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Just don't put electronic spyware in your vehicles? I realize this is a very hard concept for modern automakers to understand because they are institutionally stupid, but in practice that's something that ought to be quite easy to do.
Whether or not compliance with the law will actually provide them any benefit, that I have my doubts over. I imagine the real reason they were denied by the regime is just plain old corruption and this is simply being used as an excuse. But still.
Quit putting cellular modems in your stupid cars. None of us want that anyway.
If I’m a bank loaning money on auto loans for a major auto brand, I’d only accept the risk if that car is GPS tracked so I can take it back if the borrower stops paying. If automakers won’t make it standard, I’ll just donate to build a ballroom so they’re forced to reduce my risk exposure. But it can’t be one of those cheap Chinese or Russian GPS trackers. It has to be one of those expensive ones that is made by this other company I loan money to. That way they can keep paying on the loan I gave them. Great ROI on that ballroom investment. I’m the best bank ever.
Unfortunately people these days insist on being able to connect their phone to the car and use sat-nav, basically a car without that is almost unsellable in the current market. They could probably swap out the module with Chinese chips with one made in USA... If anyone even produces one?
Edit, I can't reply to all of you dumb fucks telling me what we already know about connecting a phone to a car. 1) GPS enabled sat-nav with live traffic updates does require an internet connection. And 2) I don't think Americans really understand how thoroughly your government has fucked you over; the restriction on domestic wireless communication doesn't need an internet connection, it applies to any wireless communication even if theoretically it cannot be connected to the internet (don't believe me, read the law).
You're gonna look really stupid when the Slate truck sells well.
By the way, your edit is disingenuously moving goalposts.
Your gonna look really stupid when you find out it has built in telemetry.
CarPlay/Android Auto doesn’t require a modem in the car. Your phone already has a modem in it.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/16/2025-00592/securing-the-information-and-communications-technology-and-services-supply-chain-connected-vehicles
Carplay is also banned. The rule is fake, it's just pretextual to ban Chinese cars so it will always be stretched to cover any possible Chinese car. The US forced free trade on everybody assuming it would always win, and now that it's losing it's just cheating. It needs to stick some kind of bullshit technicality on the treaty violation so it can abuse WTO procedure to loop this case around through appeals for 30 years before China can get a final ruling against the US.
It may not need one for those products, but I promise it has one anyway.
Internet connectivity in a car should be opt-in with a simple mechanism to enable/disable. No calls to the manufacturer, no dealer trip, no app.
You don't understand, read my post
You don't understand, we don't need the car to provide a cellular modem to collect data on us. Our phones already provide that.
GPS didn’t need any form of cellular connectivity for the first 15-20 years it was in cars.
In fact it hasn’t changed in that requirement, and screen mirroring also doesn’t need spyware.
Still works great on your phone with no internet if you precached the maps for the area you'll be in.
Yeah, have an old Tom Tom kicking around somewhere that's over 20 years old, I think. Worked great, you just needed to plug it into a computer every once in a very long while to update the maps. I mean, roads don't change THAT frequently.
You don't understand, read my post
You're citing something that absolutely doesn't require the car itself to connect to the internet.
I can do all that in my car and it has no network connectivity.
You don't understand, read my post
You don't understand, read my post
I did read your post, it was dumb.
Or provide a module for plug in for your sales region.
That's my point, I don't think there are currently any companies in the US, outside of defense contractors, that produce a module. It is impossible to comply with the law.
That’s what really pisses me off about this. The same thing as when they forced the sale of TikTok. I’d personally rather have the Chinese collecting my information and not using it than having anyone collecting and selling it (though I would guess they are actually selling it). But they’re perfectly fine with any car manufacturer in the US tracking the hell out of all of us as long as China isn’t doing it.
Bullshit. Lots of people want to be able to pre-heat or pre-cool the car over the internet, want the car to be able to download updated maps and provide navigation accounting for live traffic. My car, after a free period, charges a small subscription for those services and I just paid for it today, so I can tell you that I and my partner want it enough to pay for it.
That wouldn't help. The Chinese-owned company wants to put cheap Chinese hardware in its vehicles. It doesn't matter whether they're spyware because it's all banned regardless.
You are part of the problem. Nothing the companies are providing justifies them spying on us or attacking our property rights, but you're rewarding them for doing it.
These features, minus the map updates, existed for decades before cars were internet connected. They employed this exotic technology called "a remote." The remote always worked unless its batteries were dead, didn't require paying for a subscription, didn't track your every move, and there were no servers that could be turned off to prevent it from working. In fact, even if your car's manufacturer went out of business completely, it would still work! Crazy, I know.
Even if this absolutely must be done via smartphone with some ghastly app or another, Wi-Fi exists and has a similar range. Despite all the tech elsewhere in my life, I have never felt that it was not suitably enriched by not being able to twiddle with my car from anywhere outside of the 100 foot or so range of its remote.
Given that the current fad seems to be to use Android Auto or Apple CarPlay for your navigation anyway, on-board navigation is really rather moot. And even if it weren't, update data could readily be handled locally via a connection to your phone or even, ye gods forbid, a USB cable to the same. Back in the good old days this could also be handled with a physical disk, which admittedly you typically had to pay for but you could take it or leave it as you pleased. And the damn thing would work without it. Nowadays this could be trivially handled with a simple internet download and a $2 SD card, which come to think of it is precisely how my current aftermarket head unit does it.
This is a hole the automakers have quite purposefully drilled directly into their own respective feet by getting greedy and salivating over recurring subscription revenue. It's to benefit them, not you, and I have zero sympathy for them because of it.
I've never heard of a remote to start air con, but sure it could exist. Live traffic and map updates - the other 2 of the 3 things - do not.
There are workarounds for all of it, though. A separate device for navigation with its own maps, even physically going to the car to warm it up (that's what my parents did). But these are convenience features, and those alternatives are all less convenient.
My WiFi network doesn't extend to where I park my car. When at work, shopping or away, that is probably true for the vast majority of people.
Whether it's Google using my personal data to show me ads or paying a small fee to the car manufacturer makes little difference.
My sum total point is that, yes, people do want these features. What you meant in your post was that you don't want them. And that's fine, but you're overreaching.
Remote starts from the factory that set heat and cooling are about 20 years old sorta. Mostly in the form of auto client control paired with remote start.
But remote starts have been around since the 1960s. And just leaving your ac/heater set to what you like or pre setting it before you get out isn't hard.
My dad's old truck when I was a kid was a 1980s Toyota with a remote start. We would just leave the heater set to max before we got out and then it would be ready when we started it in the morning to go to school!