I’ve never seen a car like this. Mine was made in 2021 though so I must have caught the last ship car out lol. What kind of things do cars even use the internet for? I’m struggling to imagine it

What car is it?

I don’t want to dox myself, sorry

What? 🤣

If you know someone’s rough location, you can narrow it down a lot more if you know their car details. Especially if you get right down to exact make model year and colour. How many of your neighbours drive the exact same car as you?

Dude was just asking type of car, like “Toyota Corolla”, “Porsche Taycan” or whatever, not the VIN number.

I’m not obligated to answer

That is a fact, and I can respect that. I was just pointing out the reaction to a non-invasive question as if it was actually invasive.

Remote start, lock/unlock doors, HVAC, windows, and alarm for basics.

That doesn’t need the internet though right? Like a button on your key fob would achieve the same effect?

It’s done with your phone without line of sight or proximity of your car. The cars with built in security cameras, you can also remote view as well. I don’t know of any fob with a TV screen on it.

I have two cars made after 2020. Both have a phone app where you can set the internal climate settings in the car. You wouldn’t practically be able to do that from a keyfob.

Both also allow remote starting from the phone, with a setting for how long to let the car run before it turns off again. From a keyfob it’s normally set to 5 minutes with no option to change it.

Both are quality of life features that aren’t really required, but I do use them pretty regularly. If the internet stopped working on either car, they’d act just like any older car that didn’t have those features.

My car has a timer to set the cabin at a given temperature by a given time, do you know if your car has a function like that?

That’s not the same, though. I don’t necessarily know what time I’m going to be done eating dinner when I’m dining out. I can start the car from my phone while I’m waiting for the check, though, even if it’s a block away.

I didn’t think of that but… I dont go out to eat much anymore.

nah, pretty simple. set the preferred settings in the menu in the vehicle, then have a fob button to activate it. flash the lights to signal acknowledgement, just like locking and unlocking.

although maybe don’t actually flash the lights, since everything is stupidly over bright LED now and it’s rude af to be using those unnecessarily

Wow a whole app just for your car? That’s pretty fancy. I don’t see the appeal personally, but going by the vote ratio I must be in the minority. I like my stuff to be simple

All things that have worked just fine on cars for like at least a decade before the internet was ever invented. You are describing the exact functions of a key fob. They can even open the truck without the Internet!

I’ve never seen a fob be able to set climate controls. Either way, I’d rather control my own cloud for the car through home assistant

That’s exactly what I use remote start for. Just leave your car set to 68 or whatever and then when you remote start it will come up or down to temp. Even on my cheapass Chevy that’s 10 years old I can remote start it (including the HVAC) and also hold the “unlock” to start the defroster. Now I can’t actually change the temp the system is set at without getting in the car, thats true, but that’s a real edge case for me when I can just leave it set at room temp pretty much year round. Even the seats and steering wheel will heat up if I left that on beforehand. But maybe you do have a real need to tweak the temp and A/C values on the daily where you live, rather than just have the car resume where you left it at, I wouldn’t know.

Some high end models of years and decades past had a fob with a little lcd display that acted as a remote for the heating and cooling.

The closest I know of is some VWs and Hondas allow certain click patterns to do things like roll down all the windows or open sunroofs maybe.

Accords and Passats I think maybe Jettas have done it for decades.

Same for remote start. Which my 10 y/o Subaru does with a fob and as long as I set the heat to the right settings before getting out, works a treat on subzero mornings.

They make it go through an app and a cloud service on purpose these days so they have an excuse to upsell you on a subscription.

Not all brands sell these features as a subscription.

I chased this up with Ford over my car. They said we get them for free for the life of the vehicle, and as long as the 4g it needs to work exists. That’s got atleast 10 to 20 years left in it.

Some don’t sell them as a feature immediately. I think Toyota has an 3-10 year ‘free trial’ for some of their services. So one day your decade old car will just behave differently unless you start paying for the subscription.

Crap like this makes me want nothing to do with service connected vehicles at all. I don’t want to have to dig into all the software policies and durations for every brand I might be interested in a model of. You absolutely can’t trust what a salesman says at the dealer. I’ve shown them in writing that what they just told me was a flat out lie on multiple occasions.

The vehicles in my garage are currently 10-57 years old. People replace vehicles far too frequently.

Why would you buy anything that requires and app, let alone a car? I haven’t bought a new car in a while, but if it requires and app, I’m not buying it. I bought a pergola, and originally they said I could use an app to turn the lights on. But I made them install a switch instead. Maybe consider unlinking your life for important/expensive purchases?

Because if literally every new car on the market is doing it, you don’t have much of a choice.

(Okay, sure, you could resolve to drive old cars forever – and that’s what I do – but let’s not pretend that’s possible for everyone. Even if people were willing and able to accept the maintenance/reliability/safety tradeoffs, which many are not, there simply aren’t enough old cars for everybody to drive one.)

There are a lot of 2026 cars that don’t require a phone app. They may have other shitty internet connectivity features, but they dont’ require an app.

Off topic, but I noticed your username…China Mieville fan by chance?

Beetle fan hahaha. Maybe I had just watched The Mummy or something before picking that one years and years ago

Oh wow I haven’t seen that movie in a while.

Well go revisit that , it is peak 90s overblown comedy action schlock, which is objectively the best genre of movie lol, and I’ll go read Perdido Street Station which sounds dope.

That’s a good starting point. Mr. Mieville’s works are weird amd dark but well written.

So true! It’s been a while since I’ve read any of his stuff. The last book of his that I read was The City & the City. Weird and fun and interesting all wrapped up together.

The 1999 cinematic masterpiece starring Rachel Weisz and Brendan Fraser?

Good flick.

None of that shit needs the Internet.

keeping the navigation database up to date is one. no way to update maps in my Taycan without paying $27 a month for Porsche Connect, which I have never paid.

and I dislike relying on Android Auto given the surveillance inherent in enabling it. it’d be nice to not have fucking subscription navigation maintenance

Not sure why you think Google would exploit your navigation data but Porsche wouldn’t. I guarantee both are finding ways to make a profit by bundling and selling the enormous amounts of data users are feeding back to them by using their systems.

I’m not saying I trust Porsche at ALL with my data. Far from it. In fact I at least trust Google to have better software engineering standards, even if their software is inherently surveillance evil bullshit.

But I haven’t been able to confirm that Porsche actually DOES log and exfiltrate location or navigation data. Certainly not in my Lexis Nexus report, and there’s been nothing I’ve seen reported about them when a bunch of other automakers have been called out for selling surveillance access.

What I do know is that Google is confirmed to be doing so. Unless I’ve missed some reporting or leak, I can’t confirm that Porsche is collecting, exfiltrating from my car without an active data plan, and selling GPS and nav routing data from it.

Oh for sure, I just meant for those people that do subscribe to Porsche Connect, Porsche is very probably finding some way to monetize all that sweet sweet location and navigation data. I feel like any car that generates telemetry data and has a data connection to the manufacturer, those companies are packaging up and selling off that data to someone. But that’s really just speculation on my part.

Problem is, even tho I don’t subscribe, the data connection is still there, and it’s still used to deliver some OTA updates, and a recall on the battery involves some remote monitoring that, so even tho I don’t subscribe I still don’t feel entirely safe from being surveilled.

I’ve thought a bunch about seeing if I can just pull a fuse and kill connectivity without killing anything else, but the battery recall thing is reason enough to avoid that for the time being. Besides, Flock (and other) surveillance cameras popping up everywhere are such a bigger problem anyways that it kinda kills my motivation to bother

I was mentioning this issue with my weird little car in another thread.

My car is old enough that it uses a 3g radio to connect to the internet so that things like the NissanConnect app will work. I don’t know how many 3g towers there are, but the app functionality definitely doesn’t work. The rest of the car works fine, all the accessories work, but the app doesn’t.

The car is a 2018, which i think is before the push for subscription heated seats.

As a side note, heated seats suck, I don’t get the appeal. It makes me feel like I’m wetting myself.

I’ve no clue if I will like them or not. This car I have now is the first I’ve had with heated seats and steering wheel, I’ve only turned them on to see if they work, because every day since I bought the car has been over 90°F/32°C.

Ooh a heated wheel sounds so good in a cold climate

I have a motorcycle with heated grips, im hoping the car’s wheel is just as nice.

Do you not have harsh winters? I don’t miss them that much in the American pacific northwest (mild 4 seasons climate) outside of a few weeks a year, but when I lived in the American Midwest where the climate is harsher in both directions I really missed having seat warmers when it was below -5C regularly and sometimes going below -20C

It gets down to 4°C sometimes where I live, so not that harsh comparatively. I’ve experienced -5°C when traveling and it’s a whole different thing, my Australian ass was not equipped for that environment lol. Let alone -20, I’d probably just die. But above 0 it feels like good pants are probably good enough.

Honestly the bigger problem here is the opposite; on a 40°C day the seats and steering wheel become lava. I keep gloves in the car just to not burn myself in summer. I wouldn’t mind “cooled” seats and steering wheel instead of heated, but that sounds harder to pull off somehow.

It’s not the first tone deaf car feature sold in Australia, though. The worst are the holes in the ceiling to let the sun in. Free skin cancer for everyone!

Yeah, 40C sounds just absolutely awful, I’d much rather put up with -20C… and only a little bit because several cars have had air conditioners die on me. But yeah if it’s above 0 seat warmers can be a bit luxurious, but aren’t worth adding.

I think people who haven’t lived in north central/east North America can really underestimate how brutal the winters get there. Not like I can judge, I only know how bad y’all’s summers are because of the natural disasters relating to it.

Seat coolers are a thing these days! They use peltier coolers, which are solid state but worse than the refrigeration cycle. It’s still luxury, but it’s now “luxury trim on a prius” luxury as opposed to only in luxury cars.

But yeah, the major car brands being based in the US (largely in the aforementioned midwest), Germany, Japan, and South Korea really doesn’t do favors to folks from warmer climates, and it’s easy for the world to forget about your UV issues.

To add, my vehicle (2011) has its date display (as in the date & time) no longer accurate because it’s somehow integrated with the GPS, which has since stopped updating the date, and cannot be set manually. I now keep a little clock in my car that has the date on it to make up for the loss. It’s not that big of a deal compared to what others have mentioned, but it was still a shock to me when I found it.

Wow that sucks… in my car the time is off by an hour half the year because I never bother to update it for daylight savings. I assume it keeps a timer running somewhere to keep it on track

I’d be out of my mind, too, if the time was off. Luckily, I can set the time. It’s just the date that’s fully auto / out of my hands.

Honestly I barely look at the car time. I usually use Apple drive or Android Auto

Not to rub salt in the wound, but the GPS signals are hitting the car’s GPS antenna unless you’ve disconnected that wire, pulled the fuse to the receiver, or only drive inside hardened RF shielded bunkers. When I was futzing with a little GPS breadboard module the time is what I looked for first, because if you’ve got that time signal from GPS then you know the thing is working. (PEDANTIC EDIT: The signals will hit the antenna if you’re outside unless you’ve shielded them somehow, even if you disconnect the wire.)

You could use GPS signals to synchronize clocks across the entire planet to within a microsecond while your car could be used to prop a stick up to make a sundial.

I’m going to wager there’s something else going on there. If you have a working GPS receiver, a working display (you said you did), a working “clock” that counts seconds and can give something time-like to the display to show (seems like you do), then a switch might be flipped in software and you have a data point about why GNU does what they do.

Thank you for your input. That might be a bit beyond me at this point, but I’ll keep it in mind.

I was told it has something to do with Microsoft SYNC / GPS. There were some forum posts, too, about it but nothing that lead to a fix. I may try to update the system again in the future (it’s been several years since the last), but my understanding is that it’s not a fix on my end or one that can be done at all.

The date actually reset back to probably the earliest date it had and is continuing on from there. Fun… Lol. Again, thanks for your concern!

Thank you for your input.

No problem. Hope I helped.

I do have a followup question. Will the car’s navigation/display work? As in does it know your position? If you’re able to have it give your directions then that’s enough for a “yes.” The reason why I ask is if that’s the case, then the GPS system is working, handing data off to the infotainment system saying “here’s your position and the time of day,” and your infotainment system is saying “thanks for that position but the time is for suckers.”

Yep. Nav works just fine (though the maps are a little out of date in some areas). It’s just the date that won’t set itself anymore. The date and time display are separate from the nav screen, for what that’s worth.

Then here’s the bright side: in any emergency you wouldn’t have to cut up your car and fashion it into a sextant to know where you are!

Joking aside, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t fix something like that. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that it’s working fine for them for data gathering purposes:

• cnbc.com/…/ford-we-can-use-gps-to-track-your-car-…

I guess I don’t understand what design decisions led to a clock that can’t be adjusted manually by a user, and won’t update from a working GPS receiver. They’re the experts.

Other sources like wikipedia/youtube have GPS covered better than I can explain it, but here’s something maybe a little different:

• www.rfwireless-world.com/…/gps-nmea-sentences
• learn.adafruit.com/…/overview

Thanks for following up. I appreciate all your interest (and the links)!! I’ve put it on the back burner for now, but I hope to look at it again sometime.

GPS, telematics(the driving data your car collects and sends back to the automotive company who built it), over the air updates, some SOS style features like OnStar, maybe satellite radio.

Edit: Maybe apps, and stuff like updates to the onboard owners manual (because some cars don’t come with a paper one anymore). Oh. And using your phone as a key.

Sounds like I’m not missing much lol. I just use my phone for that stuff

You’re getting downvoted, but I’m in the exact same position. Car made in 2021, no connectivity at all. I cannot start it remotely - why would you do that? Is it really more convenient than turning a key or pressing a button once seated? I guess people really do like it, I just find it hard to imagine.

Starting the climate control from a distance sounds comfortable, the first few moments of driving can be too hot or cold.

I don’t have a built-in GPS, but if there was one I don’t see a benefit of using my phone to control it.

Windows? What?

Yeah it seems strange to me, but it must be popular for some people.

People here often assume I’m being disingenuous or acting in bad faith, I’m not sure what causes that to happen though. Maybe it’s the way I type?

Posted 38 seconds ago and already downvoted. You might have a downvoting bot following you.

I remove my own default upvote from my comments because I’m a weirdo. Maybe that contributes? People see it’s already at 0 votes and join in?

Edit: in my client I can see both up and down votes separately. So in this case it’s a controversial post with currently equal up and down votes

I am so going to follow your weird moving forward. Didn’t even know I could do that. I’ll downvote this one manually now and go search for that setting.

Edit: that will teach me not to get on Lemmy before having coffee. My brain thought that was a setting in Voyager. Thanks for this anyway, I’m going to (try to) remember that until it becomes muscle memory.

You start it remotely if you don’t have a preheater. Not that idling is great for a car engine, but at least you’ll have clear windows by the time you get in the car.

In the summer you can use it to have a cold car to sit into.

Remote climate control doesn’t work on ICE vehicles without Remote start or auxiliary preheater.

Remote start, even if from the FOB, is a life saver where I live. Leaving the car out on a 90⁰ sunbath and just getting in the car is pure torture.

I got a used 22 reg hybrid last year. It’s never had to connect to the internet.

Like the person I responded to who thought needing an app to find a charging station was an improvement over just having them all over like gas stations.