Technology

Imagine a car without cellular connectivity

It's nothing less than a war against property rights.

They are pushing software into cars because they see copyright, and more specifically the DMCA anti-circumvention clause, as an excuse to retain their control over your property after they sell it to you. Rentiership is 100% of their goal, and providing useful functionality is nothing but an afterthought at best.

"Subscriptions" to hardware you already own is entirely FRAUD and executives of companies that engage in it deserve long prison sentences.

aand this is why I won't buy a car made after 2010.

Some of these comments are the most elitist, contrarian bullshit I've ever heard.

This article is about the positives and negatives of car connectivity, not how cool you are because you choose to ride a bike. You're so cool because instead of choosing to not connect your phone to your car, you bought a rusty 07 Camry?

I'm not the biggest fan of the choices these companies are making either, but if your 1997 Mazda 929 is a personality trait, it's not much different from the ding dong who bought the Ram 3500 to showcase his peanut balls.

Sadly yes and they’re mainly taking the worst aspects. Normal built in features like heated seats as subscriptions, dropping smartphone integration for their own far inferior dogshit UI and features, and so on.

I don't currently drive since I live in a city with great public transit but if i was forced to get a car it wouldn't be made after 2006. I like buttons and don't want to spend $400 replacing my rear view mirror because its linked to my touch screen for no damn reason

The sad thing is 'smartphone on wheels' is a slur.

Smartphones don't have to be soulless and uniform and enshittified and subscription based and completely inaccessible and straight up anti-consumer/designed to fail, but here we are.

I really hope Slate takes off though (and they make a nimble hatchback for their next chassis). It feels like the antithesis of all this.

If the state of open source phones are anything to judge by, we will have open source cars at some point, except the foot brake isn’t working yet, so you’ll have to use the hand brake for now. Cars and phones both take a lot of resources to develop, and maybe you’ll be able to “de-Stellantis” your car at some point instead of going fully open source, but judging by the recent steps Google has taken to weaken de-Googling, I’m not sure how long that would last either.

If they are, would that make old cars giant feature phones on wheels?

Ads between gear changes in 3…2…1…

What becoming?

It has wheels so the computer doesn't touch the ground you know.

Giant Printer on wheels.

the thrill of mechanical mastery

I remember people in the 80s/90s complaining that those pieces of shit were broken all the time. Not anymore IMHO. There was only thrill for a few car enthusiasts.

Bill Burr calls it "driving an iPad"

It'll be interesting to see how Slate does, if it makes it to production.

My car is a 2023 and I pretty much by-pass all the integrated tech and use apple Car Play.

Watching people whine about tech in cars has always been comical to me. The first time I heard it was in the 80s and how cruise control was going to make cars unusable eventually.

the automobile has represented freedom

That's a part I never understood.

Cara are fucking expensive, they're literally money drains. Unless you have that much money, you ainns having a car.

In Europe, bot having a car generally nis perfectly fine, you still can go everywhere easily as that place hasn't been turned into a cars-only paradise

In the US, and countries that modelled themselves after it, you're not going anywhere without a car. Public transit it shit at best and in many places completely absent. Want to try a bicycle? Good luck, you gotta mix in with the murder cars.

Cars do not represent freedom, they're the opposite