Was doing enterprise IoT consulting a while back. Asked why they needed to collect all the data? Nobody could answer. Someone finally said, so we can analyze usage patterns. I asked, “OK, but why?” Finally, someone said: “So we know when and where to advertise our sales.”
Also did automotive consulting work. Connected vehicles. Asked the same questions. I’m not too worried about my car collecting a lot of data. It’s so they can plan their next sales event.
Not that it’s OK to violate privacy. Just saying, the reason may be way more banal than we think
In April 2023, the Joe Biden administration set a target to ensure 56% of all new cars sold in the U.S. by 2032 would be electric.
and we would’ve been able to easily achieve that if he didn’t also slap 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs.
Where is my coal powered car???
Wait, coal is much too new-fangled. I found a gem for you in my Nazi granduncles garage: A car running on wood gas!. For a cheap 100,000 $ it’s yours!
Coalie crew represent!
Nothing becomes affordable in the US. We run on capitalism. How would oligarchs make more money if they lowered prices?
But capturing consumers, establishing monopolies, and stifling innovation? Hell yeah, let’s burn this place down! (Literally, like, sea levels are rising, water is becoming scarce, species and ecosystems are going extinct, etc)
We are in the middle of another mass extinction event. Holocene extinction event; brought to you by the rich and powerful
We’re only holding ourselves back, at some point the subsidies for oil aren’t going to be enough. We’ll be watching the rest of the world continue on into the future that we thought we were heading towards
Electric cars were not meant to save the environment. They were meant to save the auto industry.
How is my $12k used EV city car, getting charged on 10kw of solar on the roof, not making at least a minuscule dent in the clarity of the air?
How typical do you believe your situation to be?
I see more Cybertrucks and electric Humvees than I do Nissan Leafs (Leaves?).
Fwiw, I’m not denying that they are less harmful to the environment than gas cars, rather that the stated motive is bullshit. If they were truly serious about the environment, they would also be promoting WFH. A mile not driven at all is even better than an electrically-driven mile.
most electric cars are built like fucking iphones and are difficult to repair.
Only the battery packs… Tesla for example, for what its worth (obligatory fuck Nazi Elon Musk), provides full detailed service manuals for free for ever component on the car.
I heard that getting the parts is very difficult. The manuals are of limited use if you can’t get the parts to do the work.
We threw the auto industry a bone and the American companies still ficked it up lmao
Affordable surveillance devices are the least of my concerns.
EVs are no more surveillance devices than internal combustion engine cars are. I’m getting so tired of this moronic take.
The criticism is of all new cars, not just EVs, but EVs are the only new cars that would’ve otherwise been worth considering.
Or in other words, what you wrote is a lie because old ICE cars without surveillance exist, but there is practically* no such equivalent for EVs.
*
There were a few NiMH EVs from the late '90s through early 2000s that were produced in low numbers (a few thousand total summed across all years and models), mostly leased to fleets, and almost always destroyed once the leases expired. Good fucking luck finding one of those!
Our property shouldn’t surveil us.
The inclusion of surveillance means that in various datacenters energy and fresh water are used to make various decisions about you without your consent.
I would rather not own a new car. I would rather electrify my own vehicles. I have already electrified my bicycle.
My right to privacy is not something I will let a corporation decide.
I’m tired of moronic consumerism.
I agree on nearly all points (I drive a Taycan and I’m glad to have modern safety engineering in my daily driver, and I don’t use the data service at all).
What does ANY of that have to do with the specific drivetrain of electric vehicles?
Your stance is against all new cars. Nothing to do with EVs specifically. And in that regard I do agree with you, that surveillance is unacceptable especially when it’s put into our personal property.
Just weird thing to say in an EV specific context.
It has to do with EVs in the sense that (practically speaking) every single one of them is new enough to be infested with surveillance, so (unlike with ICE) there’s no option to avoid it by going with an old vehicle.
Also, nobody gives a shit about new ICE cars, so there’s no point in mentioning them when they weren’t within the realm of consideration to begin with.
I don’t think we need to worry about making new cars cheaper, even if it’s EVs.
There are a lot more important priorities in America.
I would rather see cheaper solar panels.
I would rather electrify my own vehicles. I have already electrified my bicycle.
🎵 One of these things is not like the other… 🎵
I love Sesame Street! Next, the Count will help us understand the cost difference between a bicycle and a car.
Good or bad, most Americans need a car for everyday life. Particularly for areas that cannot be served by mass transit, electric car adoption is essential to reduce societal emissions.
Which is why I drive a dumb fartbox that doesn’t even shift for me and not Formica countertops with an iPad and a game controller.
Is adopting new surveillance technologies part of that goal to reduce emissions?
If not, maybe we should try to consider how to have electric vehicles that do not surveil us?
I’m all for less surveillance in cars, but American cars don’t have any less surveillance than Chinese ones, so using it as a reason to prevent their import is a bit disingenuous.
What more Americans could use are more affordable cars—particularly affordable electric cars—and competition with Chinese imports would help that happen.
Surveillance in new cars is a reason to not buy new cars.
No matter where it’s country of origin is.
I would rather modify an old I.C.E. car to be electric than to buy anything that reduces my freedom or charges me subscriptions for basic features.
I would rather modify an old I.C.E. car to be electric than to buy anything that reduces my freedom or charges me subscriptions for basic features.
So you don’t have a cell phone/smart phone, right? Or smart tv? Or streaming box? Or a windows computer? Or a car with TPMS sensors?
Because they’re all tracking you, and that’s just a few off the top of my head. Yes, you can limit what and how is tracking you, but when it really starts to cut into the quality of life, most people don’t care. And yes, great, you’re not most people but that’s not what people think about. If they did, digital privacy laws would be radically different.
Anyway, to go along with my old non-surveillance-infested cars:
- my phone runs GrapheneOS
- my computers run GNU/Linux
- my TV is dumb
- my media is selfhosted on Jellyfin
- the only “smart” devices I use are flashed with ESPHome and connect to selfhosted Home Assistant
- Hell, even my e-bike uses a standalone controller and does not pair with my phone or connect to an “app!”
Checkmate, troll.
But go on, explain how none of that matters and we should all be little bitches like you who just willingly bend over for the corpo-stalkers. Explain how your bullshit comment is anything other than fucking worthless doomerism.
I’m trying out SailfishOS myself
Concur…
However, I gleefully await the modders to teach me how to remove that when I eventually get an EV
I’m curious what will happen as increasingly large numbers of young Americans are delaying and rejecting driving.
That’s only a widespread option in urban areas with that have invested in mass transit. American suburbs are ultimately designed around car usage, and rural areas are too sparsely populated for mass transit to ever be viable there.
So what happens when people aren’t getting licenses? Do these areas change? Do the people relocate? Does the area simply atrophy?
Many people leave rural areas for urban areas for economic reasons, but high housing costs in those urban areas lead people to settle in suburban areas where car usage is often essential.
I don’t see any indicators that people are not getting driver’s licenses en masse; the number of licensed drivers has continued to increase, something that can’t fundamentally change without a substantial increase in public funding for mass transit or a decrease in the urban sprawl that characterizes many American suburbs.
And to add to that, even if one does live in a city where they don’t need a car for day to day activities, if you ever want to leave the downtown and urban transit network (if it exists) your options are incredibly limited. I’m about to get an apartment and I probably could bike to work if I wanted to in good weather (would kinda suck and require crossing a large road with no pedestrian crossings whatsoever) but going to see family or my partner that lives 2 hours by car away is impossible.
I would love to take a train for both of those things, and there even is one (1) amtrak line from my home city that goes to one useful place for me but nowhere else in the state, and even that one line is only a couple days a week and almost never works out unless it’s actively planned around.
I was referencing articles such as: https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2024/05/17/gen-z-less-likely-get-drivers-license/73678202007/
It’s a well-documented trend. Although housing is more expensive in urban areas, the cost savings of not dealing with a car can offset some of this. I think $10k/year is a commonly cited average cost for owning and operating a car.
