C'mon, get real. How can you drive a vehicle without a huge screen blocking your view? That you have to take your eyes off the road to actually read, or to change the volume?
> How can you drive a vehicle without a huge screen blocking your view?
Not all modern cars are designed like Teslas. Physical controls and touchscreens that don't block your view (and even having indicators that are in a simple set of heads-up indicators achieved by leveraging reflection and the windshield angle) are not unheard of on new cars.
I've got a 62 fairlane that's easier to work on than my lawnmower so I hear what you're saying. Some of the complexity under a modern hood is necessary to hit fuel efficiency and emissions requirements, but the rest of it is unnecessary bullshit. I've kept up with new car developments mostly due to annual trips that involve renting a car for a week. On my last trip I got handed a new forrester and between the center console display, blinky shit on the dash and rearviews, and the lane assist feature consistently freaking out whenever it encountered a seam in the pavement I've never had a harder time keeping focus and control over the vehicle I was driving. First thing I did the morning after I picked the car up was spend 45 minutes grovelling through every settings menu the car had looking for shit I could turn off.
Fuck that. I have ADD and they distract from what I actually need to be paying attention to: the view out the front of the car, the mirrors, and my blind spots. I rode a liter bike as my sole mode of transportation for years. Trust me when I say I don't need assistance maintaining situational awareness. I've been in exactly 1 at-fault accident in 30 years of driving. Cause: got distracted by center console bullshit.
The only real caveat is that if you and your friend get in a head-on collision on the highway one of you is probably going to come out of it a lot better.
This is a critical aspect most mechanically-inclined people choose to ignore. They also like to pretend that a generator, water pump, belt tensioner, etc (just picked accessory belt items for an example) are as reliable as they were 200k ago. And they fail to consider the cost of time lost due to the car stopping at the side of the road or not starting. When your car loses power and consequently loses power steering in the middle of the road, it's not very fun. Yes, new car owners probably do overpay for maintenance, but it's likely not that key maintenance and could be avoided. Yes, new engine bays are more cramped and there is more automation.
I am against connected cars, but I hate when people go way overboard on the "used cars are the best by far" argument just because they know the order of the flywheel, clutch, pressure plate, throwout bearing and fork.
I just watched a youtube video of a brand new F150 that needed tail light replacements. Due to all the electronics (lidar IIRC), replacing both was around $5600. And, it prevented the truck from even starting. Just for tail lights. That's pretty much what you can get an entire engine installed for on an older vehicle.
Parts for new vehicles are also very hard to obtain right now. Much easier to get parts for 15+ year old (domestic) vehicle.
These are, for the most part, nitpicked exceptions of expensive models or expensive optional upgrades. Get a new Civic or GR86 (or even Supra / V8 Mustang) and you won't have any of this. Yes, you can't turn off nannies on the Integra fully for example, but it's still a fuse away.
Speak for yourself pal, all of my belt accessories were upgraded to new OEM-equivalent this year. If this is an argument you actually want to win consider bringing up parts quality instead. Nobody who's worked on cars for the last 30 years would argue that quality hasn't significantly declined in the parts aftermarket, it certainly has.
How do you think it came to mind? I was doing the A/C and ended up doing everything on the belt. It is NOT a simple repair in a lot of cramped engine bays. Yes, I could do it in a NA Miata in under 2 hours, probably, if I remember correctly. A lot of engine bays, even from 90-2010 are very, very cramped. So this "simple" repair ends up taking days. And yes, if you actually worked as a mechanic for half a decade, you can still do it fast, but here are my points:
1. These are colossal time sinks.
2. New car owners don't have to worry about this.
3. New bonus argument: Sometimes I wonder if depreciation is cheaper than all the parts I am throwing at my old car, entirely ignoring the time cost.
4. Old car will still feel like an old car.
Yep. For my part, I simply cannot imagine buying a relatively modern car for a whole bunch of reasons, including this. I don't want a smartphone on wheels. I want a car.
That's awesome! I just lost my old 2012 Jeep Grand Cherokee when it decided to blow its engine at 107K miles. I'm told it had something to do with the variable valve timing system they put in, then I found out that this is not an uncommon problem such that some people pay 1000s of dollars to remove this feature from their engine. Replacing the engine would have cost me 14k. I had no idea, but I long for a car that isn't essentially disposable after 10 years. I really wish they made a car like that these days.
That was my general opinion on 1990s cars in the 1990s when my car was a 1972 VW beetle. I had the shop manual, and most things that didn't need a lift for I could do myself.
Now I’ve got a full-time job, own a house, and have a spouse and children and even if I could have something as simple to work on as a ’72 Beetle, I wouldn't want to spend my time doing the work on it. And I like modern features like lane assist and radar cruise control and blindspot sensors that you can't get via a phone (and I prefer integrating a phone via Android Auto rather than using the actual phone for the UI rather than just the brains of the functions it does power.)
Yeah, modern cars or more expensive than an old car, and, yes, it costs more cash to pay someone to maintain it than to maintain an older car yourself, but cash costs aren't the only costs, opportunity costs are a thing.
And then there is security aspect. Crash safety was not a priority back then, crumple zones, airbags etc. were often simply not there yet or in very basic form.
Yeah all looks fine when looking just at the financial numbers but once you are in serious crash and will see yourself crippled or kids dying, that penny saving may not look that good idea.
There is vast ocean of cars between hyper modern mess of interconnected unmaintainability and these unsafe old metal bricks. They may not be the best solution in 20 years, but right now they are great.
The main issue occurs when nobody can fix the car themselves. Then you are forced to go to the stealership for repairs and you pay over a barrel. It won't just cost more; it'll cost bank.
So even if you don't want to repair the car, you most definitely want a car that you could repair.
Are there any new cars that buck this trend? I've been buying used 00s vehicles for a while but a day will come when I won't be able to use that approach to buy simplicity with reliability and cost effectiveness.
I actually had the following (mental) debate about a decade ago:
> Given that we can see that cars are going to send more and more data about me to manufacturers, and that this will get worse with every new generation of car that comes out, I should only buy used cars from the 90s that don't do this. On the other hand, eventually cars from this era will become too old to be practical, even with maintenance and repair. This may be in twenty years, or fifty years, but eventually I'll no longer be able to keep a 1996 Toyota pickup on the road. At that point, I will have to buy a newer vehicle. At that point, I'll either buy a brand new vehicle, and I will probably freak out and panic at the amount of garbage they've packed into it by then. Or, I could buy a succession of newer used vehicles, each more packed with electronic garbage than the last one, and I will have merely delayed the encroachment on my privacy and driving experience by a couple decades, not prevented it. So, really, it's going to happen one way or the other, and maybe it's better to just be the frog who is slowly boiled rather than have it happen all at once. I guess I'll just buy newer cars as needed, like everybody else, and just be slightly less happy about it each time.
This is not a commentary on your decision, this is just a glimpse into my (tortured, possibly idiotic) thought process.
I'm in a similar position but considering a different exit strategy: EV conversion. Still cheaper than a new car and since it isn't OEM there's no digital surveillance suite.
The 90s were the inflection point where "tech" and necessity intersected for many brands. We finally got mature and minimalist EFI+emissions controls, cars with vacuum lines numbering in the single digits, delivering relatively great all-round performance.
Once you start seeing drive-by-wire / brake-by-wire / "on-star" systems appearing it's pretty much all downhill. They just couldn't leave well enough alone.
What we needed was automation for carburetors mostly to run the catalytic convertors without self-destructing. Once we got that it's mostly solutions looking for problems (and revenue streams).
What I want from EVs is an electrified version of that 90s-era simplicity with the modicum of necessary automation (in EVs that's probably all thermal/(dis)charge rate management and battery balancing). Just replace the ICE/ECU/tank with a motor+ESC+battery and leave out the touchscreens and driver deprecation+surveillance trash.
I feel like there must be a business opportunity to produce EVs in this vein. What's the affordable Driver's Car EV brand? Are we all just waiting for Mazda to deliver an EV Miata? I can't be alone here.
It's straightforward to do all the regular maintenance on an EV yourself, mostly because there is so much less of it to do. And the core drivetrain is extremely simple and robust.
But like every other vehicle we've had in our pothole ridden city, the weakness is the suspension.
The researchers assessed 25 popular brands’ privacy policies and found that 21 of these allow car companies to share or sell customer data with external service providers, data brokers and other businesses. Privacy policies from two brands—Kia and Nissan—even include a clause that notes that each company may collect and disclose data on users’ sexual orientation or sexual behavior.
Failing regulatory actions or lawsuits, the only way these companies will change such policies is through very public airing, which includes criticism and ridicule.
When this friend of mine spoke to employees at Mercedes, they said that nowadays they play all the value on the "electronic butler" features and that if you dislike the model they prefer not to sell you the car.
When he spoke to BMW, they could not utter a sentence that did not include terms in the set 'credit card', 'subscription', 'smartphone', 'app', 'telematic board', 'remote connection' (etc.) in some mental framework that made them as granted, implicit and necessary as 'axle' and 'engine'.
"All but two of the 25 car brands we reviewed earned our “ding” for data control, meaning only two car brands, Renault and Dacia (which are owned by the same parent company) say that all drivers have the right to have their personal data deleted."
Incidentally, while their SUV are as disgusting to drive as other SUVs, according to a mechanic i went to school with, Dacia is a really good brand if you want to be able to repair your car for cheap. easy to get parts, almost no electronics. I don't think they have backup camera though, so they might be illegal in the US.
Statistical algorithms can be used to segment drivers and if it is possible to figure out that someone in some segment is of a specific orientation then the probability that others in that segments are of the same orientation goes up as well.
People are extremely predictable, if they weren't then Google and Facebook would not be making billions from selling ads using user segmentation. Amazon and Netlfix operate similarly, buyers and viewers are shown content based on their previous browsing habits and what others with similar patterns have bought and viewed in the past. If you can recommend content and ads better than a coin toss then you can make a lot of money.
I'm not sure why car companies want to sell driving patterns but if it can be used in some ad model to improve click through rates then I'm sure that Facebook and Google will be more than happy to buy the data to help their bottom line.
We all live in digital panopticons designed to sell us consumer products but most people are either unaware or don't care about what such a state of affairs entails. It's better to just assume that eventually all data feeds will be integrated into some ad model because that is where things are headed. Further dystopian extrapolations of constant and ubiquitous surveillance are left as exercises for the reader.
Subaru at least also has driver facing cameras into the cabin for driver attentiveness monitoring. I believe the Mach E also has it but I don't remember right off the top of my head, and I'm sure there's others as well.
Digital storage density is increasing and most developed nations have 5G deployments. I imagine the ad models could probably be updated in real time because neither storage nor bandwidth are real bottlenecks so if you are frustrated during your drive by the time you get home Google and friends already know what products to show you in order to increase sales. Truly marvelous times to be alive.
An online service could ask m/f/other during signup, then collect other information through tracking. I’m not aware of a specific in-car use case today, but I could imagine some personalisation feature asking you in the future.
It doesn't have to be 100% accurate, it only needs to get it right, across the whole market, just enough for advertising preferences, so they can make money off of it. In this case, if you are a woman, and you drive a Subaru, your sexual orientation is towards other women.
> It’s unclear if or how these automakers might be doing such things. “Kia does not and has never collected ‘sex life or sexual orientation’ information from vehicles or consumers in the context of providing the Kia Connect Services,” says Kia spokesperson James Bell. He adds that the brand includes the category in its privacy policy to define “sensitive personal information” under the California Consumer Privacy Act. Nissan spokesperson Brian Brockman similarly says, “Nissan does not knowingly collect or disclose consumer information on sexual activity or sexual orientation,” and adds that state laws such as California’s require the company to disclose inadvertent information that might be inferred from other data such as location tracking.
It sounds like they list everything, because anything might be inferable somehow.
The following paragraph clarifies:
" “Kia does not and has never collected ‘sex life or sexual orientation’ information from vehicles or consumers in the context of providing the Kia Connect Services,” says Kia spokesperson James Bell. He adds that the brand includes the category in its privacy policy to define “sensitive personal information” under the California Consumer Privacy Act. "
It's not as bad as it sounds. It seems just like legalese making things sound more dire than they are.
They put microphones, cameras and location trackers in your car, and reserve the rights to use what they collected about the owner and (potentially very unaware) passengers¹. There seem to be no alternatives for what new cars are concerned.
It is as bad as it sounds, and more.
(¹passengers are considered subject to a "they shall be informed by the owner of the vehicle that by entering it they accept privacy loss" clause.)
Any time someone tells you that some term in a contract doesn't mean what it plainly says that it means, or that it's just some kind of boilerplate that is never actually invoked, run away as fast as you can.
If it isn't already a "law," one should be that the more complex a software system gets the more it tends towards control over user actions. There is probably a network-related corollary that in a networked software systems, over time, as they get more complex they tend towards more user monitoring and reporting.
This is one of the many technological trends that are driving every part of American life to dependence on the government-business matrix. It would be less painful if the agents of the matrix weren't growing so incompetent.
I drive a 2023 Tacoma and I love the physical configuration of the truck combined with technology. The most disappointing fact about Toyota, and by proxy Toyota Connected, is that things like remote start are now sold on a subscription basis that includes a clause for them sending loads of telemetry and other data.
The worst thing about these displays is the glare when driving at night. I know you can dim them and use dark mode but it still is not great. I'm color blind and think that makes it worse.
My other daily driver is one of the last models of <brand> that doesn’t include any consumer computers. There’s a generic computer under the hood for engine management, but the UX is all beautiful vacuum fluorescent numbers that can de dialled down all at once.
I recently test drove a car with four displays that seems to be sourced from different manufacturers - there was no consistency of UX. I told the salesman that I wasn’t interested in purchasing a 2 ton appliance that was unlikely to receive patching beyond 5 years.
Yeah, the least bad EV as far as I can tell is a Bolt EUV. But I think what I really want is an EV that looks like a regular car. I don't want something that looks like a space ship and has big screens inside it.
I have a 2017 Ford Focus without a 4G cell connection (came with 3G, which is no longer supported) - no tracking.
It works fine - has physical dials/switches for most things, it does have a screen for backup camera and CarPlay and the like. It doesn't have parking assist or any sort of lane keeping or autopilot. Seats 5, but not a lot of trunk space.
Only issue is it has a 110mi range which is fine for my commute or going short distances out of town.
If you want something like this find an older EV, and disconnect the cell modem.
I was going to opt for a new EV. But ultimately decided against it. Cited “range anxiety,” poor build quality (specifically Tesla), too many unknowns, locked down cars, changes or advanced in battery tech (solid state batteries?).
Glad I ultimately kept my 30/38 mpg (city/highway) car. Honestly if this car becomes not financially feasible to repair (no repairs yet, only maintenance). I might stick with ICE, specifically a manual and as low tech as possible.
Only need a decent audio system, safety systems (backup camera), and connectivity via android auto/Apple Car Play (if not supported from manufacturer then rip out existing unit and replace with third party unit).
No “in car wifi”. No “self driving.” No tracking. A car should not be complicated or locked in by subscriptions.
The alternative is getting a fairly old car that won’t be particularly safe in a collision with a newer car. We do need legislation / awareness of these issues.
You are proposing an alternative between (N) vehicles some of us would never enter vs (D) vehicles that may cause more damage to the driver in case of collision.
Given (N) there is no actual alternative; (D) is a known risk; and there is no need for vehicles of class (N) to limit the issues in (D).
How much safer are newer cars than older cars? Only real comparison I have seen is that video of an old 50s car vs a 2000s car crashing head on. Sure cars from the 50s are not gonna a be great... but how old of a car would you not buy?
The 2012 car I'm usually driving (if I am driving) has zero "modern" amenities - I consider electric window lifters to be state of the art! (and playing CDs, or plugging in via AUX) ;) Not even unlocking via remote. The trick is "small and cheap", in this case a Kia Picanto, perfect for the city.
I'm most curious about range anxiety, because I really feel like we're at the point where the vast majority of people's driving habits will fall into one of three categories:
1. Your driving habits make most/all EVs so clearly nonviable that you would never even consider an EV. If you're driving 400 miles a day in freezing temperatures far from any charging infrastructure, of course you're not getting an EV any time soon.
2. You don't drive that much every day, but you can't regularly charge at home or work, so you're not going to consider an EV.
3. Your driving habits are much closer to the average person, and with an EV you'd just charge at home or work a few times per week and never think about range.
The situations where you'd ever experience range anxiety seem pretty narrow to me. It would basically only happen if you were in category 3 but needed to do a rare long road trip in an area without charging infrastructure.
My wife has raging ADHD, and even though medicated, I would expect to have to deal with empty battery family logistics pages continually were I to put her in an EV.
I'm none too fond of adding cognitive overhead to my life on top of that. I throw my bike/skis on the truck and drive out for fun times on a whim at least twice a week, and don't fancy adding a "charge the car" loop to my already burdensome family maintenance loops.
EVs and range are like someone sticking their nose into a well tuned software/laundry/dishes process, inventing a problem, and complicating things inordinately for everyone who has to deal with it.
I'll keep my 5-minute fillup for as long as I humanly can.
I shouldn't presume to know how ADHD would affect someone's preference for vehicle type. That's totally fair.
> EVs and range are like someone sticking their nose into a well tuned software/laundry/dishes process, inventing a problem, and complicating things inordinately for everyone who has to deal with it.
I completely agree that the desire to avoid significant change is a fair reason to avoid EVs. I definitely don't agree with the characterization that it's "inventing a problem" and "complicating things inordinately".
You'll spend way less of your time refueling an EV if you can charge where you already park at home or work.
That 5 minute fillup is monumentally longer than my 3 second fillup. I wait hours a year longer to recharge my ICE compared to my EV, and I put far more miles on my EV than my ICE.
3-second fillup: when I pull into my garage, it takes me ~3-5 seconds to grab the plug off the wall right next to the car and plug it in. I then stop waiting on it, because I've got other stuff I'm doing now that I'm home. Sure, maybe it takes it 20 minutes or a couple of hours to replenish whatever charge I used, buts its not time I'm waiting. The only time I'm waiting on my EV is just the time to plug it in for easily 95% of the miles I do. The same experience would be had for most American drivers for the vast majority of their miles.
Recharge my ICE: go out of my way to a gas station, negotiate payment, open the gas tank, pump the gas, put everything back, go back on my way. This is just all wasted time. I'm not realistically able to walk away and do some other task while all of this is happening, I'm an active participant in it all the way through or the time waiting isn't useful to actually do anything with (the several minutes of it actually pumping).
Range anxiety is largely irrational for the average US driver. The majority of US drivers would spend less time and money charging an EV than paying for gas. Sure, some people truly can't charge at home. However, the vast majority of US households live in a single family house, and then another big chunk live in townhouses and others that could probably easily add charging. Very, very few actually do the "drive off to the woods twice a week" kind of lifestyle.
And even then, depending on how far away "the woods" are, it might not have any impact at all on waiting to charge. Were you going >100mi away to go on that quick bike or skiing trip? There's lots of bike trails around me within a 100mi radius or so, and I don't even live in a part of the country known for good biking.
You have a working garage. Good for you - however a metric ton folk don’t. Last stats I read had something like 75% of owners had access to one, compared to only 39% of renters.
In addition the Midwest seems to have a higher number of usable garages, but the moment you hit any city then you’re going to be damn lucky.
Your apparent dismissal of other people’s range anxiety based upon your personal experience, is all rather disappointing.
> I throw my bike/skis on the truck and drive out for fun times on a whim at least twice a week
You think the average driver is more likely to be a general commuter/local city kind of driver or one throwing their skis in the back of their car twice a week? Which one is basing their view of reality more on personal anecdotes?
> Last stats I read had something like 75% of owners had access to one, compared to only 39% of renters.
The majority of Americans live in single family homes. By a large measure. The next largest category are single-family attached. That's 70% of the total housing stock. These kinds of structures can (generally) easily add some form of charging, even if only outside. Then you figure, chances are households who have zero cars are probably the ones in dense housing units, so car ownership is even more weighted towards those in these kinds of units, so for car owning households (and especially multi-car owning households) you're probably even higher than just 70%.
I'm speaking to those living in suburban/urban settings in single family homes (detached or attached) who mostly use their cars around the city and commuting. They're talking about people driving on >100mi ski trips twice a week. Which one is probably more like the average driver? Who is basing their view mostly off anecdotes and who is basing it off actual statistics?
I'm not saying EVs work for every use case -- clearly they don't! But for the majority of drivers in the US, range anxiety is irrational at this point and they'll spend more time and money pumping gas than plugging in.
Quite definitely a personal story. I'm trying to illustrate the diverse lifestyles out there in margin of USAistan that aren't going to convert cleanly.
> majority of drivers
I definitely moved to a small town with boundless access to outdoor recreation because the standard-issue American lifestyle doesn't appeal. I caution you against endorsing technologies and social structuring programs that further the monocropping of humans (but I freely admit that this is a stony crypto/anarcho/discordian philosophical bent).
It seems to me, depending on the town and where I live geographically around it, I might still find having an EV to still be easier than an ICE. If you're like 50 miles outside of the nearest town, you often don't have many options for getting gas. Depending on how things are, it could be a bit of a hassle. If most of the amenities you're going to visit (the trails and what not) are within around 100mi or so from home, the EV is going to be an easier vehicle most of the time seeing as how you can just "gas up" at home instead of potentially having to make a long trip into town.
And speaking from a self-reliance mindset, wouldn't being able to fuel your vehicle with energy you can produce off-grid be even more anarcho instead of being reliant on massive global supply chains to get your weekly/biweekly fix?
But I do get it, if you're routinely driving >100mi deep trips into the wilderness its not reasonable to have an EV. Currently. Maybe things will be better in a decade, maybe they won't. I imagine the world will look a good bit different in this regard in a decade.
It definitely all varies based on where you are and what you need. I'm definitely not one to argue all vehicles should be EVs, I do think people should be able to make the decisions which are ultimately right for them. You actually do pull a boat to the lake a good bit? You actually do hit up offroad trails? You take your horses around in a horse trailer? That's awesome, have fun. But I do see a good chunk of people who aren't honest with themselves about what their actual needs are, and overall it leads to sub-par outcomes for a lot of society. People driving giant pavement princess brodozers to their office jobs in dense urban areas all because there was that one time a few years ago where they helped someone move a couch and hey wasn't that just so handy. They impart a lot of negative externalities on the people around them.
I hear you: infernal combustion engines produce a buttload of negative externalities. So does everything. If I could wave a magic wand and get all the normies into townhomes in walkable neighborhoods, I absolutely would (in no small part because it would get them and their nightmare mass-produced suburbs out of my daily experience).
What I'm failing to convey is an opinion that homogenizing humans and their experiences is a dangerously totalitarian approach to social design. One of my favorite things about the internal combustion engine is the freedom of choice it buys pretty much everyone: an auction car is cheap, and can get you out of trouble in a pinch.
To zoom out though, I suspect that we disagree fundamentally on the cornucopian/eschatonian axis tho. Even harder to reconcile than bluecult/redcult!
> category 3 but needed to do a rare long road trip
In fact, we know people with an EV for commuting and chores, plus an ICV for long travel.
(Of course this is exactly a slice of that "cat.3" for which such arrangement makes sense - it may possibly count many, but those "cat.1" and "cat.2" do exist. To be fair, there will also exist "cat.4" people who live in environments where cars are not a daily need.)
Things are worse when you get to the details. The cars try to stay at 20-80% charge, so off the bat you somewhat “lose” 40% of the actual full stated range. And charging takes hours, not minutes, and charging stations don’t want you to leave the car there for a long time so you then have charge anxiety that forces you to unplug and move the car after exactly say 3 or 4 hours. The whole process is a bit anxiety producing.
If I could find a 1980's Ford pickup truck I'd buy it in a heart beat, cars used to be simple enough anyone could fix it, the parts were all just large pieces of metal and they ran fine.
Maybe they ran fine, but they also spewed pollution everywhere and guzzled fuel like crazy. My reasonably modern family car does 55 US MPG. Cars 50 years ago weren’t just “simple”, they were in many ways PRIMITIVE.
A million voices suddenly cried out "I told you so" all at once, then there was silence.
--an old curmudgeon who drives a 23-year-old pickup truck
Design the vehicle to last 100 years. Use standard interfaces from for the very few electronics that are necessary. Almost nothing should be more complicated that turning on an LED with a coin cell.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadThe only work it ever needed was a new transmission after living in SF for too long.
I see my friends taking their new modern cars into the shop regularly. My Jeep has been running smoothly for literally more than 30 YEARS!
All the high-tech features like music/podcasts, gps navigation, etc... that's my phone stuck to the dash.
It is a simple robust vehicle. KISS
Not all modern cars are designed like Teslas. Physical controls and touchscreens that don't block your view (and even having indicators that are in a simple set of heads-up indicators achieved by leveraging reflection and the windshield angle) are not unheard of on new cars.
You get used to the buzz, and they also warn you when someone else is making a mistake - not only you.
I am against connected cars, but I hate when people go way overboard on the "used cars are the best by far" argument just because they know the order of the flywheel, clutch, pressure plate, throwout bearing and fork.
Parts for new vehicles are also very hard to obtain right now. Much easier to get parts for 15+ year old (domestic) vehicle.
1. These are colossal time sinks. 2. New car owners don't have to worry about this. 3. New bonus argument: Sometimes I wonder if depreciation is cheaper than all the parts I am throwing at my old car, entirely ignoring the time cost. 4. Old car will still feel like an old car.
New cars are unwantable, old cars are progressively banned.
Now I’ve got a full-time job, own a house, and have a spouse and children and even if I could have something as simple to work on as a ’72 Beetle, I wouldn't want to spend my time doing the work on it. And I like modern features like lane assist and radar cruise control and blindspot sensors that you can't get via a phone (and I prefer integrating a phone via Android Auto rather than using the actual phone for the UI rather than just the brains of the functions it does power.)
Yeah, modern cars or more expensive than an old car, and, yes, it costs more cash to pay someone to maintain it than to maintain an older car yourself, but cash costs aren't the only costs, opportunity costs are a thing.
Yeah all looks fine when looking just at the financial numbers but once you are in serious crash and will see yourself crippled or kids dying, that penny saving may not look that good idea.
There is vast ocean of cars between hyper modern mess of interconnected unmaintainability and these unsafe old metal bricks. They may not be the best solution in 20 years, but right now they are great.
So even if you don't want to repair the car, you most definitely want a car that you could repair.
Slightly newer but also have a basic 2012 F-150 5.0 that is probably the easiest thing I've ever owned to work on that i daily drive.
Having worked on some of the newer Ecoboost's so many damn tubes and wiring everywhere.
> Given that we can see that cars are going to send more and more data about me to manufacturers, and that this will get worse with every new generation of car that comes out, I should only buy used cars from the 90s that don't do this. On the other hand, eventually cars from this era will become too old to be practical, even with maintenance and repair. This may be in twenty years, or fifty years, but eventually I'll no longer be able to keep a 1996 Toyota pickup on the road. At that point, I will have to buy a newer vehicle. At that point, I'll either buy a brand new vehicle, and I will probably freak out and panic at the amount of garbage they've packed into it by then. Or, I could buy a succession of newer used vehicles, each more packed with electronic garbage than the last one, and I will have merely delayed the encroachment on my privacy and driving experience by a couple decades, not prevented it. So, really, it's going to happen one way or the other, and maybe it's better to just be the frog who is slowly boiled rather than have it happen all at once. I guess I'll just buy newer cars as needed, like everybody else, and just be slightly less happy about it each time.
This is not a commentary on your decision, this is just a glimpse into my (tortured, possibly idiotic) thought process.
Once you start seeing drive-by-wire / brake-by-wire / "on-star" systems appearing it's pretty much all downhill. They just couldn't leave well enough alone.
What we needed was automation for carburetors mostly to run the catalytic convertors without self-destructing. Once we got that it's mostly solutions looking for problems (and revenue streams).
What I want from EVs is an electrified version of that 90s-era simplicity with the modicum of necessary automation (in EVs that's probably all thermal/(dis)charge rate management and battery balancing). Just replace the ICE/ECU/tank with a motor+ESC+battery and leave out the touchscreens and driver deprecation+surveillance trash.
I feel like there must be a business opportunity to produce EVs in this vein. What's the affordable Driver's Car EV brand? Are we all just waiting for Mazda to deliver an EV Miata? I can't be alone here.
But like every other vehicle we've had in our pothole ridden city, the weakness is the suspension.
Failing regulatory actions or lawsuits, the only way these companies will change such policies is through very public airing, which includes criticism and ridicule.
BMW sounded good in theory but didn’t respond to requests for clarifying information.
When he spoke to BMW, they could not utter a sentence that did not include terms in the set 'credit card', 'subscription', 'smartphone', 'app', 'telematic board', 'remote connection' (etc.) in some mental framework that made them as granted, implicit and necessary as 'axle' and 'engine'.
Oh cool, here is Subaru's [1].
[1] https://www.subaru.com/support/consumer-privacy.html
Incidentally, while their SUV are as disgusting to drive as other SUVs, according to a mechanic i went to school with, Dacia is a really good brand if you want to be able to repair your car for cheap. easy to get parts, almost no electronics. I don't think they have backup camera though, so they might be illegal in the US.
You can fit aftermarket ones. (I checked, many models exist.)
Otherwise they'd have to have literally invented a gaydar and that just seems like a weird thing for car manufacturers to be investing in.
People are extremely predictable, if they weren't then Google and Facebook would not be making billions from selling ads using user segmentation. Amazon and Netlfix operate similarly, buyers and viewers are shown content based on their previous browsing habits and what others with similar patterns have bought and viewed in the past. If you can recommend content and ads better than a coin toss then you can make a lot of money.
I'm not sure why car companies want to sell driving patterns but if it can be used in some ad model to improve click through rates then I'm sure that Facebook and Google will be more than happy to buy the data to help their bottom line.
We all live in digital panopticons designed to sell us consumer products but most people are either unaware or don't care about what such a state of affairs entails. It's better to just assume that eventually all data feeds will be integrated into some ad model because that is where things are headed. Further dystopian extrapolations of constant and ubiquitous surveillance are left as exercises for the reader.
https://developer.gm.com/in-vehicle-apps
https://developer.gm.com/app-gallery
Subaru at least also has driver facing cameras into the cabin for driver attentiveness monitoring. I believe the Mach E also has it but I don't remember right off the top of my head, and I'm sure there's others as well.
> It’s unclear if or how these automakers might be doing such things. “Kia does not and has never collected ‘sex life or sexual orientation’ information from vehicles or consumers in the context of providing the Kia Connect Services,” says Kia spokesperson James Bell. He adds that the brand includes the category in its privacy policy to define “sensitive personal information” under the California Consumer Privacy Act. Nissan spokesperson Brian Brockman similarly says, “Nissan does not knowingly collect or disclose consumer information on sexual activity or sexual orientation,” and adds that state laws such as California’s require the company to disclose inadvertent information that might be inferred from other data such as location tracking.
It sounds like they list everything, because anything might be inferable somehow.
It's not as bad as it sounds. It seems just like legalese making things sound more dire than they are.
They put microphones, cameras and location trackers in your car, and reserve the rights to use what they collected about the owner and (potentially very unaware) passengers¹. There seem to be no alternatives for what new cars are concerned.
It is as bad as it sounds, and more.
(¹passengers are considered subject to a "they shall be informed by the owner of the vehicle that by entering it they accept privacy loss" clause.)
- a steering wheel, few pedals, and a gear shifter, without touch-sensitive features or needless complexities
- dashboard / user-friendly interface, favoring tactile buttons and dials over large touch displays
- basic climate control, with traditional knobs for temperature and fan settings
- a basic radio system, no need for expansive touchscreens or intricate systems
- ABS/ASR, side assist, and parking assist
In essence, I want the eco-friendly benefits of an electric car, combined with the straightforward design and functionality of traditional vehicles.
I recently test drove a car with four displays that seems to be sourced from different manufacturers - there was no consistency of UX. I told the salesman that I wasn’t interested in purchasing a 2 ton appliance that was unlikely to receive patching beyond 5 years.
It’s the perfect electric city car, and it’s basically “analog” from a UX perspective.
It works fine - has physical dials/switches for most things, it does have a screen for backup camera and CarPlay and the like. It doesn't have parking assist or any sort of lane keeping or autopilot. Seats 5, but not a lot of trunk space.
Only issue is it has a 110mi range which is fine for my commute or going short distances out of town.
If you want something like this find an older EV, and disconnect the cell modem.
The manufacturers are acting as a surveillance cartel. If they all spy on you there’s no way to opt out without a change in privacy legislation.
Glad I ultimately kept my 30/38 mpg (city/highway) car. Honestly if this car becomes not financially feasible to repair (no repairs yet, only maintenance). I might stick with ICE, specifically a manual and as low tech as possible.
Only need a decent audio system, safety systems (backup camera), and connectivity via android auto/Apple Car Play (if not supported from manufacturer then rip out existing unit and replace with third party unit).
No “in car wifi”. No “self driving.” No tracking. A car should not be complicated or locked in by subscriptions.
Legislation determining what?
You are proposing an alternative between (N) vehicles some of us would never enter vs (D) vehicles that may cause more damage to the driver in case of collision.
Given (N) there is no actual alternative; (D) is a known risk; and there is no need for vehicles of class (N) to limit the issues in (D).
1. Your driving habits make most/all EVs so clearly nonviable that you would never even consider an EV. If you're driving 400 miles a day in freezing temperatures far from any charging infrastructure, of course you're not getting an EV any time soon. 2. You don't drive that much every day, but you can't regularly charge at home or work, so you're not going to consider an EV. 3. Your driving habits are much closer to the average person, and with an EV you'd just charge at home or work a few times per week and never think about range.
The situations where you'd ever experience range anxiety seem pretty narrow to me. It would basically only happen if you were in category 3 but needed to do a rare long road trip in an area without charging infrastructure.
I'm none too fond of adding cognitive overhead to my life on top of that. I throw my bike/skis on the truck and drive out for fun times on a whim at least twice a week, and don't fancy adding a "charge the car" loop to my already burdensome family maintenance loops.
EVs and range are like someone sticking their nose into a well tuned software/laundry/dishes process, inventing a problem, and complicating things inordinately for everyone who has to deal with it.
I'll keep my 5-minute fillup for as long as I humanly can.
> EVs and range are like someone sticking their nose into a well tuned software/laundry/dishes process, inventing a problem, and complicating things inordinately for everyone who has to deal with it.
I completely agree that the desire to avoid significant change is a fair reason to avoid EVs. I definitely don't agree with the characterization that it's "inventing a problem" and "complicating things inordinately".
You'll spend way less of your time refueling an EV if you can charge where you already park at home or work.
And what do you mean “Recharge my ICE”?
Are you trying to infer that Internal Combustion engine vehicles are not refilled but “recharged”?
And how does your singular personal anecdotal experience change the fact that range anxiety is a very real thing with EV vehicles?
Recharge my ICE: go out of my way to a gas station, negotiate payment, open the gas tank, pump the gas, put everything back, go back on my way. This is just all wasted time. I'm not realistically able to walk away and do some other task while all of this is happening, I'm an active participant in it all the way through or the time waiting isn't useful to actually do anything with (the several minutes of it actually pumping).
Range anxiety is largely irrational for the average US driver. The majority of US drivers would spend less time and money charging an EV than paying for gas. Sure, some people truly can't charge at home. However, the vast majority of US households live in a single family house, and then another big chunk live in townhouses and others that could probably easily add charging. Very, very few actually do the "drive off to the woods twice a week" kind of lifestyle.
And even then, depending on how far away "the woods" are, it might not have any impact at all on waiting to charge. Were you going >100mi away to go on that quick bike or skiing trip? There's lots of bike trails around me within a 100mi radius or so, and I don't even live in a part of the country known for good biking.
You have a working garage. Good for you - however a metric ton folk don’t. Last stats I read had something like 75% of owners had access to one, compared to only 39% of renters.
In addition the Midwest seems to have a higher number of usable garages, but the moment you hit any city then you’re going to be damn lucky.
Your apparent dismissal of other people’s range anxiety based upon your personal experience, is all rather disappointing.
And this is what again?
> I throw my bike/skis on the truck and drive out for fun times on a whim at least twice a week
You think the average driver is more likely to be a general commuter/local city kind of driver or one throwing their skis in the back of their car twice a week? Which one is basing their view of reality more on personal anecdotes?
> Last stats I read had something like 75% of owners had access to one, compared to only 39% of renters.
The majority of Americans live in single family homes. By a large measure. The next largest category are single-family attached. That's 70% of the total housing stock. These kinds of structures can (generally) easily add some form of charging, even if only outside. Then you figure, chances are households who have zero cars are probably the ones in dense housing units, so car ownership is even more weighted towards those in these kinds of units, so for car owning households (and especially multi-car owning households) you're probably even higher than just 70%.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1042111/single-family-vs...
I'm speaking to those living in suburban/urban settings in single family homes (detached or attached) who mostly use their cars around the city and commuting. They're talking about people driving on >100mi ski trips twice a week. Which one is probably more like the average driver? Who is basing their view mostly off anecdotes and who is basing it off actual statistics?
I'm not saying EVs work for every use case -- clearly they don't! But for the majority of drivers in the US, range anxiety is irrational at this point and they'll spend more time and money pumping gas than plugging in.
> majority of drivers
I definitely moved to a small town with boundless access to outdoor recreation because the standard-issue American lifestyle doesn't appeal. I caution you against endorsing technologies and social structuring programs that further the monocropping of humans (but I freely admit that this is a stony crypto/anarcho/discordian philosophical bent).
And speaking from a self-reliance mindset, wouldn't being able to fuel your vehicle with energy you can produce off-grid be even more anarcho instead of being reliant on massive global supply chains to get your weekly/biweekly fix?
But I do get it, if you're routinely driving >100mi deep trips into the wilderness its not reasonable to have an EV. Currently. Maybe things will be better in a decade, maybe they won't. I imagine the world will look a good bit different in this regard in a decade.
It definitely all varies based on where you are and what you need. I'm definitely not one to argue all vehicles should be EVs, I do think people should be able to make the decisions which are ultimately right for them. You actually do pull a boat to the lake a good bit? You actually do hit up offroad trails? You take your horses around in a horse trailer? That's awesome, have fun. But I do see a good chunk of people who aren't honest with themselves about what their actual needs are, and overall it leads to sub-par outcomes for a lot of society. People driving giant pavement princess brodozers to their office jobs in dense urban areas all because there was that one time a few years ago where they helped someone move a couch and hey wasn't that just so handy. They impart a lot of negative externalities on the people around them.
What I'm failing to convey is an opinion that homogenizing humans and their experiences is a dangerously totalitarian approach to social design. One of my favorite things about the internal combustion engine is the freedom of choice it buys pretty much everyone: an auction car is cheap, and can get you out of trouble in a pinch.
To zoom out though, I suspect that we disagree fundamentally on the cornucopian/eschatonian axis tho. Even harder to reconcile than bluecult/redcult!
In fact, we know people with an EV for commuting and chores, plus an ICV for long travel.
(Of course this is exactly a slice of that "cat.3" for which such arrangement makes sense - it may possibly count many, but those "cat.1" and "cat.2" do exist. To be fair, there will also exist "cat.4" people who live in environments where cars are not a daily need.)
--an old curmudgeon who drives a 23-year-old pickup truck
Design the vehicle to last 100 years. Use standard interfaces from for the very few electronics that are necessary. Almost nothing should be more complicated that turning on an LED with a coin cell.
Is it possible to :
- not subscribe to "on Star" and its equivalents
- unplug the modem in the car
- use the infotainment without sharing data.
What happen if I block the cameras and disconnect the modem antenna ?