but tell me, how many of these people own a car to begin with?
Most do. The poorest don’t, and the richest young people living in London (you have to be rich to actually live in London) don’t. But the basic point is that they can just by finding a parking spot, whereas an EV with no charging opportunity cannot even if they do have a parking spot.
and would love to find some real data
It must exist but will it be published?
Your financial analysis misses the savings on maintenance
Anecdotally it could well be the other way round. Anybody can do basic stuff on a normal car but only specialists can do any work on an EV. That is what people are finding here. Crash repairs are also very tricky.
Peter wrote:
the Kona numbers are manufacturer numbers; reality will be worse and anyway assumes no aircon no heating and very optimal driving style
I’m using actual consumption figures from my previous (diesel) car and my current EV. The EV reports the extra consumption by heating/air conditioning and it amounts to perhaps 5% or less. (Not surprising considering that typical average engine power is in the order of 10 kW.)
Graham said either in this thread or the Covid one about remote access or control of modern/electric vehicles. Mozilla has published an automotive privacy report, summarised here, where all 25 major brands fail to meet even the most basic standards.
Internet-connected cars harvest personal information, through vehicle sensors (braking, bodyweight, seatbelts), cameras (facial expression), connected devices (phone contacts), gps (destinations), billing information (age, gender) etc. The profiles created are for targeted advertising or to resell. Some of the weirder ones which aren’t specified how monitored include sex life, genetics, health information, and immigration status. Some companies automatically infer consent for passengers, and it’s unlikely anyone encrypts the data.
Scary, but unsurprising. The funny thing is I was recently trying to explain the concept of a transponder to a non-pilot, using the analogy of automatic number plate recognition, and was told drivers are too large a group or lobby and this would never happen 
From the summary:
you’re probably driving around in a data-harvesting machine that may collect personal information as sensitive as your race, weight, and sexual activity.
That must have been a fun project to work on, especially the last one. I guess these companies already had a lot of practice doing emissions cheating (e.g. detecting driven wheels rotation while other wheels are stationary) so this was a similar thing e.g. detecting weight on the back seat with no weight on the front seats, and then doing FFT on the spectrum to detect peaks in the range of 0.1Hz to 1Hz.
How would race be determined? One could make jokes (reflectivity?) but it must involve telemetry with covert photos being taken. Reminds me of Tesla which has internal cameras and if you look inside the car (from outside, via a closed window) it detects your face and flashes a warning message on the LCD, saying (IIRC) that your photo has been taken.
But, seriously, you must assume that the manufacturers all have the means to update the firmware and thus have means to shut down the car. The security around that will be pretty good at the factory but an inside job will always work. Any scenario where you have OTA (over the air software updates) has this capability. It is well practiced with mobile phones but there the risk is purely commercial / hassle (dead phones). I am developing a product which will potentially have OTA and some of the angles are quite difficult to decide what to do.
Most dangerously, the mfg has the power to implement e.g. a speed limit. If the country passes a law on this, the mfg will implement it because they want to sell cars.
Most dangerously, the mfg has the power to implement e.g. a speed limit. If the country passes a law on this, the mfg will implement it because they want to sell cars.
Absolutely, information invariably leads to control. Perhaps even more dangerous is the potential for government to collect the data and use it as a basis for taxation based on whatever non-market ‘values’ it wishes to impose. Once we’re all driving cars that upload data on how we run our lives, it’s obvious that will be tempting.
I’ve been aware of the automotive data harvesting situation for a while and learned that it really started to kick in with non-EV manufacturers in 2019 or so. At least in the US and at least for now if you call the manufacturer and ask them firmly to turn it off, they will often do so after telling you all the reasons it is supposedly good for you (meaning them, of course). The dealers know nothing.
The automotive world is increasingly a manipulative trap in many other regards too. Another is BMW famously charging a monthly fee for allowing you to use the heated seats and other hardware that are already installed in the car you bought. That one was so offensive to US buyers they have recently discontinued the practice.
I will never get a car like this. My limit is where a manufacturer or anyone else can do things to the car while it’s in my ownership without asking or getting my consent. The car has a sim card, it stays right in the shop. Nope. Never.
Then again, I use google maps to drive around and avoid traffic jams. Any better really?
The moment you join the internet these days you are nothing but a subject they wish to exploit by bombarding you with personalized advertizing.
Am I right that any telemetry involves a regular payment?
A normal SIM card does, but you can have a SIM in an embedded form, AFAIK (not a physical SIM). Just a crypto certificate, held on a smartcard chip. But still the GSM network has to be paid…
It is however possible that if you buy a 30k+ car then the mfg will prepay the telemetry link for say 20 years.
Peter wrote:
Am I right that any telemetry involves a regular payment?
In my car it’s free for seven years, then you have to pay to the car manufacturer. How the network gets paid I don’t know.
Am I right that any telemetry involves a regular payment?
Yes, for data upload by the car manufacturer of which the owner is typically totally unaware, the manufacturer pays for it. It’s really quite amazingly invasive. If asked the dealer will claim it is a benefit because they can unlock your car remotely if you somehow lock yourself out.
More typically, the owner might find out about it if he takes the car in for dealer service and they tell him about his driving habits. The manufacturer’s immediate purpose in doing this is to deny warranty coverage when applicable due to ‘abuse’ as they define it, low cost market research on how the fleet is being operated, and to have proprietary data on the car if it is traded in, which increases factory dealer profit on used car sales.
As mentioned, with some difficulty you may be able to get them to turn it off. There may also be ways to disable the hardware on your car without negative effect.
The car has a sim card, it stays right in the shop. Nope. Never.
Me too, unless I make sure 100% it is disabled. There is always a way. The issue is just the time, annoyance and cost to maintain your property rights when under continuous bombardment. It’s really tiresome.
The disabling bit has been much discussed in the context of road pricing, based on GPS reception.
One can obviously disable GPS (long distance truck drivers use jammers to get around max driving time regs) and one can similarly jam GSM/2G/3G/4G/5G but the software can be done so that after it has not had any connection for x days etc, it disables vehicle features. We see this on some PC software; no connection, no function. Common on smartphones. And anyway if you disable telemetry for a month, it can store it and upload it in one go when you re-enable it.
The problem is that EVs contain so much software which needs updating that you won’t be disabling this, just to get privacy. You will want fixes, features, compatibility updates for charging points, etc. Just like with a phone!
The only thing which I’d like to fix on my 11 year old VW is bluetooth compatibility with my phone for satnav. It does work for phone calls but the satnav (google maps) does not couple. Various hacks like downgrading the BT stack don’t work. But this is trivia. On a new EV you will not be doing anything to disable the telemetry. Anyway, the warranty will depend on it
If they ever ban the mfg of petrol/diesel cars here, there will be a stampede to buy one. This is universally forecast. VW and Toyota/Honda are fine for 20 years. Longer if you are willing to pay for corrosion repairs.
OTOH a govt will offer a buyback, 2k or so, and a lot of people will be tempted by that.
