> internet-connected smart cars

My main concern is that you pay a small fortune to buy a car, then get hit with "extras" that require a monthly subscription. Subs that the maker can arbitrarily increase at any time, to any amount. Or turn off completely at their whim. Maybe even download "upgrades" that severely limit the performance or utility of what you have already paid for. Just like with PCs and phones.

This seems to be following the trend of cloud computing for businesses. It sounded like a good idea, but increasingly, the drawbacks and costs mean that it's the wrong decision for many.

I was thinking literal ransomware:

Want to drive to work this morning? Send ₿0.001 to Russia. Want to drive home afterwards? Send ₿0.001 to North Korea.

I'm waiting for variable extortion payments. Want to use your air conditioning in winter? It's free! Want to use it when it's 40°C? That'll be £1 per mile.

Or something like "want to turn your heated seats off now it's summer? Send £1 per minute, otherwise they go back on at full blast..."

Great. I'll get more of that "hi, I've installed a virus in your car and took pictures of you masturbating, please send bitcoins or I will send them to your family, church and employer".

If I buy a car, either brand new or second hand (or leased for that matter), then whilst I am the owner, any data-related collections should all be on my terms. I don't have an issue with it having access to my phone to play my music from it or even displaying my photos on the main display if I want to, but rampant data harvesting, subscriptions, additional payments and continual data-feed back to the manufacturer? Absolutely NO WAY! The manufacturer can fuck off! It's MY car and MY data, not yours, and if you think I'm going to just let you do that you're mistaken.

I agree there may be a case for some data transfer to take place under certain specified conditions, but NEVER a constant stream of whatever the manufacturer deems they have a right to. That is completely unacceptable, and I can see a market for devices to block that by plugging into the OBD port (or whatever) appearing and becoming commonplace.

This is yet another example of where manufacturers think that they have a divine right to monitor and track you after you've bought their product. It doesn't work that way, and long-term, people will not tolerate or accept it.

"people will not tolerate or accept it"

Yes they will. It's the drip drip drip of what's 'tolerable' or 'acceptable' - just like having cameras and microphones throughout your house and in your pocket was unacceptable and intolerable 2 decades ago, yet now more than 400 million people VOLUNTARILY do it (source: [1]www.statista.com ).

It's a combination of obfuscating the purpose of these devices, and wearing the consumer down such that it seems 'normal' to just allow it.

[1] https://www.statista.com/forecasts/887613/number-of-smart-homes-in-the-smart-home-market-in-the-world

Wouldn't GDPR rules mean they can't grab your data here in Europe anyway? They'd need to ask permission and you need to be able to say "no" without things not working, otherwise it's not a real choice.

I don't trust car manufacturers to keep their systems up to date, patched, and working correctly today, even without full Google Auto integration. I don't believe for a second a car manufacturer will continue to patch an infotainment system in a car that's 10-15 years old. If ransomware groups are willing to spend time putting malware on connected torque wrenches, you can guarentee they'll be aiming for these cars, especially considering all the personal data they'll be collecting.... I'll stick with a standard system that integrates Carplay thanks...

Agree on CarPlay. If you live in the connected world then sooner or later you'll need to share some data with a third party; trick is to choose ONE vendor that you more or less trust, and let them manage the rest. That's why I use 'Login with Apple' when possible on websites as well.

I'd argue that the manufacturers are dying to move to a lease-only model. The sales pitch will be that this is to help with product recycling but, if they get away with this, your car goes end of life when the vendor decides it's no longer making enough profit for them: when you've stopped buying additional monthly subs and your data has been milked dry then it's of no further use to the manufacturer and gets recalled. Never mind the inconvenience of the heated seats or what-have-you no longer working: the entire car will cease to function and the lessor will have to cut a deal with a vendor for a whole new vehicle.

Welcome to the Brave New World. Now pass me my Government mandated Soma pill.

Not really the primary focus of this article, but subscriptions are the bane of my existence. I hate that I don't own Microsoft Office or Photoshop. I detest that several features on my car either cost a small fortune to 'buy' or an even larger fortune (spread out over time) to 'rent'. I loathe that my house security system is advertised as having features x, y, and z, but when bought and installed, it turns out to only actually have x; the other features being tied to a mandatory subscription. I baulk at the idea that actually "owning" a house these days requires 2 substantial incomes and a mountain of savings, otherwise the rental market is the only way to go.

The only subscription I don't mind, ironically, is HP's Instant Ink. I print about 5 pages a month, so their 'free 15 pages a month for life' tier gives me all I will likely ever need. Right up until they remotely brick my printer with an 'upgrade' in order to get me off this and onto a paid tier.

There are alternative, you know: LibreOffice and Gimp for starters. No-one if forcing you to drink all the M$ coolade, even if you are forced by $work to use a 'doze platform. At home there are very few things other than games that *require* WIndows.

Why?

A survey of randoms saying they don't like something is worth precisely fuck all.

Vehicle makers will take note when it starts to affect the bottom line.

I'll stick to dumb cars that do what I want when I want it - which consists of getting me from A to B safely in a reasonable time. During a journey I'll probably spend about 10% of the time concentrating on what I'm doing, and the other 90% assessing what everyone else on the road is doing.

And that is the carrot that will lure most people in. It's the heroin hit that will make the rest pass. It's the golden excuse for jacking everyone into the Matrix of Companies and getting them to actually ask for the procedure.

I'm an old fart now, barely a decade from retirement. I will easily resist, but my resistance doesn't matter because the upcoming generation, the one that already lives with their smartphones grafted to their hands, will likely sign up to this scheme without even blinking.

And they're the ones who tell you that it's for the greater good . . .

A USian colleague of ours claimed this morning that the remote access to his car comes with 3-years from the point you buy it, and then becomes a subscription service thereafter. There was of course also the nonsense with certain a German manufacturer selling subscription access to the "sport" mode on the ECU.

A similar situation exists for many EV chargers. I will NOT get an EV until every charge point in the land has a bog-standard credit card slot. No, I will not download that 3.6GB app via the QR code plastered on the side of the charger just to use it (and every charger has it's own app...) Noting that scammers have quite rightly already pasted posters with other QR codes of their choosing over the top.

Only two words are suitable in response, fuck and off.

My current car, bought second hand, neither the previous owner or dealer had bothered clearing the sat nav. The home address of the previous owner is still saved in that computer. I made damn sure that on sale of my previous car that such things had been cleared out.

Digital has it's place, the influx into everything is not welcome. If I am a luddite for not wanting my lunchtime walk tracked; consider the fate of certain Russian officers whose movements were being tracked on Strava. An evolution of consumer rights concerning data protection is something that I would love to see in manifestos. GDPR is a start, but it requires considerable evolution.

While I am fully behind the concept of not buying anything which needs a regular payment to continue to be usable, my motive for buying an older car is even simpler.

We now have things like Euro NCAP which supposedly makes cars safer but it does that by allowing the car to take control based on a set of overly focused scenarios. One of the biggest challenges is the bit where the camera see you getting to close to a white line without having used an indicator so takes over the steering to move you away from it - straight into the pothole/vehicle you were trying to avoid. I can understand the thinking behind these but it seems the implementation assumes we all live in areas with standard width, well maintained and well marked roads. If you are outside such a fantasy town then your 'single track with passing places' country lane is going to give the car a complete nervous breakdown and there is never an option to shut it off long term, just for the current journey.

I would suggest you check out some other manufacturers. Some lane monitoring and collision avoidance systems are definitely better than others. My relatively recent Subaru can have all of that turned off entirely with one physical push button by the side of the dash. It is nowhere near as aggressive as some of the other monitoring systems I have seen, and not something I've needed to turn off. But that the option is immediately there is, I think, what you are looking for. Over Christmas I did a load of driving down the nowhere B-roads of Northumberland, which if you have used them, you'll know that being in the middle for visibility and road surface reasons is generally a good idea - slowing down and moving over for traffic ofc. Said systems did not interfere with me doing this.

A friend's Skoda is particularly obnoxious. Nice enough car, but try and cross a line without signalling and it'll interfere with steering and/or braking. Obviously, there are situations where this is correct; but there are many where it's really not. I would be curious as to how many accidents are linked to such systems making bad decisions?

On the other hand, one only has to drive 3 minutes in any direction to see some piss poor driving. Against that backdrop, perhaps it's better that such incompetent drivers have their steering and braking done for them. Especially the morons that think they can drive competently while messaging on their phone.

I wonder when "authorities" will start demanding car data to evidence basic driving violations - speeding, not indicating before a turn, splashing through a puddle and soaking a pedestrian, wearing incorrectly coloured trousers whilst driving ... If the data is there, either by direct data logs from speedometers etc or via footage recorded by camera or audio devices, if can only be a matter if time.

If you smash your car, the cops can and will already collect things like the ECU log. It will be immediately obvious what your control inputs have been on the run into an accident.

Dashcams are obviously pretty common and usually usable as evidence as well.

I am reminded of a feature I saw in the Apache gunships when I had the honour of sitting in the back seat of one a few years - the big red button with "MASTER ZEROISE" on it. The idea being that in event of the chopper going down in hostile territory you can smash that button to destroy data devices.

Ha ha

I never wear trousers while driving!

Why isn't this zero percent? Are they working for the manufacturers or whomever the data is shared with?

It's absolutely jaw dropping that this is so high.

How many of those surveyed understood the question?