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> “There’s just massive amounts of data being collected, and if you want the service, you have to agree to it. And people do agree to it, and they have relative

> “There’s just massive amounts of data being collected, and if you want the service, you have to agree to it. And people do agree to it, and they have relatively little control over things,” Scassa says. I'm curious what this will do to the used car market in 10-15 years. Say the original owner consented to all this data tracking. They go to sell the car to buy a new one, and the 2nd owner does not agree to the tracking. Is there a vendor-provided way to shut this off? Or is the vehicle always stuck in a "data collecting mode" regardless of who it is sold to? Furthermore, if a customer changes the car to stop data upload, that could be seen as tampering with a vehicle. This could lead to legal consequences, but I'm not a lawyer so I can't dwell on the specifics.

Psyladine 7y ago
>I'm curious what this will do to the used car market in 10-15 years. Depends on LEO. If it is easier to deal with trackable cars, then untrackable cars will be hotter than black tinted windows and radar detectors. It already is, to some extent; why can I not gut my catalytic converter & change some programming so my car says the outputs are fine? Because the state wants me to get rid of my old functional car to support the economy of newer more expensive vehicles.
- xg15 7y ago
  > why can I not gut my catalytic converter & change some programming so my car says the outputs are fine? Because the state wants me to get rid of my old functional car to support the economy of newer more expensive vehicles. ...also probably to protect the environment?
  - Psyladine 7y ago
    garbage argument. A single cargo container pukes more shit into the ocean and atmosphere than all the little commuter cars put together. And we have fleets of them running 24-7 to make this world possible. Humans breathe out CO2, I wonder how long until the go-greens suggest a permanent solution to that booming population issue...
  - shadow-banned 7y ago
    tHe sTaTE wAnTs tO cOnTroL me!!!! modifies car to literally emit noxious emissions everywhere
    - dang 7y ago
      Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN?
  - tbihl 7y ago
    You have to have an incredibly inefficient vehicle for manufacturing and shipping a new one to be an environmental positive...
    - freeone3000 7y ago
      Catalytic converters reduce local pollution significantly. Smog reduction in major cities is in part due to their near-universality.
    - xg15 7y ago
      But the "manufacturing and shipping a new one" part is temporary until the majority of cars are replaced. The reduced emissions from more efficient cars will be permanent. Yes, retrofitting would be better, but if that's not possible, what else would you do to get converters into cars? Also, I think GP was talking about removing a converter from a car that already had one. Literally not doing anything would be better for the environment than that.
xg15 7y ago
Seems to me answering those questions will be part of a greater process to balance power and interests between manufacturers and consumers/users. E.g., Tesla already seems to try and decide the questions in the way manufacturers would likely have them, i.e. suppressing data transmission is tampering and the problem of car reselling doesn't apply as cars cannot be resold anymore without manufacturer involvement. I think it's up to consumers to offer a different perspective here.
- paganel 7y ago
  > s tampering and the problem of car reselling doesn't apply as cars cannot be resold anymore without manufacturer involvement. I suspect this will become a huge societal problem if it continues like this in a car-dependent country like the US. Yes, the middle-class people will probably still be able to purchase $30,000-40,000 cars for the foreseeable future (even adjusted for inflation), but what will happen to the people who won't be able to purchase a second-hand car that costs more than $5000-6000 (or even $1000-2000)? How will they continue to get to work in a country that values public transport so lowly?
  - jhoechtl 7y ago
    The more technology is built into a car, the more obsolescence shall quickly devaluate it?
    - paganel 7y ago
      You would think so, but afaik there's almost no older smart-phones around (think 4-5 years-old) because they're expensive to repair, that is if you can repair them at all. That's why you don't see less-wealthy people commuting to their jobs in an early 2000s Mercedes S-Klass or in a VW Phaeton (even though they'd be able to purchase such vehicles at today's prices), but instead they use an older Honda or a Toyota or a slightly newer Nissan.
      - Fnoord 7y ago
        Smartphones aren't cars. Cars are much bigger, therefore easier to make [somewhat] modular. Furthermore, the recent hype with smartphones was smaller, thinner, and more glue.
throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
And if not, what if regulation suddenly makes it illegal to opt out? California maybe?
cptskippy 7y ago
> Is there a vendor-provided way to shut this off? In the Tesla Model 3 and Nissan Leaf there are menu settings to disable it. Additionally in the Leaf it prompts you at interval (every 2000 miles?) to notify you about it.
- mikestew 7y ago
  Leaf it prompts you at interval (every 2000 miles? Or every g-ddamned time you start the car, depending if you have a first-gen or not. The GPRS radio in ours is unhooked, so now the button press is just ceremony so you can see the screen. But do note the part where the cell radio is unhooked. Whatever the car, there’s a module in there somewhere that probably just needs to be unplugged.
  - cptskippy 7y ago
    > Or every g-ddamned time you start the car, depending if you have a first-gen or not. My in-laws have a Ford Escape that does that.
sircastor 7y ago
Anecdotally, I can tell you my 6 year old Nissan Leaf asks me every time I start up the car if it can send data back to Nissan. The 2g radio doesn't actually have a network to connect to, so it's kind of a moot point. I imagine it'll be like any useful service, once you turn off the data collection, it suddenly loses a bunch of useful features
pjc50 7y ago
Swings and roundabouts in the EU: GDPR should clobber all the nonconsensual data collection, but there is also the "eCall" mandate that will require your car to phone in location to the emergency services in the event of a crash. (What happens when an EU national drives one of the American surveillancemobiles? Sounds like a straightforward GDPR violation to me, although good luck getting that resolved)
- tjoff 7y ago
  Don't really see how eCall is related to the data collection? A potential privacy issue yes, but much less so than the data collection.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Well, in order to implement it the car has to have a "phone" (mobile station) and a GPS. And I think (although not proven) that in order to meet the time requirement it has to keep both of them "warm", ie registered to network with a GPS fix. Which means at the minimum the mobile operators know where the car is at all times. And the car manufacturer has built almost all the hardware for full tracking.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  Does this mean that if you cut the wires to your antenna you will be jailed in Europe?
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Unlikely; you'd have to find the directive to check.
  - mrr54 7y ago
    The first recourse of the law typically isn't jail.
mfer 7y ago
The 80's tractor market is heating up because farmers are tired of the problems of modern technology and how companies are using it [1]. I wonder if anyone will jump at the market for cars that don't track you. I wonder who would fund that. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971545
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  The trouble is that this isn't true for large companies who are consolidating all the farms anyway. They can afford the the new equipment. This is just a niche thing for the family farm which is steadily dying off as they can't compete on price. Sure there will always be some family farms, but no doubt they will be driven to say "organic small farm raised" for the whole foods and farmer's market type niche of people. This "heating up" is a drop in the ocean.
clucas 7y ago
This is not legal advice, and you should consult an attorney if you believe that an OEM may come after you for tampering with your own vehicle. That said, I believe that there is very limited legal recourse for a vehicle OEM who wants to prevent an end user from changing the data collection and upload features of their vehicles. The worst thing would be potentially voiding the warranty, but for 10-15 year old used vehicles, that's not an issue. I work as an in-house counsel at a vehicle OEM (likely not one you've heard of). Our end customers are generally large companies, so it may be different for personal passenger vehicles, but we actively plan for the contingencies where our end users switch out their telematics module, or request to have the telematics data stream be directed to another service provider. Further, in our market, the idea that the customer wouldn't want telematics at all is not really likely, but we also plan for that possibility. So, I don't believe the used market isn't as big of a deal as you may think. The real concern for personal vehicles is losing essential warranty or service options for new vehicles by turning off the data collection.
- falcolas 7y ago
  Don't forget that Tesla is now in this space, and turning off Tesla's access to it will turn off your car, period. I have a hard time believing that others in the industry will not take the blase reaction to this and then do it themselves.
  - admax88q 7y ago
    Finally car manufacturers can kill the used car market just like video game companies killed the used game market. I'm sure its not going to be long before you don't _own_ your car, you just purchased a license to use it for a period of time.
  - Seenso 7y ago
    > Don't forget that Tesla is now in this space, and turning off Tesla's access to it will turn off your car, period. Which is super scary. A couple years ago one of their firmware engineers had his NDA expire, and he posted some stories about his time there in some forum. One of the stories that stuck with me is they were really sloppy with their updates. One time the pushed one that wasn't fully cooked (it might have bricked some, I can't remember), so one of the engineers literally wrote a script to SSH into each of the cars to roll back part of the update. Update: here's the original source: https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376 https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376
Ididntdothis 7y ago
I think the used car market will get destroyed. In a few years buying a used car older than a few years will probably be a quaint memory. That is unless manufacturers will get forced to open up their systems by law.
- Jaruzel 7y ago
  I think the move to electric vehicles will actually collapse the second-hand car market - no-one wants to buy a car with batteries that no longer hold enough charge to complete a journey. We already see this effect with used laptops and smartphones, however I can never see changing your cars battery pack being a end-user activity.
  - admax88q 7y ago
    If batteries get commoditized then it could be an easy process to replace the battery. It becomes no different than many other repairs you would typically make to make a used car sellable. However it will likely require legislation to ensure there's no DRM bullshit in the battery packs.
    - stjohnswarts 7y ago
      It becomes an issue because batteries are so much more expensive than other things you can get though. It's not replacing a alternator, it's replacing a $15000 battery "set". Also I'm hoping electric car longevity will prove out the value in this. Electric car drive trains "in principle" should have much longer lives than gas engines.
      - admax88q 7y ago
        I went to look up battery prices to prove you wrong, but your price is spot on. https://www.evwest.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=4&products_id=463&osCsid=e1dcb00cf5uagqp27kql5tt733 https://www.evwest.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=4&prod... Used Tesla battery, 5kWh for $1500. you're looking at ~10 of these for decent range.
chopin 7y ago
>They go to sell the car to buy a new one, and the 2nd owner does not agree to the tracking. Is there a vendor-provided way to shut this off? In Europe there needs to be due to GDPR. It will be interesting to see how this works out as this has not been challenged as far as I know.
magduf 7y ago
>Furthermore, if a customer changes the car to stop data upload, that could be seen as tampering with a vehicle. This could lead to legal consequences, but I'm not a lawyer so I can't dwell on the specifics. Where are you getting this crazy idea? If it's your car, you can tamper with it all you want, as long as you don't violate emissions laws and stuff like that. There's no law preventing you from tampering with your car's data collection or transmission, or most other things for that matter. How do you think the entire aftermarket parts industry exists?

Psyladine 7y ago

>I'm curious what this will do to the used car market in 10-15 years. Depends on LEO. If it is easier to deal with trackable cars, then untrackable cars will be hotter than black tinted windows and radar detectors. It already is, to some extent; why can I not gut my catalytic converter & change some programming so my car says the outputs are fine? Because the state wants me to get rid of my old functional car to support the economy of newer more expensive vehicles.

xg15 7y ago
> why can I not gut my catalytic converter & change some programming so my car says the outputs are fine? Because the state wants me to get rid of my old functional car to support the economy of newer more expensive vehicles. ...also probably to protect the environment?
- Psyladine 7y ago
  garbage argument. A single cargo container pukes more shit into the ocean and atmosphere than all the little commuter cars put together. And we have fleets of them running 24-7 to make this world possible. Humans breathe out CO2, I wonder how long until the go-greens suggest a permanent solution to that booming population issue...
- shadow-banned 7y ago
  tHe sTaTE wAnTs tO cOnTroL me!!!! modifies car to literally emit noxious emissions everywhere
  - dang 7y ago
    Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN?
- tbihl 7y ago
  You have to have an incredibly inefficient vehicle for manufacturing and shipping a new one to be an environmental positive...
  - freeone3000 7y ago
    Catalytic converters reduce local pollution significantly. Smog reduction in major cities is in part due to their near-universality.
  - xg15 7y ago
    But the "manufacturing and shipping a new one" part is temporary until the majority of cars are replaced. The reduced emissions from more efficient cars will be permanent. Yes, retrofitting would be better, but if that's not possible, what else would you do to get converters into cars? Also, I think GP was talking about removing a converter from a car that already had one. Literally not doing anything would be better for the environment than that.

xg15 7y ago

Seems to me answering those questions will be part of a greater process to balance power and interests between manufacturers and consumers/users. E.g., Tesla already seems to try and decide the questions in the way manufacturers would likely have them, i.e. suppressing data transmission is tampering and the problem of car reselling doesn't apply as cars cannot be resold anymore without manufacturer involvement. I think it's up to consumers to offer a different perspective here.

paganel 7y ago
> s tampering and the problem of car reselling doesn't apply as cars cannot be resold anymore without manufacturer involvement. I suspect this will become a huge societal problem if it continues like this in a car-dependent country like the US. Yes, the middle-class people will probably still be able to purchase $30,000-40,000 cars for the foreseeable future (even adjusted for inflation), but what will happen to the people who won't be able to purchase a second-hand car that costs more than $5000-6000 (or even $1000-2000)? How will they continue to get to work in a country that values public transport so lowly?
- jhoechtl 7y ago
  The more technology is built into a car, the more obsolescence shall quickly devaluate it?
  - paganel 7y ago
    You would think so, but afaik there's almost no older smart-phones around (think 4-5 years-old) because they're expensive to repair, that is if you can repair them at all. That's why you don't see less-wealthy people commuting to their jobs in an early 2000s Mercedes S-Klass or in a VW Phaeton (even though they'd be able to purchase such vehicles at today's prices), but instead they use an older Honda or a Toyota or a slightly newer Nissan.
    - Fnoord 7y ago
      Smartphones aren't cars. Cars are much bigger, therefore easier to make [somewhat] modular. Furthermore, the recent hype with smartphones was smaller, thinner, and more glue.

throwawayhhakdl 7y ago

And if not, what if regulation suddenly makes it illegal to opt out? California maybe?

cptskippy 7y ago

> Is there a vendor-provided way to shut this off? In the Tesla Model 3 and Nissan Leaf there are menu settings to disable it. Additionally in the Leaf it prompts you at interval (every 2000 miles?) to notify you about it.

mikestew 7y ago
Leaf it prompts you at interval (every 2000 miles? Or every g-ddamned time you start the car, depending if you have a first-gen or not. The GPRS radio in ours is unhooked, so now the button press is just ceremony so you can see the screen. But do note the part where the cell radio is unhooked. Whatever the car, there’s a module in there somewhere that probably just needs to be unplugged.
- cptskippy 7y ago
  > Or every g-ddamned time you start the car, depending if you have a first-gen or not. My in-laws have a Ford Escape that does that.

sircastor 7y ago

Anecdotally, I can tell you my 6 year old Nissan Leaf asks me every time I start up the car if it can send data back to Nissan. The 2g radio doesn't actually have a network to connect to, so it's kind of a moot point. I imagine it'll be like any useful service, once you turn off the data collection, it suddenly loses a bunch of useful features

pjc50 7y ago

Swings and roundabouts in the EU: GDPR should clobber all the nonconsensual data collection, but there is also the "eCall" mandate that will require your car to phone in location to the emergency services in the event of a crash. (What happens when an EU national drives one of the American surveillancemobiles? Sounds like a straightforward GDPR violation to me, although good luck getting that resolved)

tjoff 7y ago
Don't really see how eCall is related to the data collection? A potential privacy issue yes, but much less so than the data collection.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Well, in order to implement it the car has to have a "phone" (mobile station) and a GPS. And I think (although not proven) that in order to meet the time requirement it has to keep both of them "warm", ie registered to network with a GPS fix. Which means at the minimum the mobile operators know where the car is at all times. And the car manufacturer has built almost all the hardware for full tracking.
stjohnswarts 7y ago
Does this mean that if you cut the wires to your antenna you will be jailed in Europe?
- pjc50 7y ago
  Unlikely; you'd have to find the directive to check.
- mrr54 7y ago
  The first recourse of the law typically isn't jail.

mfer 7y ago

The 80's tractor market is heating up because farmers are tired of the problems of modern technology and how companies are using it [1]. I wonder if anyone will jump at the market for cars that don't track you. I wonder who would fund that. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971545

stjohnswarts 7y ago
The trouble is that this isn't true for large companies who are consolidating all the farms anyway. They can afford the the new equipment. This is just a niche thing for the family farm which is steadily dying off as they can't compete on price. Sure there will always be some family farms, but no doubt they will be driven to say "organic small farm raised" for the whole foods and farmer's market type niche of people. This "heating up" is a drop in the ocean.

clucas 7y ago

This is not legal advice, and you should consult an attorney if you believe that an OEM may come after you for tampering with your own vehicle. That said, I believe that there is very limited legal recourse for a vehicle OEM who wants to prevent an end user from changing the data collection and upload features of their vehicles. The worst thing would be potentially voiding the warranty, but for 10-15 year old used vehicles, that's not an issue. I work as an in-house counsel at a vehicle OEM (likely not one you've heard of). Our end customers are generally large companies, so it may be different for personal passenger vehicles, but we actively plan for the contingencies where our end users switch out their telematics module, or request to have the telematics data stream be directed to another service provider. Further, in our market, the idea that the customer wouldn't want telematics at all is not really likely, but we also plan for that possibility. So, I don't believe the used market isn't as big of a deal as you may think. The real concern for personal vehicles is losing essential warranty or service options for new vehicles by turning off the data collection.

falcolas 7y ago
Don't forget that Tesla is now in this space, and turning off Tesla's access to it will turn off your car, period. I have a hard time believing that others in the industry will not take the blase reaction to this and then do it themselves.
- admax88q 7y ago
  Finally car manufacturers can kill the used car market just like video game companies killed the used game market. I'm sure its not going to be long before you don't _own_ your car, you just purchased a license to use it for a period of time.
- Seenso 7y ago
  > Don't forget that Tesla is now in this space, and turning off Tesla's access to it will turn off your car, period. Which is super scary. A couple years ago one of their firmware engineers had his NDA expire, and he posted some stories about his time there in some forum. One of the stories that stuck with me is they were really sloppy with their updates. One time the pushed one that wasn't fully cooked (it might have bricked some, I can't remember), so one of the engineers literally wrote a script to SSH into each of the cars to roll back part of the update. Update: here's the original source: https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376 https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376

Ididntdothis 7y ago

I think the used car market will get destroyed. In a few years buying a used car older than a few years will probably be a quaint memory. That is unless manufacturers will get forced to open up their systems by law.

Jaruzel 7y ago
I think the move to electric vehicles will actually collapse the second-hand car market - no-one wants to buy a car with batteries that no longer hold enough charge to complete a journey. We already see this effect with used laptops and smartphones, however I can never see changing your cars battery pack being a end-user activity.
- admax88q 7y ago
  If batteries get commoditized then it could be an easy process to replace the battery. It becomes no different than many other repairs you would typically make to make a used car sellable. However it will likely require legislation to ensure there's no DRM bullshit in the battery packs.
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    It becomes an issue because batteries are so much more expensive than other things you can get though. It's not replacing a alternator, it's replacing a $15000 battery "set". Also I'm hoping electric car longevity will prove out the value in this. Electric car drive trains "in principle" should have much longer lives than gas engines.
    - admax88q 7y ago
      I went to look up battery prices to prove you wrong, but your price is spot on. https://www.evwest.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=4&products_id=463&osCsid=e1dcb00cf5uagqp27kql5tt733 https://www.evwest.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=4&prod... Used Tesla battery, 5kWh for $1500. you're looking at ~10 of these for decent range.

chopin 7y ago

>They go to sell the car to buy a new one, and the 2nd owner does not agree to the tracking. Is there a vendor-provided way to shut this off? In Europe there needs to be due to GDPR. It will be interesting to see how this works out as this has not been challenged as far as I know.

magduf 7y ago

>Furthermore, if a customer changes the car to stop data upload, that could be seen as tampering with a vehicle. This could lead to legal consequences, but I'm not a lawyer so I can't dwell on the specifics. Where are you getting this crazy idea? If it's your car, you can tamper with it all you want, as long as you don't violate emissions laws and stuff like that. There's no law preventing you from tampering with your car's data collection or transmission, or most other things for that matter. How do you think the entire aftermarket parts industry exists?