Posted by arkadiyt 22 hours ago
I hate how this is a trade off. It’s totally possible for cars to broadcast their location only if the SOS is pressed or the crash sensor is triggered, but it feels like there’s no way to have that without also having everything else.
On the other hand, as mentioned by others: Why bother if you use CarPlay?
Amen.
Peppers article with Amazon affiliate links
Perfect summation of 2026
They can deny any claim for any reason, the onus gets flipped on you because if you want to fight back, you have to take a multi-billion dollar company to court .
All these car manufacturers pushing this horrorshow deserve to go under. Tbh it looks like most will soon....
(I dread the day my 2007 Civic is no longer usable.)
When I was a younger man, audio visual forums used to have an unfortunately sexist, but fairly good conceptual measure they called “wife acceptance factor”. It should really just be partner acceptance factor. Regardless of whom you are with, I hope they would physically intervene before letting you do this. What is the point? All of these posts feel like they miss the forest for the trees. Don’t like This Modern World? Fair enough, start by leaving your phone at home. Pay cash. And so forth. The author’s problems would be better solved by taking the bus. If you’re going to get into messing with cars, the wiring harness is not the place to start. Every trip to the dealer or any other mechanic is going to be painful right up until you finally give up and try to private sale the vehicle. At some point in that process, after you have dropped the price by over half the Kelley Blue Book value (or whatever Palantir shit replaces that) you may actually hear yourself explaining to the pleasantly smiling with a certain look in their eye non buyer about how you had to do this.
I will admit my bias. Fair play to the author for putting this all together but it reads like a very intricate aluminum foil hat.
1) My auto insurance is already too expensive. I have zero interest in "oh yeah we had to add to your driver factor because telematics says you exceeded the speed limit 11 times last year :^)". Less tracking is just a bonus.
2) He made no irreversible changes to the vehicle. Just keep the part and plug it back in when you need it for service/inspection or whatever.
3) "Telematics disabled" probably adds to the resale value of the car.
His solution: disconnect the cell modem
Your solution: Be single, never drive a car ever, and leave your phone at home.
?????
Also my spouse is just as paranoid as this guy is and when I told her what new vehicles collect she was happy she had an older model car. So this is not really a thing.