I want to buy a new car, but it needs to be privacy friendly. Sadly you cannot really buy any new Car that is.
Has anybody any experience on making your modern car not phone home to its company, by removing the hardware it uses to do?
I want to buy a new car, but it needs to be privacy friendly. Sadly you cannot really buy any new Car that is.
Has anybody any experience on making your modern car not phone home to its company, by removing the hardware it uses to do?
You can have good luck just by buying 10 year old cars - they might have connectivity, but the it will be to a cell/network standard that no longer exists and so for practical purposes the car cannot connect to anything.
Planned obsolescence restoring our privacy through incompetence is kind of fun to think about.
toyotas are typically outdated. my 2002 car has a cassette deck, but no CD player. i can imagine a car from 2010 barely being able to recieve DAB.
that car will last 20 more years anyway, so i’ll just wait this dystopian shit out. why “upgrade” when your car starts every morning and gets 35-40mpg?
And in 20nyears it will just need an engine rebuild, because Toyota.
not even that. there’s LS-400s that have 1M miles / 1,6M km and still use the first engine and transmission.
the engine in my car (1SZ-FE) is known to regularly last 400.000 km. it barely has 100k after 20 years of being a grocery getter for an elderly woman, and the engine shows literally no signs of wear. you drain exactly the amount that goes in.
Oh, I was being cynical, lol. Worst case, ya know!
The Corolla 4 cylinder is probably the most robust engine I’ve seen. Chain drive for the cam, so no timing belt to wear out, and just rock.
I had a 1982 22R engine go 300k when I was poor- rarely did oil changes, really didn’t take care of it. Still started on the first try (with a carb!) when I traded it at 300k, and everything still worked. Only maintenance it required was a water pump at 100k or so, and the usual belts/hoses/brakes. Kind of miss that car. It was gutless, but damn reliable.
I did more maintenance on a 90’s Ford with less than 100k miles, ha!
We have numerous Honda and Toyotas in my family, I appreciate that I rarely have to work on them - even the 30 year old ones.
that’s the thing. we have 5 Toyotas in our family, a couple of ancient VWs (like 70s, rarely drive any of them) and a single ford transit nugget with a westfalia camper pack.
that thing barely has 80k on it, and it has had numerous electrical problems, and we were stranded on the autobahn at least 4 times. even the variable turbo thingy got stuck (garrett turbo btw).
long story short, either buy 20+ year old cars, or stick to tpyota and honda.
never buy a ford. ecoboost engines especially. you’ll be lucky if it lasts even 50k.
I have thought about something like that. Maybe getting an early model EV and maintaining it. I love the idea of electric vehicles, but they’ve just always been expensive. Cost is also the reason I have never bought a new vehicle in my life as well.
I don’t think there is such a thing as a non-connected early-model EV, aside from really niche stuff that was mostly leased to fleets, like the 1998-2002 Ford Ranger EV or the 1997-2003 Toyota Rav4 EV. Good luck finding one of those, though, and also good luck getting reasonable modern-EV-equivalent range out of the lead acid or NiMH batteries.
3G was ended in 2022, which opens up a lot of models. I think 4g started being implemented around 2014.
Even before the official end man, towers were retired and so odds were against getting a connection though somecimes you could
3G still exists exactly for monitoring services, just not for consumer use.
Milions (billions?) of remote monitoring devices rely on it, like oil fields, water systems, gas systems, etc.
I’m not sure if the automotive systems fall into that, but I could see the manufacturers making sure they were.
I have a vehicle with 3G that always has 5 bars, even when my phone has little or none. Kind of says a lot about the QOS the automotive industry gets.