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Electric cars became more affordable across much of the world in 2025 — except the U.S
(restofworld.org)
this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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Affordable surveillance devices are the least of my concerns.
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.
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.
Great, now talk about how you recompiled the BIOS on your computer and audit every line of code in an update that comes out.
What you’re asking for is impossible. You ask, but GFL.
I've got a BIOS ROM chip sitting here on my desk waiting to be flashed with Libreboot as we speak.
How sad that you're so desperately grasping at straws in order to simp for corporations.
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.
EVs are no more surveillance devices than internal combustion engine cars are. I'm getting so tired of this moronic take.
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.
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.
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.
🎵 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.
And Ernie and Bert will demonstrate the opportunity cost of the car vs bicycle in real life!
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!