives them the ability to, within a particular legal framework, get ownership of the car if you don't pay your loan, prevent the title from being transferred to someone they don't trust, etc. It's basically just risk mitigation.
That's what I thought too. I got pulled over once and the cop asked me "Is this your car?". I replied "Well, no... the bank owns it, but they let me drive it". He was not amused, but I was not being snarky -- I took the question to mean: "Do you own this car?", and the honest answer was no - at least, as I understood it, because the owner name on the title was the bank, not mine.
I assume the majority of people would understand the cop’s question as “Are you the person responsible and have the legal right to control this vehicle right now in this very moment”.
As others have noted, states typically have you on the title and the bank just has a lien, so I’m not sure that would even be technically accurate. And even if accurate, your tone is too lackadaisical and overclever for this kind of interaction. You could have said, “in the lay sense, yes, though the bank is the owner of record.”
> When you finance a car, the vehicle becomes collateral for a loan, but it belongs to you.
The title stays with the lender until all the payments are made per the loan agreement. I would not say the vehicle legally belongs to a borrower until they have possession of the title.
> The reason we have laws is so that people have recourse to principle, whereas when you implement something like this in hardware (a car), it's dystopian vigilantism.
The legal system is costly to use. Reducing the costs to repossess collateral would reduce borrowing costs, and ultimately help borrowers with lower borrowing costs because there is less expense towards repossession.
This is a pretty naive take if you're trying to paint it as enabling an even better outcome for "riskier buyers"
This article is something like 5-10 years behind reality: Right now subprime auto loans are mostly enforced with GPS trackers that buyers are usually not made properly aware of, or even worse, tricked into paying for as an add-on pitched as being for their own benefit.
There are entire businesses built on selling poor people cars at truly insane interest rates, on payments they clearly can't afford, repossessing the cars on the cheap with GPS trackers, then selling then to the next poor person with bad credit.
This grift isn't new, but cheap GPS trackers and license scanners reduced the cost per repossession in a way that enabled these places to be signficantly more brazen about it.
Unfortunately the two prevailing takes I see on this are "they're subprime for a reason" as if they deserve it, and "well at least someone is still giving them a chance, you need a car in this country" (and of course some well meaning but ill informed people think you can just take public transport in every part of the country)
The reality is this is worse than nothing in many cases. Buy here, pay here have people pay more frequently so that they can repo a car within days not months of someone buying them. The process isn't free either, it's disruptive, and they'll continue to leech off the owner in collections.
-
Overall it feels like a classic case of short sightedness from society. Saying we should directly subsidized subprime people's access to affordable loans and cars would be a non-starter: It sounds like some bleeding heart charity case making the responsible pay for the irresponsible.
But then we'll all indirectly fund a much worse version of that when subprime auto loans start to implode (like they're probably already starting to with the interest rate hikes...) and we're all paying to pick up the pieces in multiple ways. If the bottom falls out the car market, well right now even middle class families are taking loans with insane terms that leave them underwater in a good market. The pain will trickle up and out from just subprime lenders and cars specifically.
People who give out car loans want you to pay back the loan. They don't want to repossess the vehicle. There is a real cost associated with it and you can't just take the car and make a profit. You'd be able to recoup what was owed and some costs may not be coupable. Again, they're not in the business to lend out money to people they know that can't afford it. There may be fraud at the individual level but the system doesn't work like that.
The recovery rates for subprime auto deals are historically around 50%
Not the scummy low end of the auto loan business. They want you to pay for a couple months and then reposes the car. They are selling older cars, so just a couple months of payment is more $ than the depreciation of the car, and when it comes back they can sell it again. While they maybe have to pay you back for the value of your owned part of the car, they can charge repossession and detail for sale fees first.
They do need a few people who pay off the whole car. These are the case studies they use to shout how great they are for taking a chance on someone who turned their life around.
You understand that if i lend you $100 to buy a car, you pay off 50%, i can sell the car for $70, i would have to give you $20 (you only owe me $50). There are strict rules what you can do state by state, but generally you can't repossess something worth more than the outstanding balance and keep the rest as a profit
For example here's NY state
If you've already paid more than 60 percent of the amount you owe when the car is repossessed, the creditor must auction it within 90 days. During this time, you can still get your car back, says the New York City Bar Legal Referral Service. You have up until the car is actually sold or leased to settle with the lender. You might have to pay the past due amounts, but often you'll be asked to pay the entire loan balance.
After the auction, the creditor can apply the proceeds toward fees and expenses relating to the repossession and the unpaid balance on the loan. The lender must give you a completed an Affirmation of Repossession and Bill of Sale. After all expenses are paid, you're entitled to the balance of the proceeds.
>...if i lend you $100 to buy a car, you pay off 50%, i can sell the car for $70, i would have to give you $20 (you only owe me $50)
The trick is to lend me $100 on a $40 dollar car that I cannot sell for $70. Nevermind the fact that in most states I can't sell the car for any amount as the dealership owns the lien.
> There are strict rules what you can do state by state, but generally you can't repossess something worth more than the outstanding balance and keep the rest as a profit
A lot of articles have been written about scammy "Buy Here, Pay Here" autosales that exist despite the strict rules. Since the dealership is financing the car, they can tweak the initial balance and monthly payments to their liking, while following the letter of the law but hitting the repo quota on the same '97 Honda Civic.
An 84 month loan at New York’s maximum 16% interest means that the 60% threshold isn’t reached for 5 years, far after the expected loan lifetime.
And the car isn’t the only thing being sold, there might be a bundled reconditioning fee, a GPS installation fee, a documentation fee, a service fee, origination fee, nitrogen fee, etc. So when they sell the car again for the same $2000 plus fees that you bought it for, they’ll happily deduct that $2000 from the $3000 you still owe.
Since you mentioned subprime loans, to clarify: this is about the level below that, for people that can’t qualify for a loan from any real bank, even Santander.
As soon as the government assistance I'm advocating dried back up we skyrocketed back to historical highs of subprime delinquency.
And notice how when graphed together, right on the timeframe I describe of 5-10, you see a massive divergence between subprime and prime trends even in your own article. Recovery rates tell you percentages, not absolute scale. (graph is a stunning representation of our current K-shaped recovery btw)
With cheaper repossessions the scale was what increased, and that's what Fitch is referring to with record performance.
We gave more people than ever who couldn't afford loans loans, and so while the relative rate of recovery didn't change, delinquency went insane, and is gearing up to get even more insane with the interest rate hikes.
> People who give out car loans want you to pay back the loan.
I can't tell if this is just a naive or at least uninformed take. At a high enough level the financial system wants people to pay back loans... but that's not what's being discussed here.
-
There are dealers who want buyers to fail to pay. They're additionally enabled by both GPS trackers and license scanners to be even more efficient in their grift.
Additionally, you accidentally exposed an amazing example of what I described in terms of "we will subsidize it either way"
We don't provide a direct form of assistance specific to cars... but we did pay individuals to keep them afloat during the pandemic. They then had to take that money and pay subprime lenders to keep cars with exorbitant interest fees for longer, driving record profitability for the subprime market.
Now interest rates are spiking, those people are losing their cars. They're in a more desperate situation than ever, with less assistance then when interest rates were better. Used car prices fell, but not enough to cover all the ground they gained during the heat of the pandemic.
It's like this country just lets looming crisis walk up face to face without every trying to change course lest we seem like communists. To me this shouldn't even be a partisan issue, we can enable a smaller need for government intervention in the next economic slump by just not donating money to these lenders
So you're saying car repossessions can yield a profit? I've never seen recovery even approaching 100% and every state I've seen restricts what you can do with repossessed cars (eg new York makes it go to auction if 60% has been paid off and give proceeds back to borrower). I picked the first site i found that has something about subprime auto severities. This is pretty common sense to anyone in the industry.
No offense but i don't think you know what you're talking about. Where are you getting this information? Talk to someone in the industry
That "site" is Fitch Ratings, and you seem to not know much about what they do: subprime auto loans are an ABS (asset-backed security) so there are multiple monthly indicators you can get from Fitch or any of the big three.
> So you're saying car repossessions can yield a profit?
Yes! You don't understand how Buy-Here Pay-Here works if you're going on about auctions.
Here in CA it's been legally defined specifically to try and help protect a vulnerable population, but the MO is the same wherever you go:
- 90% of all their loans are kept in-house for 90 days
- The dealer does not primarily deal with new cars
That means if they repo the car within 90 days, they're out of pocket exactly the cost of the recovery and the depreciation... so they just lean heavily on cars that are at the end of their useful lives, then ask for just enough down to cover the repo and a sliver of profit.
They let the fish go, and hope the inevitable* happens within 90 days, so they take the car back and sell the account to collections for a few extra pennies. And obviously it's the junkiest of junk debt so it's not worth much, but there are bottom feeding collection agencies that will use barely legal tactics to try and squeeze just a tiny bit of extra blood from the stone.
* To understand how far these places are willing to go: CA needed to pass a law to prevent them from requiring in person payments and force them to disclose the trackers (most states don't require this).
That's because they'd require all payments to be made on-site, then have recovery waiting for the end of business to take cars. Can't get there because of work? Repo'd. Can't get there because of a court date? Repo'd. Can't get there because the POS they sold you isn't working? Repo'd and patched up just enough to hobble along enough for the next desperate buyer.
And to be clear, CA is in the minority in preventing that, this is still happening across the nation at a scale that's never been seen before.
> After five years, Fransen transitioned from a third-party collection environment to a buy-here, pay-here finance company and specialized in developing a successful in-house recovery department.
-
I mean seriously, what do you think the loss in value on a 150k mile 2005 Sentra with a mean belt squeal and an extra 1000 miles on it since the last repo is? They're dealing with desperate customers at the bottom of their list of choices so it's not even factored in into the price.
The only "wrench" in this is if someone manages to keep the car long enough that they can't keep the loan in-house... but by the time that happens they've already made their money: They didn't sell the car at a good price to a desperate buyer, the loan has matured so it's a little more, and it's not their problem if it needs to be repo'd.
Overall this is a discussion about the intersection of multiple massive industries that each do enough revenue to form their own countries. No offense, but you definitely don't know what you're talking about if you think you can reduce it to just needing to be "in the industry".
Loans at e.g. luxury-brand dealers are sold with the expectation of payment. There are other business models, however. There are some auto "dealers" who are really just rental places with another name. When they repo a vehicle, they perform the minimum of service and repair and then it goes back on the lot. A 7yo used car doesn't really lose any value from adding 5000 miles to the odometer, so the exorbitant finance fees go mostly to profit.
Vehicles that get absolutely trashed are a loss, but that's why the lenders want every repo to be a surprise to the creditor.
You're implying poor people don't understand a car payment. It's a pretty simple you owe x per month. I'm sure there are some who are so financially illiterate they don't understand, but I imagine the vast majority of poor people understand how much they're going to have to pay, and would prefer a company take a chance on them because it lets them get to their jobs.
Please refrain from commenting if you can't do it without putting words in my mouth.
These people are forced into owning cars by a reality of our country that's not changing soon: we're pretty damn car-centric. But they're being taken advantage by a system that uses unethical and even illegal tactics to squeeze them between a rock and a hard place.
The government can either do something upfront and probably save a ton of money while helping lift a lot of people out of a predatory cycle... or it can pick up the pieces after the house of cards comes crashing down.
-
The difference is that if it does something upfront people will claim it's evil socialist government charity to lure irresponsible people into voting. Never mind we did give these people checks to float which were often promptly turned in to these scum... leading to the lowest delinquency rate in the history of subprime ABS ratings (and record subprime loan performance!)
Instead the government will do nothing until the house of card falls, leaving a massive wake of destruction. And then the government will throw around cash to help out the various players across the wide wide range of markets that will be hit by the splash damage.
Their lobbyists will be out in full force assuring us this is what's best for the American people. The American people will be instructed that it was an necessary intervention to save the market.
Infusing overleveraged corporations with cash will benefit some very wealthy people (but don't worry it'll trickle down). And then we'll repeat this in 10-20 years.
Sure maybe society puts them between a rock and a hard place because it requires a car. But how is the dealership forcing them to need a car, or tricking them into getting a car?
They're just selling it to them, the individual is looking at the payments, they knows it's gonna be a stretch and they are rolling the dice hoping they can afford it.
The relationship between the individual and the dealership doesn't sound very exploitative to me.
Again you're putting words in my mouth. I didn't say dealerships forced them into needing a car, or tricked them into getting a car.
I asked you not do a simple thing: reply to what was said, not some non-sensical aberration of it, and you've failed twice. Why is such a simple task so difficult for you?
-
At the end of the day the dealerships are selling cars that are lemons.
The dealerships are requiring in-person on site payments.
The dealerships are selling cars well above FMV so that they can hold the loans in-house in a preferable structure that enables the rapid fire cycling of these cars.
Many dealerships are failing to disclose GPS trackers.
Some have gone as far as harassing buyers and their social circle after repos to try and get more money back.
I can't tell if you're being facetious at this point if you seriously think Buy-Here Pay-Here is not an exploitative grift. You don't get to double the profit margin of the people servicing prime customers with fair tactics: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/sen/sb_0951-1000/sb...
> The title stays with the lender until all the payments are made per the loan agreement.
This varies a lot by state. A lot (most?) states the title absolutely goes to the purchaser but it has a lien attached that gives the lender rights of repossession.
It's a pain in the ass, because you just hold a title that you can't do anything with. You have to physically get the lien signed off the physical title before you can sell it. That's why many states have switched to either electronic titling, or having the bank hold the title until they sign it off.
They send you a lien release, but the title is goes to you from the beginning. The title has a note that there is a lien on it, so if you buy a car with such a title you need to ensure you get the lien release with it. You cannot transfer a title with a lien notice on it without the lien release (I assume there is a way to assume the loan as well, but I've never heard of it happening. Most loans wouldn't allow that, so it is probably a technicality that the government wouldn't know how to handle if you actually did attempt that)
Depends on the state, in many states the lienholder retains the physical copy of the title to prevent a fraudulent sign-off on the lien being used to sell the vehicle. In a lot of these states they actually don't hold the physical copy because the DMV allows major lienholders to use electronic retention. In this case, when you pay off the loan the DMV actually produces a physical title for the first time so that the lienholder can mail it to you. The lienholder isn't interested in having filing cabinets full of title certificates to keep track of.
That said, physical possession of the paper doesn't really matter to ownership---as electronic retention demonstrates. The owner listed on the title is the owner regardless of who has the paper, and the DMV's electronic records are far more important than the paper certificate (you can just get the DMV to print a new certificate from their records, but of course they'll charge a hefty fee and policy usually prevents doing so when there's a lien).
The physical possession issue is just around the ability to fake a lien release signature and sell the vehicle. For the same reason some buyers won't accept a title with a signed-off lien and want a new "clean" title printed by the DMV first, but others will just verify the sign-off. Dealers usually have direct access to query DMV records and can check whether or not a lien sign-off is genuine that way (relase of lien is reported to the DMV by the lienholder), but private party purchasers don't have such an easy way to do this and are more vulnerable to this kind of fraud. Multi-sale title certificates that have sales logged on the back are also regarded as suspicious by a lot of buyers, and they'll want a new clean one.
That said, I think the GP here is making a big assumption about how courts would interpret the situation. A lienholder has the right to repossess the vehicle as is, by sending a tow truck. Whether or not a court would interpret "remote repossession" as somehow changing the fundamental nature of ownership is an open question and I'm pretty skeptical. It's already not that uncommon for lienholders to install GPS tracking devices with fuel pump cutoff, in which case they have a more limited degree of remote control of the vehicle, and I've never heard of anyone thinking this changes the fundamental owner-lienholder relationship. I just don't think this idea about transfer of liability really holds any water.
This is how it works in my state, yes. The lender doesn't keep the title. You do, and it's in your name, but the lender is also listed on it as the lien-holder.
> > When you finance a car, the vehicle becomes collateral for a loan, but it belongs to you.
> The title stays with the lender until all the payments are made per the loan agreement. I would not say the vehicle legally belongs to a borrower until they have possession of the title.
Maybe the confusion comes from the meaning of "owning". There are essentially three parts to ownership: the right to sell, to rent, and to use. A full owner has all three, but there are situation where they are distinct and the "owner" may be different depending on which aspect you consider. So when usage is considered, the borrower is the owner, the lender can't get into the car and drive, but when sales are considered, the lender can sell the car and get money from it, the borrower can't (at least not before the loan is fully paid).
Two of my vehicles are Chrysler's. Both send me a monthly email telling how the car is doing: tire psi, oil change status, etc. Both are paid off, but I'll bet anything they can still disable them. So do I really own them?
You own them. Sure Chrysler can disable your car, but whether they do that by sending it a radio signal or by sending a guy round with a wrench is neither here nor there.
> Reducing the costs to repossess collateral would reduce borrowing costs, and ultimately help borrowers with lower borrowing costs because there is less expense towards repossession.
Costs to borrowers could be reduced, which sounds like a nice silver lining to what most people would consider an anti-feature, but there's nothing that says the savings will necessarily be passed on to borrowers versus retained by the lenders instead.
Not to mention the (current) alternative is an often shady/creative/aggressive repossession agent who in many cases[0] has the legal authority to go on your property to hook and tow the vehicle (often in the middle of the night). Even when they "don't" they often do anyway.
In a country with very high firearm ownership it's actually dangerous[0]. From a quick Google search violence breaks out pretty often[2][3] in these circumstances.
Perhaps this is true in America where apparently you still have a paper title to indicate ownership?? But under commonwealth law "title" is a legal concept, not a physical document, and can't belong to anyone except the rightful owner. An asset can be used as security collateral without the ownership changing hands.
I believe in most states (I know in mine), there is no longer any paper that you can hold that makes you the owner. The title is just a document showing that you are the owner registered with the motor vehicle department. It doesn't grant you ownership.
In the US, a vehicle doesn't belong to someone free-and-clear if there are any liens against it. Mechanics and car loans are the primary users of this process. With leased vehicles, there's no conveyed ownership per-se because it's a glorified rental.
Might need Steve Lehto to weigh-in on how much "ownership" there is in America.
You don’t get mailed the title, but it’s your name on the title that the state holds (whether on title or electronically). So you don’t have the ability to sell it directly, you still own and are responsible for it.
Many banks will hold the title for you, but the title is technically in your name. For most people there safe is a better place to keep the title, most people don't really have a good safe to store documents like this. You only need a title when you sell or move states. Either way you will need the bank involved.
Sorry, but IOT is the only way to try and make hire purchase work in a lot of poor countries (speaking as a resident of a poor country). This model has already been explored succesfully by companies such as M-Kopa Solar. If the car companies don't do it themselves, there's definitely going to be an aftermarket for this type of thing with lenders in poorer countries.
I sympathize, but I'm not so sure about the laws. When it comes to companies as big as Ford, they could probably get the laws rewritten if needed - or even if they didn't, whether they got sued would depend more on who they were friends with than with the jot and tittle of legal text.
Well-off people can buy or rent cars without difficulty. Increasing the security of cars as collateral will reduce the credit risk of car loans and therefore the car loan interest rates charged to borrowers with low credit scores.
Exactly (on both sides). We should help people to find and choose cars they can afford.
And, when someone does not pay as agreed to a significant degree, the more efficient that a repossession can happen, the better a deal can be offered to borrowers who do pay as agreed.
In the 1970s my dad found that American car dealerships had no interest in selling small and economical cars at all.
Japanese car dealerships have been this way recently, before the pandemic hit we tried to buy a new Honda Fit and had to buy a used one because they had none in inventory because, allegedly, the factory had washed away in a flood but they had a row of 50 CR-Vs made in the same factory. The dealer tried to push us into one of those.
The automotive press uncritically reports that American consumers are crazy about huge vehicles but what I've observed is that dealers are crazy about selling huge vehicles. Before the pandemic you would frequently see small cars were selling out as fast they arrived on the lot but dealers would have a sea of huge and expensive vehicles and be offering $8000 or so in incentives to sell them. If small vehicles were really unpopular it would be the other way around.
There are rumors that Toyota and Honda would love to kill the Corolla and Civic but the quality of those vehicles is so legendary and the attachment of owners is so fanatical that they know people aren't going to "trade up" but will be paying new car prices for high mileage vehicles.
Your dealer doesn't know what they're talking about, which is par for the course. You couldn't find a Fit because Honda stopped importing them. They were discontinued in the US due to poor sales.
Not in my neighborhood. The Blue Honda Fit is the ideal getaway car in Tompkins County because you could do donuts in somebody's yard and they tell the cops and then they'd have to flag down every 20th car.
That assumes that sales figures are entirely controlled by demand. The OP points out a perfectly plausible mechanism by which demand is not the only factor affecting sales volume. It's almost certainly true that dealerships will stock what's profitable, customer preferences be damned.
This would assume that either the only game in town is Honda or that all the other manufacturers are colluding with Honda. Absent significant evidence, it is safer to assume people’s preferences are causing the lower sales.
This is true in my town. Believe it or not some customers and employees really love some car dealers and speak reverently about them and that was true of the last Toyota dealer but it is not true of the current one.
It's not hard in a small market. Often, large dealership chains don't put all their eggs in one brand basket. It works the same way in other cities, but larger cities can support multiple dealers of the same brand.
"The automotive press uncritically reports that American consumers are crazy about huge vehicles but what I've observed is that dealers are crazy about selling huge vehicles."
Very true. Same for houses. A lot of people probably would prefer a small house over not being able to afford a big house and renting eternally. But big houses are more profitable, so that's what's being built. That's why in a lot of markets supply and demand don't really work if the supply can be restricted.
In both scenarios there are laws encouraging these outcomes. Minimum lot sizes and CAFE standards, respectively, lead to bigger cars and houses. There are also small utility trucks and electric vehicles in other countries, but they’re unfortunately illegal in the land of the free, ostensibly for crash test performance opposite the giant trucks that are considered safe. Indeed, distorted markets are worse.
Always seems bizarre to me I can ride an ATV around or even a motorcycle on the highway, but a cheap 1980s style Honda CRV is apparently to unsafe to sell anymore because it doesn't meet crash test standards.
Most of the costs of manufacture are fixed or at most scale linear with mass, so the range of costs to mfgr the smallest commuter car vs the hugest truck are, at most, perhaps 3 to 1 but more realistically 2 to 1.
"The market will bear" a consumer paying 5 to 10 times as much for the largest fanciest SUV or pickup truck vs the smallest cheapest commuter car. Therefore the profit is VASTLY higher on larger cars and there's an immense motivation to get as many customers as possible into the biggest cars. If you can get a customer to pay 6 times as much for a SUV that costs 3 times as much to make, that's a huge profit lost if the customer is permitted to buy the commuter car.
Another way to phrase it is if almost all your profit comes from selling giant cars, then the customer experience of buying a small car is always going to be awful.
The people buying the largest vehicles are not concerned by cost, so increasing the cost of large vehicles via taxes or fees or regulation only makes the situation worse. You'd like to think that a 20% surcharge on large cars would result in fewer large cars sold, but the guy buying them is a general contractor and he needs the pickup truck to make money so he's just going to pass the cost on to real estate inflation and the extra 20% is going to motivate the dealership even harder to only sell expensive cars.
You’re giving Ford the benefit of the doubt that it will work as described and won’t be abused.
Have they earned that reputation regarding automated systems, and how will they deal with false positive/bugs etc. when the wrong car is repossessed at the worst time for its owner ?
Which means, not at all, look at the recent Hertz case about rental cars reported as stolen and then doubling down, because admitting to problems with the process would mean admitting to criminal intent.
The poster was talking about "human error". If you are out of a car because your lender messed up (perhaps intentionally to pocket the late fee) you are in trouble, because everyone needs a vehicle to get to work on time. And of course you have as much recourse against your lender as the people at the receiving end of the Hertz case. Didn't Peter Thiel say you need a seven-figure sum to make the legal system work for you?
I don't disagree with the end point, but I have a hard time understanding why the Hertz case demonstrates that Ford is likely to lie with criminal intent about a mistaken repo. It has literally nothing in common except that it involves a car.
If Ford wants to lie about repos or lie about human error, they can do that now, they don't need a computer to do it. The whole damn process is subject to human error as it is today.
The reduction of friction has me worried here. Nowadays you have to get a tow truck out to retrieve the vehicle, and you have an incentive not to do that pointlessly. But once the car can drive itself back to the dealership the bar will be lowered pretty quickly.
On the "people lying" side of the issue you're describing, up until now a tow company needed to be involved. With this system, the middle man is gone, so potentially a single employee could initiate repossesion of a whole fleet by themself.
Will the owners have recourse after being stranded without their car explaining their boss it just went away ? probably. Will the employee be punished ? surely. Is it something we want to allow on the first place ? I'm mot so sure.
Here we're really digging on the "working as intended" side, bit the more probable issues would be it's just buggy and sometimes an older cars thinks it got repossessed, goes away, and you're left to battle for getting reparations and/or another car, knowing you're probably broke so not in a strong position for that.
> On the "people lying" side of the issue you're describing, up until now a tow company needed to be involved. With this system, the middle man is gone, so potentially a single employee could initiate repossesion of a whole fleet by themself.
Tow truck drivers don't currently play any role in certifying the requests they get. A bank emails them repo paperwork, and they tow the car. If the paperwork they receive is not correct, they would have no way of even knowing that. In fact, the human tow truck drivers themselves create another layer of possibility for human mistakes.
I can see it now: A cash-strapped, frazzled single-mom parks her car on her driveway to unload groceries, leaving her child in the car seat while she carries bags inside the garage. While the mom is walking toward the door the car repossesses itself and heads back to the dealership, child trapped inside.
After this happens the first time they will add some kind of checking mechanism which means you can defeat repossession by putting a doll sitting on some bricks in a child car seat to avoid this happening automatically.
haha! At this rate, in the future, fooling an AI will be considered a form of hacking and met with computer fraud and abuse or inauthentic behavior charges.
> prevent americans buying cars on finance that they are never going to be able to afford
The issue is that "Making finance accessible to low income Americans" and "predatory lending" are approximately two sides of the same coin. And so it is not politically popular.
That's part of the narrative for the financial crisis. Even without waging that particular fight, it's important to remember that, for a long time, there were plenty of barriers to full participation that had nothing to do with the individual's ability to afford something. Redlining is probably the best documented of these practices.
Every creditworthiness measure is subject to some bias. Most practical ways of tightening lending is going to end up with some correlative demographic being disproportionately excluded.
People are going to use this to steal cars and scam people. It will almost certainly screw up and kill somebody at some point.
No amount of new features will ever convince me to buy a car that does this but the people who do buy them will undoubtedly be poor and marginalized and offered a great deal on their financing if they choose the roborepo car.
This. I anecdotally seen this happen to my wife's friends. Long story short, their credit is shot so they are forced to either purchase car by cash ( they seemingly can't ) or go to one of those places that will give them a car loan at ridiculous rate and installed with gizmos to allow easy repossession once payment is missed.
<< What needs to happen is better consumer protection to prevent americans buying cars on finance that they are never going to be able to afford.
I think you would have everyone and their mother fighting against this saying you need freedom to make stupid decisions. Even I am personally on the fence. You do need better protections, but you need to have an ability to make your choices ( and in US - not having a car is not really a valid solution ).
I'd rather a human was involved in the process. With this all you get is "computer says no" and poof your car is gone.
With a human tasked with the repo, at the very least even if "computer says no" to them, they have some leeway (even if it's slim-to-none) in talking to you about it.
567 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadI think antique car restoration and modernization is going to be a great business to be in for the next 20yr or so. At least the demons in older cars can be propitiated with minor rituals like a fetish hung on the mirror or the occasional blood sacrifice.
This shit is going to lead to hilarious scenes of cars flocking places because of a node.js bug.
edit: i forsee "car leashes"; probably something in the nature of a parking boot so make sure the car stays immobile or becomes nonviable. And there's always the trick of jackstands and hiding the wheels at night.
I don't see how a patent like this can be granted if we still generally don't have working self-driving cars. Even Tesla is getting forced to admit that "Full Self Driving" isn't really full self driving.
I'm sure some things do get through on occasion, but examiners are most certainly subject matter experts.
One exception that comes to mind is a couple of patents some physicist working for the US Navy created that probably aren't real technology. Anti-gravity devices and the like. Why they admitted those? No idea, but possibly this was done as part of some sort of hearkening back to the cold-war-era strategy of 'waste the enemies resources on a goose chase' kind of thing.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EzmEZ9oXEAQOiY1?format=jpg&name=...
Can I patent a self driving car that runs over pedestrians so that I can sue any company whose self driving car does it that hasn't paid me a license fee?
Political assassination via cyber attack/backdoor? ezpz, find a tree, accelerate into it, claim it was the car acting up.
Bug in the software? Sorry you're dying today because they wanted to repossess cars easier, your life is less important than protecting capital.
We're in a world where deregulation has planes either falling out of the sky or attempting to. I don't trust any soft handed regulation on cars without manual overrides.
My car has a push start, but also a manual transmission. I know if something goes wrong and my engine stops responding to the electric throttle I can just pop out of gear and coast.
On the political assassination front, wasn't there a story out about one such attempt or did I dream it?
LEOs are also notoriously corrupt and difficult to keep tabs on. Imagine police harassment when they have the ability to remotely shut off your car.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings_(journalist...
Not saying they're super common, but as someone who writes software, I don't like the increasing dependency on software implementations of certain components that are fairly simple in their mechanical form.
"My truck done left me and my cellphone said I'm broke"
If you liked my comment, please upvote and subscribe, and consider donating to my Patreon to have access to my future comments one day earlier.
HN used to bury Reddit-like comments a while back, but it seems the Reddit influence is becoming more and more accepted on HN these days, as I’m starting to see them more at the top vs. the bottom of threads.
Edit: Thanks for the upvotes kind stranger!
"Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Whether it actually is, or is not, is irrelevant.
Back on topic:
I find this hard to believe, what happens if it repossess itself by mistake? Gets in an accident on the way home during said repo? Especially since nowadays most Fords are just oversized trucks.
And why is this even a desired feature? Is the average Ford customer that untrustworthy? I’m curious what the expected amount of use for a feature like this is.
In any case, autonomous driving isn’t far along enough yet for this to be practical and out in the streets, so I wonder how it even got approval.
But my comment isn’t about the occurrence of them, it’s about the muddied waters when a vehicle repo’s itself with no driver. Who’s at fault if the vehicle crashes?
The purchaser of the vehicle clearly did not crash - they may not even know the vehicle was being repo’d. So then is the dealership or bank to blame? (If so, will this add to higher premiums?) Say a predatory dealership has some stake in the game. Given the asymmetry of information, maybe they will claim the car wasn’t being repo’d at all, rather the purchaser must have caused the damage and lied.
What if no repo even occurs but the software malfunction?
It just seems like such a mess.
Desired feature for leasing companies and as to damage after the company takes remote possession I expect the same shenanigans you get when returning rentals.
Please make it stop...
For instance:
i found hn throuh r/hackernews
Edit: And Monsanto, don't you know, told me ya'best not go, usin' your own seeds.
(no joke folks, I think there's some real potential for a satire country song here, I'm thinkin' by a Jonathan Coulton type singer)
Verse 1: My truck was my pride and joy, it was my everything But now it's gone, and I'm feeling the sting Ford said I couldn't pay, so they took it away And now I'm left here, with nothing to say
Chorus: My truck done left me, and my heart is broke I'm just a heartbroken man, and it ain't no joke But I'll find a way to get back on my feet And maybe someday, my truck and I will meet
Verse 2: Elon says I'm lazy, but he don't know me I worked hard every day, but still couldn't keep my truck, you see Folks told me to learn to code, but that ain't for me I just want my truck back, and to be free
Chorus: My truck done left me, and my heart is broke I'm just a heartbroken man, and it ain't no joke But I'll find a way to get back on my feet And maybe someday, my truck and I will meet
Verse 3: My tractor used to be my trusty steed But John Deere said I couldn't fix it, no indeed Used to be, I could do it all myself But now it's all about John Deere's wealth
Chorus: My truck done left me, and my heart is broke I'm just a heartbroken man, and it ain't no joke But I'll find a way to get back on my feet And maybe someday, my truck and I will meet
Verse 4: Monsanto told me not to plant my own seeds But I didn't listen, and now I'm in need Of some help, to get back on my feet But I won't give up, no, not me
Chorus: My truck done left me, and my heart is broke I'm just a heartbroken man, and it ain't no joke But I'll find a way to get back on my feet And maybe someday, my truck and I will meet
Outro: My truck may be gone, but I still have my pride And I won't let anyone, take that away inside I'll find a way to make it right And maybe someday, my truck will be back in sight.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/11dnngu/future_...
Except theirs is way funnier :)
edit- err sorry, it was this one!
https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/11drf6o/future...
> Write a country song about a guy whose truck left him. The first verse starts "My truck done left me and my cellphone said I'm broke"
Yes: your truck still ran away with your fishing boat and eloped on BLM land.
You get out of jail, your wife comes back, your dog comes back to life, you get your truck back, you get your farm back...
Taking a look at this now, for the first time in months. There's nothing in here about comedy not being allowed. It does discourage users from making comments like yours, though.
Shallow jokes to break up heavy conversations, like about our society slipping into a dystopia, are very human.
Verse 1: I had a trusty truck, my pride and joy Took me everywhere, never did destroy But times were tough, I fell behind Missed some payments, the bank declined
Chorus: Now my truck's gone, it drove away Left me feeling low, I gotta say I'm stuck here on this dusty land Holding onto memories of what I had
Verse 2: That old truck had a mind of its own But it always knew the way back home Now it's gone, and I'm all alone Sitting here, trying not to moan
Chorus: Now my truck's gone, it drove away Left me feeling low, I gotta say I'm stuck here on this dusty land Holding onto memories of what I had
Bridge: I should have known better, I should have tried To keep my payments up, to keep my ride Now I'm here, looking at the road Wondering where my truck has gone to roam
Chorus: Now my truck's gone, it drove away Left me feeling low, I gotta say I'm stuck here on this dusty land Holding onto memories of what I had
Outro: Maybe someday, I'll get another ride One that won't drive away, won't make me cry But for now, I'll just sit here and sing About the truck that was my everything.
Verse 1: Had a pickup truck, my favorite toy, Whiskey in console, feeling coy, Drove on dirt roads, feeling free, With a girl on the tailgate, in tight blue jeans for all to see.
Chorus: My truck left me, feeling stuck, Drinking whiskey in my blue jeans, feeling yuck, Miss the girl on the tailgate, her pretty look, Truck is gone, now I cry like a rook.
Verse 2: Fell behind on payments, lost my ride, The truck drove off, with the girl by its side, She wore tight blue jeans, hugged her curves just right, Now the truck and the girl are out of sight.
Chorus: My truck left me, feeling stuck, Drinking whiskey in my blue jeans, feeling yuck, Miss the girl on the tailgate, her pretty look, Truck is gone, now I cry like a rook.
Bridge: It was just a truck, I know, But its departure dealt a painful blow, I'll find a new ride and try to mend, But memories of the girl and the truck will never end.
Chorus: My truck left me, feeling stuck, Drinking whiskey in my blue jeans, feeling yuck, Miss the girl on the tailgate, her pretty look, Truck is gone, now I cry like a rook.
Outro: Maybe one day my truck will return, With the girl in tight blue jeans for all to yearn, Until then, I'll sip my whiskey and dream, Of the truck and the girl, a perfect team.
It didn't even mention a can of beer or shotgun
Violating auto speed limits is a good example. Society can't enforce speed limits 100% of the time if it relies on the occasional state trooper with a radar gun. Therefore society sets the penalty very high so that the small risk of a citation isn't worth the benefit of speeding.
100% enforcement should have much lower penalties.
There are other problems with 100% strict enforcement, in that we don't even know what laws we have.
It's a dangerous job and I don't think they give the repo folks enough information. I recently had to run one of them off as the former property owners had renters that stopped making payments on their vehicle. The repo guy was highly aggressive and was yelling at my family members. I assumed he was just some nutjob and had no idea he was a repo guy aside from the fact he was driving a tow truck without any company logo. I assumed he was trying to steal my tractor since it's is an antique.
Penalties are set high because in the US they're enforced only irregularly. If the US moves to some kind of near universal enforcement, problems will occur because of that.
But the really dangerous people on the highway aren't typical speeders who might go say 85-90mph when the speed limit is 55-65 mph. In traffic that isn't dense and clustered, high speeds in and of themselves are not a big problem.
The really dangerous people on the highway are those who aggressively change lanes in dense traffic, weaving in and out of traffic trying to find the narrowest possible gap to slip through where no safe passing gap exists. This is much harder to objectively track and measure unless a cop happens to sneak up on the dangerous driver and sees them firsthand.
Counterintuitively, I believe that the highways are made far less safe from speed limits because this tends to cluster up all traffic together so impatient people (who are going to exist no matter what) are compelled to dangerously weave in and out of dense clusters of cars which is the most likely thing to cause an accident.
If you made one or two lanes available with no speed limit so the aggressive drivers could be free to have their way and don't have to interact through slow drivers, I'd bet that most problems on the road would be solved. You want to create a situation where impatient people don't have to interact with the slower drivers.
Innovation today seems to have shifted towards serving the owning class.
When was it different?
I have a big enough philosophical objection to the concept where we don't actually own property and may only rent it from the government due to property taxes. Now we "own" phones we can't control, "own" cars that have features dis/en-abled over the air if you pay for them.
Product managers are brimming with innovative features and benefits enabled by stripping ownership away from the public/consumers. It reminds me of the Black Mirror episode where you pay for your toothpaste $0.05 at a time from a dispenser in your home when you want some on your toothbrush.
For personal property there is a production chain with labor that went into the item, but for land it's just out there and at some point someone decided they should be able to restrict what other people do in some area. If you see that it's not legitimate for a government to do, then by the same logic it's not legitimate for an individual - a government is just a collection of individuals acting together
I see the rights of government as secondary by default with exceptions meted out strictly as necessary. There exists a very limited number of jurisdictions where property taxes don't exist and land ownership is therefore real, so there's no philosophical/legal impediment to foregoing property taxes.
Further, the government is the only thing that grants the land ownership claim, if there is no government than anyone can come along and kick you off your land, revealing that you didn't really own it to start with - you're just living there right now
Do you mean because it's immobile?
> it's impossible to establish a chain of custody for land ownership that doesn't involve theft
This is a big issue in some places, e.g. I've heard in South Africa, because of legal issues arising out of confiscation when apartheid ended. Not so much in the US. There are some disputes going back to deeds with native Americans but they're very rare.
> the government is the only thing that grants the land ownership claim, if there is no government than anyone can come along and kick you off your land
The government's authority is the only reason a theory of any private property can exist in the real world anyway. Unless we're talking about super abstract theories of private enforcement in anarchist philosophy or something. In the world we live in, no government means people take your stuff, whether it's land or not.
Yeah I'm talking about personal vs private property, generally defined by movability, so like a house itself is private but the land isn't
> Not so much in the US. There are some disputes going back to deeds with native Americans but they're very rare
I think you're only talking about disputes recognized in the courts, not the actual disputes over the whole land claim which have consistently been there historically
> In the world we live in, no government means people take your stuff, whether it's land or not
Seems like we agree on this point - land ownership comes from the govt who ultimately "owns" all the land (but still through theft or some random claim)
My theory is that as profits decline due to the tendency of markets to reach equilibrium with respect to products/services supplied that capital owners will begin to reintroduce pre-capitalist norms and practices such as landlordism as these can sustain revenues to their liking as you renter won't have any ownership rights to contest their actions. It means they can raise rental rates anytime in the majority of cases and then just evict you from or repossess what was rented. Kind of like feudalism but without the fancy hats and titles.
Doing an image search for "ford model t plaque" yields some examples.
But this isn't anything new. Buy here pay here places have been throwing ignition locks on cars for ages and shut off the ignition if you don't make payments. This would take it a step further, integrate it into the car, and add autonomous features to it.
Our lawyers were pragmatic about it. They were very clear that the concept should be novel and plausible, and were willing to offer guidance and help with the text of the parent. It was neat, and I wish I’d taken advantage of it.
The inventor would submit ideas to the patent staff, if selected, spend an hour or so describing it to staff who write the patent application; the inventor reviews and clarifies, etc a couple rounds, and then it's submitted.
I can get into the nearest city and town just fine on public transport, and that's what I do. But public transport here is spoke-hub. If you want to go somewhere that is moderately far away from a hub, it becomes incredibly difficult (and expensive).
If you live in a city, and you never leave that city other than to go to other cities, then you absolutely do not need a car. Most other people do.
- Camping overnight is both illegal, and less comfortable than the hotel I was basing my hikes out of
I drove there, stayed at a hotel, and hiked out from that hotel every day. It was a very memorable trip. I then drove home.
The alternative would have been to get a bus to the train station (40 minutes), a train to the south of the park (2 hours), get a bus from the train station to another town (only 2 buses a day, morning and night, so we'd have had to leave home much earlier or lose a day), get another bus from that town to another town, then get another bus from that town to another town. All whilst lugging a large suitcase, camera bag & gear, and another backpack between us. The buses would have taken another 3 hours. Then if I needed to get home in an emergency, or otherwise leave quickly, I'd have to redo it all backwards, and hope I could make that twice a day bus.
No thanks, I'll just stick with my 1.5 hour drive from my front door to the hotel.
It fulfils the desire to go from point A to point B in relative comfort at relative speed, at reasonable cost that scales to the local economy. US market cars tend to have lots of extraneous features and not be suitable for rugged roads; less developed economies get models with fewer comfort features, but a more robust suspension for use where roads are more aspirational. Autorickshaws are common in some places and unknown elsewhere, etc.
Walking, biking, and public transit in a livable community is the only rational way forward.
I've noticed that the arrogant and condescending people who are most opposed to cars tend to be childless young urbanites with very limited life experience. The rest of the country operates in a completely different way, and votes accordingly.
My observed injury rate per vehicle mile, per trip, or per time spent, in a car is much lower than the same rates on a bicycle. Incidentally, my largest injury on a bike was due to street car rails, so thanks public transit for making the roads less safe for bicycling. I can't count the number of times I've tripped while walking, resulting in mostly minor injuries, but nevertheless more injuries than I've sustained in automobiles (not counting violence from siblings). Lack of safety restraints on public transit mean more minor injuries from sudden stops as well.
> Cars are too big and too heavy
Autorickshaws are much smaller, lighter, and more fuel efficient. Plus they're cute!
> Infrastructure demands are too great
Infrastructure demands for cars scale. You can use cars if you can get fuel to enough fueling stations and have cleared trees and other obstacles from paths. Pavement is optional but encouraged. Parking lots are nice to have, but any cleared space works. You don't get a lot of speed, and probably not much fuel efficiency, but it works. Paved roads are nicer, and they get built because they're useful. Of course, busses and bicycles like paved roads too (paving for bikes requires a lot lower standard too).
If you can't get fuel to fueling stations, there's things like wood gasifiers[1], although gasoline and diesel are much more scalable if the infrastructure is present.
> Walking, biking, and public transit in a livable community is the only rational way forward.
This would severely limit the scope of livable communities. Or at least significantly increase transit time for many to most activities. Those are all great options, when available and appropriate, but a lot of times it's not the best mode of transportation and often it's not even appropriate. The diversity of origin/destination pairs in most metropolitan areas of a certain size makes it very hard for most users to be served by direct public transit routes, and hub and spoke routing makes a lot of trips turn into first go 30 minutes in the wrong direction, then 30 minutes in the right direction, when a point to point automobile trip would be much less time.
I can't imagine some of my recent trips working well with public transit. Especially those trips where I'm carrying sports equipment for multiple people not traveling with me. How do you take three or four sets of hockey gear on a bicycle, or walking the half mile uphill from the bus stop to my home?
[1] https://www.amusingplanet.com/2022/02/wood-gas-vehicles-cars...
I used to be a big proponent of alcohol/drug test to prevent car starting, ideally I imagined the system would be with an absolute guarantee (mandated) the information stays local (just a hardware switch preventing ignition or startup). But I'm sad to say I don't believe in any more, so much abuse to mark people as 'tries to drive while under the influence' or making you pay higher insurance because you're often 0.5g instead of 0.3g.
I really want people to be prevented to drive killing vehicles under the influence (yes even my e-cargo). I know it would bring so many other problems, such as cost, tampering, bad sensitivity, etc. It doesn't make sense to me that we don't crack down more on this specific act.
Probably be better to just make cars do realtime verification of license status before letting someone drive ... but that's only better by comparison; people who never drive drunk will bristle at the heavy regulation.
Money spent making the device not suck reduces profit. Nobody will care when you abuse your customers because your customers are convicted criminals.
Pretty much every company selling stuff that people need to use to not violate the terms of their sentence is like this.
That may be true. But it's also possible that measuring blood alcohol with breath tests is never going to work consistently for all people. Breathalyzers are well known for widely variable results between people who have identical BAC.
If it's meant to be used by everyone (I'm not thinking DUI recidivists, how many people have you seen rationalize driving after a drink or two or six) then make it usable by everyone.
I'm also extremely tired of people veering into the fucking bikelane while phoning, texting, hands off talking on the phone, and sometimes (to often) just 'checking' the damn cargo with my two kids inside. So they can get to work 'on time' and spend 15 minutes at the coffee machine. Dammit.
Make it impossible to interact with in a moving object, cut the data and phone, I don't have the answer or a patent but this is killing so many people for very, extremely selfish and stupid reasons...
But since we're OK for the road being some kind of far west, Dashcam it is...
A couple in Florida was killed yesterday in the hurricane, though they tried to evacuate, the storm meant that license verification servers were down and their Ford would not start.
Edit: Just occurred to me this is probably a theoretic future state
It's not that I'm afraid of missing a payment. At this point I would probably buy the car outright. But after the robo-signing debacle with BoA repossesssing houses that they were never party to, the mere capability renders the machine fundamentally untrustworthy.
I've said this a couple of times before, but I find it fairly astonishing that we don't have legislation covering what manufacturers are allowed to do to a product with embedded devices after a user has purchased it.
I want to be very clear - after I have bought a product, ANY CHANGE WITHOUT MY CONSENT done by the embedded software at the behest of the manufacturer is essentially breaking and entering (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)). They have the ability to stick a "little green man" inside the car, that should not absolve them of the legal repercussions of using it without my permission.
I don't believe that sticking a term/clause into a user agreement that is not negotiable is an acceptable way to deal with this situation.
This is rapidly becoming one of my strongest political beliefs. I think the concept of ownership is at stake.
My wishlist is essentially:
1. Devices that contain digital locks MUST provide all keys to all locks to the buyer at time of purchase. The user can opt into allowing the manufacturer to keep a copy, but they must be allowed to opt out.
2. Devices that require remote services must explicitly list all services and features that depend on those services. The user must have the option to opt out of remote services.
3. Buyers of devices that choose to opt out of remote services are revoking consent for manufacturer access to the device. Any future access by the manufacturer (at all, from updating code to reporting usage to remotely starting a car) will be considered a violation of the CFAA.
4. Manufacturers must justify why a feature requires a remote service. "Profit" is not an acceptable answer.
Man, do I have bad news for you about everything.
Basically - I want a simple contract that ensures that the device I've bought will continue working as expected (assuming no use of remote/internet connected features) and that the manufacturer is unable to enter my property and change how it functions after sale.
I don't find that particularly unusual. I think the unusual part is rather than manufacturers have this new ability at all. For the majority of our legal history it was either prohibitively expensive or downright impossible for a manufacturer to embed a device that only obeys the manufacturer into consumer products.
Now it's both possible and cheap, and I'd like to see some regulation regarding my rights to purchase a tool.
A small number of places are paying at least a little attention and beginning to ban the most egregious cases of this (ex: NJ considering banning car subscriptions with a specific call out to the behavior of BMW around seat heaters).
But this is going to become a tidal wave of consumer abuse in the very near future - I can fucking guarantee it.
Why would anyone ever sell you a product when they can rent it to you and let their "little green man" be the property manager for free? They won't - not unless they're forced to.
And while I think renting can be a useful way to acquire a product - I sure as hell think it shouldn't be the only one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19825745
The only restrictions that the financer can put on your use of the vehicle are ones that you agreed to in the loan agreement. They can't just restrict your use of it as they see fit -- unless, I suppose, you were foolish enough to sign an agreement allowing them to.
The only restrictions I've ever personally seen have been a requirement to carry comprehensive car insurance for some minimum amount. And, of course, there's a lien on the car so you can't sell it without having the lien removed (typically by repaying the loan).
Don't take out a loan to buy a car.
Huh, which state is that? Every car I've ever financed, the bank owns the title until the loan is paid off. Exactly the opposite of mortgaging a house, where I've owned the deed but the bank put a lien on it.
Kind of surprised it hasn’t happened yet honestly.
https://interestingengineering.com/culture/hacker-attacked-y...
like an insurance company?
How about a million dollar cruse missile? Deal?
There will be a few high profile stories of cars driving off with newborn babies strapped in the car seat, then the tech will be banned.
Weirdly enough by patenting the business method, this makes every car mfgr OTHER than Ford much more appealing, so what we really is patent trolls as a service patenting really bad ideas to make sure nobody can implement them. I don't think Ford's new invention was intended to get me to buy a Toyota. Patenting bad ideas as a weapon is an interesting concept. Other than the obvious fraud issue, what's to stop me from filing a REALLY bad idea patent, then selling the stock short, then drumming up some PR, then closing out my short position at profit? At some point this is inevitable as "the internet" along with "the stock market" and everything else becomes more bot than human.
But you’ve also gotta be selfish enough to think that your pollutants don’t matter and that 1970’s era smog wasn’t a big deal. And you have to hope that older cars are still grandfathered in to pollution regulations and they won’t be subject to mileage limits as cars continue to emit fewer (or no) pollutants.
https://www.bicycling.com/culture/a41119529/the-most-dangero...
If only homicide was illegal, then no one would kill anyone else.
what in tarnation
It's not clear to me that the wireless shifters themselves communicate via Bluetooth, though the system does use that to talk to a smartphone app, if desired.
It seems like there has to be a market for something other than what we are getting. I'd like something that benefits from improvements in emissions/gas mileage but doesn't bolt on infotainment or phone integrations or networked everything. Zero interest in lane-assist technology. Preemptively saying no to any O.T.A. updates. I basically want what in 2023 would be considered a work-truck level of utilitarianism but in a form I can use to get my family from A to B, since throwing young kids up front on a bench seat in a work-truck is a no-go. It would be nice if it weren't actively ugly as well, but on this point I am negotiable.
Maybe the Bronco selling like crazy will convince carmakers to issue "remastered" versions of previous cars, and maybe the remastering won't be "stick a 17inch screen in the center console."
I put cameras onto a box truck so I had reversing etc, but I used an 8-camera wired security system with video recorder and eSIM for that. The screen was optional but I found one that only had one button (to toggle views) rather than a "command console" type that by its nature gave full control over the security system. Driving around displaying the bumper-height rear camera on the screen was quite handy, normally it's a blind spot of trucks.
Likewise the GPS tracking system, I bought a stand-alone navigation system (you need a truck-specific one that you can at the very least type height and weight into so it doesn't direct you down roads you can't fit through), and obviously a separate anti-theft tracker (well, two, because the immobiliser also had one).
And of course there was a radio/CD player in the cab, no need to wire that into the one computer to rule them all that modern mobile infotainment systems have. I mean, "computers with wheels" or whatever the transport as a service companies call their devices these days.
Everyone is reselling the more or less same cheap Chinese units at insane markups. Firmware seems to be mostly identical. The tracking portals never have HTTPS. I haven't been able to find anything decent so far.
Access to it was either via the manufacturer website or you could configure your own server IP and it would send JSON packets via HTTP post. No verification of the server, but it was also annoying enough to configure that I thought even a thief that found it would just smash it rather than fscking with it. AFAIK no-one ever did, it only stopped working when I stopped paying for the eSIM (the new owner never took over that tracker even though I told them all about it)
The immobiliser was a whole other ball of shit. It had a keyfob, but also remote monitoring via a physical SIM. I couldn't find a DIY-able one, so I was paying ~$US50/year to some Chinese company to monitor the system and allow me to track and immobilise it via their app. That worked, as did the geographic restrictions, but it was also easy enough to remove/bypass - the new owner hated the system and rang me to yell about it before removing it. I assume they just added a bypass wire and moved on.
My thinking is that GPS tracking at least gives a chance of finding the car again if it gets stolen.
Being able to configure a server is already great. Will do some more digging.
> It seems like there has to be a market for something other than what we are getting.
I might have a few small wishes, like I'd appreciate windshields and rear windows that quickly adapt to blinding headlights (or better regulations for highlights with actual enforcement), but cars have been mostly "good enough" for ages.
Funny how quickly an incredibly empowering technology became obscenely oppressive after they take the keys to the machine away from us. Sometimes I wish computers had never been invented.
The full self repossession thing is just another use case for full self drive, which is complete fantasy land on the part of automakers.
So, it will do what every Ford I've owned since the 80s will do...
What if you usually work weekends which is common for a lot of the jobs people who are missing payments might be working? In that case you would be out of luck.
You would also be out of luck if you are trying to get a side-gig or pick up a part time job on weekends to make ends meet.
This is what happens when people who have no money troubles make decisions in a board room. Completely out of touch.
This technology in any car should be a violation of our rights. A corporation dictates when to access the vehicle remotely?
It’ll start with justifiable use cases. In a not too distant future, imagine something like:
* can’t access car during peak CO2 emission times because you got the cheaper monthly rate that uses a green subsidy to pay for the cheaper rate
* your incorrectly a suspect of a petty crime, your car is now inaccessible because Ford doesn’t want liability if you do something bad with their car (despite you cooperating with law enforcement)
* you’ve been categorized as spreading hate speech/misinformation/disinformation and that breaks our terms of service
I could go on, but you get the point.
My thought process was that the inherent evils were already being discussed, so I figured I would point out something that I saw in the article which I thought was interesting but not already being discussed.
This sounds like a feature that opens up a new avenue of potential financial engineering. If your car could enforce that it was in 'green mode' or didn't drive at certain times and you could get a subsidy or tax break for it, that might potentially be a good incentive to encourage more environmental friendly lifestyles and practices. That doesn't seem like a bad thing to me, I might not want to buy that feature but it allows for some interesting possibilities. The buyer would have to agree to some stuff at the time of purchase (or lease as it sounds like it would be) to enable this.
We should be mindful of potential unintended consequences of these things. There are some good frameworks in place though, despite what you're second point suggests, Ford has relatively limited liability in the case that their car is driven by a bad actor (cooperating the the police or not) the second that car starts driving on its own, for whatever reason, Ford has some liability.
I remember my grandfather being relatively upset at the idea of GM knowing his GPS coordinates when his Cadillac had onstar. Now there have been hundreds or even thousands of cases when OnStar has had a positive outcome on peoples lives after a crash or something, including times they've reported it before anyone else. His tune changed dramatically one time they remotely unlocked his car and remotely started it so he could get home when his fishing boat turned over and his car keys were at the bottom of a lake though.
Hell no. It starts that way, and it ends with "you are not allowed to live".
Humans are bad at predicting edge cases. That cuts both directions. Machines should give guidance, not provide enforcement.
In practice, not everyone might have the choice to just not buy that feature.
"Buy a bus pass like the good poors, cash side work is evil"
-the people peddling these things, but using nicer words"
When you finance a car, the vehicle becomes collateral for a loan, but it belongs to you. A technology like this means that the vehicle still belongs to Ford, which means if something goes wrong with it, or if you get sciatica from their shitty seats, you can class action sue them into oblivion.
The reason we have laws is so that people have recourse to principle, whereas when you implement something like this in hardware (a car), it's dystopian vigilantism. I realize the largest future growth market for cars is in countries without reliable legal systems, and whose evolving governments will not hamper themselves the way the US did by guaranteeing individual freedoms, but this is why discourse about tech is important, as for every innovation, there's 100 scumbags like this inventor looking to leverage it to exploit people.
Also I’m not sure you’re correct about the ownership and the lawsuits. Sure you can sue anyone for anything but why would this be any different from me leasing a car from ford and the same thing happening? That doesn’t seem to have been an issue for automakers so far…
For the record, this sounds like a dystopian nightmare to me. I’m not in favor of the concept.
Ford has a huge financing arm. And it will probably get bigger as interest rates rise, because they have more room to offer lower than market interest rates as a hidden discount without dropping the purchase price.
[1] https://www.ford.com/finance/investor-center/ford-interest-a...
I hear this meme a lot but is it actually true? By most benchmarks cars from the last 10 years are more reliable than those from two decades ago.
I don't know about Ford, so they might still be ok, or at least better than GM. I don't want to pay $40K+ to find out though.
I expect to be able to drive vehicles without major issues for about 10 years. I've done this in the past with GM vehicles, but after 2007, the two I owned had significant issues all the ones I purchased prior did not. I put significantly less than 10k miles a year on my vehicles.
I'm not a lawyer at all, however much of my work on privacy and security has been about reconciling technology architecture and implementations with privacy and other laws and regulations, and security architecture is about allocating risk between counterparties in a technology solution, so from that view, this could be reasonably interpreted as a predatory technology.
They are, in all other respects, the same as a traditional loan-based purchase.
Nothing prevents that from happening now, though. I'm also uncertain how reclaiming the collateral for the loan is any different in this scenario.
Granted, I think this is extraordinarily gross and consumer-hostile. Aren't there myriad of options on the table for reclaiming the vehicle? How often does someone "get away" with keeping a car, anyway? That's what the repossession industry exists for.
It seems like a good idea for stolen autos (at least until the car can be modded to remove the ability, so recently stolen autos). As long as there are enough checks to ensure that only the owner (or law enforcement with a warrant) can repossess the car. There just has to also be a requirement that the lease holder can't lawfully repossess without a court judgement.
Is it not correct that the lending entity you use to purchase a vehicle is the party that legally owns it? The borrower has possession and right to use the vehicle, but the lender holds the title. That's why you get the title transferred over to your name once the balance of the load is repaid.
The reason they do that is because a lien gives them the ability to, within a particular legal framework, get ownership of the car if you don't pay your loan, prevent the title from being transferred to someone they don't trust, etc. It's basically just risk mitigation.
The title stays with the lender until all the payments are made per the loan agreement. I would not say the vehicle legally belongs to a borrower until they have possession of the title.
> The reason we have laws is so that people have recourse to principle, whereas when you implement something like this in hardware (a car), it's dystopian vigilantism.
The legal system is costly to use. Reducing the costs to repossess collateral would reduce borrowing costs, and ultimately help borrowers with lower borrowing costs because there is less expense towards repossession.
This article is something like 5-10 years behind reality: Right now subprime auto loans are mostly enforced with GPS trackers that buyers are usually not made properly aware of, or even worse, tricked into paying for as an add-on pitched as being for their own benefit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/business/dealbook/gps-dev...
-
There are entire businesses built on selling poor people cars at truly insane interest rates, on payments they clearly can't afford, repossessing the cars on the cheap with GPS trackers, then selling then to the next poor person with bad credit.
This grift isn't new, but cheap GPS trackers and license scanners reduced the cost per repossession in a way that enabled these places to be signficantly more brazen about it.
Unfortunately the two prevailing takes I see on this are "they're subprime for a reason" as if they deserve it, and "well at least someone is still giving them a chance, you need a car in this country" (and of course some well meaning but ill informed people think you can just take public transport in every part of the country)
The reality is this is worse than nothing in many cases. Buy here, pay here have people pay more frequently so that they can repo a car within days not months of someone buying them. The process isn't free either, it's disruptive, and they'll continue to leech off the owner in collections.
-
Overall it feels like a classic case of short sightedness from society. Saying we should directly subsidized subprime people's access to affordable loans and cars would be a non-starter: It sounds like some bleeding heart charity case making the responsible pay for the irresponsible.
But then we'll all indirectly fund a much worse version of that when subprime auto loans start to implode (like they're probably already starting to with the interest rate hikes...) and we're all paying to pick up the pieces in multiple ways. If the bottom falls out the car market, well right now even middle class families are taking loans with insane terms that leave them underwater in a good market. The pain will trickle up and out from just subprime lenders and cars specifically.
The recovery rates for subprime auto deals are historically around 50%
https://www.fitchratings.com/research/structured-finance/soa...
They do need a few people who pay off the whole car. These are the case studies they use to shout how great they are for taking a chance on someone who turned their life around.
For example here's NY state
If you've already paid more than 60 percent of the amount you owe when the car is repossessed, the creditor must auction it within 90 days. During this time, you can still get your car back, says the New York City Bar Legal Referral Service. You have up until the car is actually sold or leased to settle with the lender. You might have to pay the past due amounts, but often you'll be asked to pay the entire loan balance.
After the auction, the creditor can apply the proceeds toward fees and expenses relating to the repossession and the unpaid balance on the loan. The lender must give you a completed an Affirmation of Repossession and Bill of Sale. After all expenses are paid, you're entitled to the balance of the proceeds.
https://www.sapling.com/6669128/new-state-car-repossession-l...
The trick is to lend me $100 on a $40 dollar car that I cannot sell for $70. Nevermind the fact that in most states I can't sell the car for any amount as the dealership owns the lien.
> There are strict rules what you can do state by state, but generally you can't repossess something worth more than the outstanding balance and keep the rest as a profit
A lot of articles have been written about scammy "Buy Here, Pay Here" autosales that exist despite the strict rules. Since the dealership is financing the car, they can tweak the initial balance and monthly payments to their liking, while following the letter of the law but hitting the repo quota on the same '97 Honda Civic.
And the car isn’t the only thing being sold, there might be a bundled reconditioning fee, a GPS installation fee, a documentation fee, a service fee, origination fee, nitrogen fee, etc. So when they sell the car again for the same $2000 plus fees that you bought it for, they’ll happily deduct that $2000 from the $3000 you still owe.
Since you mentioned subprime loans, to clarify: this is about the level below that, for people that can’t qualify for a loan from any real bank, even Santander.
https://www.fitchratings.com/structured-finance/abs/auto-ind...
As soon as the government assistance I'm advocating dried back up we skyrocketed back to historical highs of subprime delinquency.
And notice how when graphed together, right on the timeframe I describe of 5-10, you see a massive divergence between subprime and prime trends even in your own article. Recovery rates tell you percentages, not absolute scale. (graph is a stunning representation of our current K-shaped recovery btw)
With cheaper repossessions the scale was what increased, and that's what Fitch is referring to with record performance.
We gave more people than ever who couldn't afford loans loans, and so while the relative rate of recovery didn't change, delinquency went insane, and is gearing up to get even more insane with the interest rate hikes.
> People who give out car loans want you to pay back the loan.
I can't tell if this is just a naive or at least uninformed take. At a high enough level the financial system wants people to pay back loans... but that's not what's being discussed here.
-
There are dealers who want buyers to fail to pay. They're additionally enabled by both GPS trackers and license scanners to be even more efficient in their grift.
Additionally, you accidentally exposed an amazing example of what I described in terms of "we will subsidize it either way"
We don't provide a direct form of assistance specific to cars... but we did pay individuals to keep them afloat during the pandemic. They then had to take that money and pay subprime lenders to keep cars with exorbitant interest fees for longer, driving record profitability for the subprime market.
Now interest rates are spiking, those people are losing their cars. They're in a more desperate situation than ever, with less assistance then when interest rates were better. Used car prices fell, but not enough to cover all the ground they gained during the heat of the pandemic.
It's like this country just lets looming crisis walk up face to face without every trying to change course lest we seem like communists. To me this shouldn't even be a partisan issue, we can enable a smaller need for government intervention in the next economic slump by just not donating money to these lenders
No offense but i don't think you know what you're talking about. Where are you getting this information? Talk to someone in the industry
> So you're saying car repossessions can yield a profit?
Yes! You don't understand how Buy-Here Pay-Here works if you're going on about auctions.
Here in CA it's been legally defined specifically to try and help protect a vulnerable population, but the MO is the same wherever you go:
- 90% of all their loans are kept in-house for 90 days
- The dealer does not primarily deal with new cars
That means if they repo the car within 90 days, they're out of pocket exactly the cost of the recovery and the depreciation... so they just lean heavily on cars that are at the end of their useful lives, then ask for just enough down to cover the repo and a sliver of profit.
They let the fish go, and hope the inevitable* happens within 90 days, so they take the car back and sell the account to collections for a few extra pennies. And obviously it's the junkiest of junk debt so it's not worth much, but there are bottom feeding collection agencies that will use barely legal tactics to try and squeeze just a tiny bit of extra blood from the stone.
* To understand how far these places are willing to go: CA needed to pass a law to prevent them from requiring in person payments and force them to disclose the trackers (most states don't require this).
That's because they'd require all payments to be made on-site, then have recovery waiting for the end of business to take cars. Can't get there because of work? Repo'd. Can't get there because of a court date? Repo'd. Can't get there because the POS they sold you isn't working? Repo'd and patched up just enough to hobble along enough for the next desperate buyer.
And to be clear, CA is in the minority in preventing that, this is still happening across the nation at a scale that's never been seen before.
-
To be even more efficient, they're starting to take on more of the collections processes themselves, often with disastrous results: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-takes...
https://www.autoremarketing.com/bhph/three-ways-improve-coll...
> After five years, Fransen transitioned from a third-party collection environment to a buy-here, pay-here finance company and specialized in developing a successful in-house recovery department.
-
I mean seriously, what do you think the loss in value on a 150k mile 2005 Sentra with a mean belt squeal and an extra 1000 miles on it since the last repo is? They're dealing with desperate customers at the bottom of their list of choices so it's not even factored in into the price.
The only "wrench" in this is if someone manages to keep the car long enough that they can't keep the loan in-house... but by the time that happens they've already made their money: They didn't sell the car at a good price to a desperate buyer, the loan has matured so it's a little more, and it's not their problem if it needs to be repo'd.
Overall this is a discussion about the intersection of multiple massive industries that each do enough revenue to form their own countries. No offense, but you definitely don't know what you're talking about if you think you can reduce it to just needing to be "in the industry".
Vehicles that get absolutely trashed are a loss, but that's why the lenders want every repo to be a surprise to the creditor.
These people are forced into owning cars by a reality of our country that's not changing soon: we're pretty damn car-centric. But they're being taken advantage by a system that uses unethical and even illegal tactics to squeeze them between a rock and a hard place.
The government can either do something upfront and probably save a ton of money while helping lift a lot of people out of a predatory cycle... or it can pick up the pieces after the house of cards comes crashing down.
-
The difference is that if it does something upfront people will claim it's evil socialist government charity to lure irresponsible people into voting. Never mind we did give these people checks to float which were often promptly turned in to these scum... leading to the lowest delinquency rate in the history of subprime ABS ratings (and record subprime loan performance!)
Instead the government will do nothing until the house of card falls, leaving a massive wake of destruction. And then the government will throw around cash to help out the various players across the wide wide range of markets that will be hit by the splash damage.
Their lobbyists will be out in full force assuring us this is what's best for the American people. The American people will be instructed that it was an necessary intervention to save the market.
Infusing overleveraged corporations with cash will benefit some very wealthy people (but don't worry it'll trickle down). And then we'll repeat this in 10-20 years.
They're just selling it to them, the individual is looking at the payments, they knows it's gonna be a stretch and they are rolling the dice hoping they can afford it.
The relationship between the individual and the dealership doesn't sound very exploitative to me.
I asked you not do a simple thing: reply to what was said, not some non-sensical aberration of it, and you've failed twice. Why is such a simple task so difficult for you?
-
At the end of the day the dealerships are selling cars that are lemons.
The dealerships are requiring in-person on site payments.
The dealerships are selling cars well above FMV so that they can hold the loans in-house in a preferable structure that enables the rapid fire cycling of these cars.
Many dealerships are failing to disclose GPS trackers.
Some have gone as far as harassing buyers and their social circle after repos to try and get more money back.
I can't tell if you're being facetious at this point if you seriously think Buy-Here Pay-Here is not an exploitative grift. You don't get to double the profit margin of the people servicing prime customers with fair tactics: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/sen/sb_0951-1000/sb...
This varies a lot by state. A lot (most?) states the title absolutely goes to the purchaser but it has a lien attached that gives the lender rights of repossession.
That said, physical possession of the paper doesn't really matter to ownership---as electronic retention demonstrates. The owner listed on the title is the owner regardless of who has the paper, and the DMV's electronic records are far more important than the paper certificate (you can just get the DMV to print a new certificate from their records, but of course they'll charge a hefty fee and policy usually prevents doing so when there's a lien).
The physical possession issue is just around the ability to fake a lien release signature and sell the vehicle. For the same reason some buyers won't accept a title with a signed-off lien and want a new "clean" title printed by the DMV first, but others will just verify the sign-off. Dealers usually have direct access to query DMV records and can check whether or not a lien sign-off is genuine that way (relase of lien is reported to the DMV by the lienholder), but private party purchasers don't have such an easy way to do this and are more vulnerable to this kind of fraud. Multi-sale title certificates that have sales logged on the back are also regarded as suspicious by a lot of buyers, and they'll want a new clean one.
That said, I think the GP here is making a big assumption about how courts would interpret the situation. A lienholder has the right to repossess the vehicle as is, by sending a tow truck. Whether or not a court would interpret "remote repossession" as somehow changing the fundamental nature of ownership is an open question and I'm pretty skeptical. It's already not that uncommon for lienholders to install GPS tracking devices with fuel pump cutoff, in which case they have a more limited degree of remote control of the vehicle, and I've never heard of anyone thinking this changes the fundamental owner-lienholder relationship. I just don't think this idea about transfer of liability really holds any water.
If you purchase it, you get a title with a lien, and you need to have it reissued, after the car is paid.
> The title stays with the lender until all the payments are made per the loan agreement. I would not say the vehicle legally belongs to a borrower until they have possession of the title.
Maybe the confusion comes from the meaning of "owning". There are essentially three parts to ownership: the right to sell, to rent, and to use. A full owner has all three, but there are situation where they are distinct and the "owner" may be different depending on which aspect you consider. So when usage is considered, the borrower is the owner, the lender can't get into the car and drive, but when sales are considered, the lender can sell the car and get money from it, the borrower can't (at least not before the loan is fully paid).
Costs to borrowers could be reduced, which sounds like a nice silver lining to what most people would consider an anti-feature, but there's nothing that says the savings will necessarily be passed on to borrowers versus retained by the lenders instead.
In a country with very high firearm ownership it's actually dangerous[0]. From a quick Google search violence breaks out pretty often[2][3] in these circumstances.
[0] - https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/car-repossession-law...
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti0NHC6oVnk
[2] - https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/crime/2011/03/02/rep...
[3] - https://www.fox4news.com/news/repo-man-shot-while-trying-to-...
FTFY.
Might need Steve Lehto to weigh-in on how much "ownership" there is in America.
This is not true - In my state you don't get mailed the title to the car until after the loan is paid.
No surprise the dark tactic is spreading.
Regular licenses for software you do "buy" can be retracted but that rarely happens in practice.
If they don't have the right to do that, it's theft, either way around.
What needs to happen is better consumer protection to prevent americans buying cars on finance that they are never going to be able to afford.
And, when someone does not pay as agreed to a significant degree, the more efficient that a repossession can happen, the better a deal can be offered to borrowers who do pay as agreed.
I'd personally much prefer to make public transit that is so good that everyone uses it.
Japanese car dealerships have been this way recently, before the pandemic hit we tried to buy a new Honda Fit and had to buy a used one because they had none in inventory because, allegedly, the factory had washed away in a flood but they had a row of 50 CR-Vs made in the same factory. The dealer tried to push us into one of those.
The automotive press uncritically reports that American consumers are crazy about huge vehicles but what I've observed is that dealers are crazy about selling huge vehicles. Before the pandemic you would frequently see small cars were selling out as fast they arrived on the lot but dealers would have a sea of huge and expensive vehicles and be offering $8000 or so in incentives to sell them. If small vehicles were really unpopular it would be the other way around.
There are rumors that Toyota and Honda would love to kill the Corolla and Civic but the quality of those vehicles is so legendary and the attachment of owners is so fanatical that they know people aren't going to "trade up" but will be paying new car prices for high mileage vehicles.
No I'm not making this up: https://www.news-leader.com/story/news/business/2014/10/02/w...
Very true. Same for houses. A lot of people probably would prefer a small house over not being able to afford a big house and renting eternally. But big houses are more profitable, so that's what's being built. That's why in a lot of markets supply and demand don't really work if the supply can be restricted.
"The market will bear" a consumer paying 5 to 10 times as much for the largest fanciest SUV or pickup truck vs the smallest cheapest commuter car. Therefore the profit is VASTLY higher on larger cars and there's an immense motivation to get as many customers as possible into the biggest cars. If you can get a customer to pay 6 times as much for a SUV that costs 3 times as much to make, that's a huge profit lost if the customer is permitted to buy the commuter car.
Another way to phrase it is if almost all your profit comes from selling giant cars, then the customer experience of buying a small car is always going to be awful.
The people buying the largest vehicles are not concerned by cost, so increasing the cost of large vehicles via taxes or fees or regulation only makes the situation worse. You'd like to think that a 20% surcharge on large cars would result in fewer large cars sold, but the guy buying them is a general contractor and he needs the pickup truck to make money so he's just going to pass the cost on to real estate inflation and the extra 20% is going to motivate the dealership even harder to only sell expensive cars.
Have they earned that reputation regarding automated systems, and how will they deal with false positive/bugs etc. when the wrong car is repossessed at the worst time for its owner ?
If Ford wants to lie about repos or lie about human error, they can do that now, they don't need a computer to do it. The whole damn process is subject to human error as it is today.
Will the owners have recourse after being stranded without their car explaining their boss it just went away ? probably. Will the employee be punished ? surely. Is it something we want to allow on the first place ? I'm mot so sure.
Here we're really digging on the "working as intended" side, bit the more probable issues would be it's just buggy and sometimes an older cars thinks it got repossessed, goes away, and you're left to battle for getting reparations and/or another car, knowing you're probably broke so not in a strong position for that.
Tow truck drivers don't currently play any role in certifying the requests they get. A bank emails them repo paperwork, and they tow the car. If the paperwork they receive is not correct, they would have no way of even knowing that. In fact, the human tow truck drivers themselves create another layer of possibility for human mistakes.
The issue is that "Making finance accessible to low income Americans" and "predatory lending" are approximately two sides of the same coin. And so it is not politically popular.
Does autocorrect make Freudian slips?
No amount of new features will ever convince me to buy a car that does this but the people who do buy them will undoubtedly be poor and marginalized and offered a great deal on their financing if they choose the roborepo car.
<< What needs to happen is better consumer protection to prevent americans buying cars on finance that they are never going to be able to afford.
I think you would have everyone and their mother fighting against this saying you need freedom to make stupid decisions. Even I am personally on the fence. You do need better protections, but you need to have an ability to make your choices ( and in US - not having a car is not really a valid solution ).
With a human tasked with the repo, at the very least even if "computer says no" to them, they have some leeway (even if it's slim-to-none) in talking to you about it.