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Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments

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Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments

#41
I work in security and anti-fraud is the use case of last resort for terrible ideas.

When you finance a car, the vehicle becomes collateral for a loan, but it belongs to you. A technology like this means that the vehicle still belongs to Ford, which means if something goes wrong with it, or if you get sciatica from their shitty seats, you can class action sue them into oblivion.

The reason we have laws is so that people have recourse to principle, whereas when you implement something like this in hardware (a car), it's dystopian vigilantism. I realize the largest future growth market for cars is in countries without reliable legal systems, and whose evolving governments will not hamper themselves the way the US did by guaranteeing individual freedoms, but this is why discourse about tech is important, as for every innovation, there's 100 scumbags like this inventor looking to leverage it to exploit people.

Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments

#42

Thus making payment even less likely... I used to be a big proponent of alcohol/drug test to prevent car starting, ideally I imagined the system would be with an absolute guarantee (mandated) the information stays local (just a hardware switch preventing ignition or startup). But I'm sad to say I don't believe in any more, so much abuse to mark people as 'tries to drive while under the influence' or making you pay hi…

The biggest problem with an ignition interlock device today is that they're extremely unreliable. As implemented they are also very intrusive. Granted, they are currently implemented only as part of a punitive measure, so that behavior is partly intentional, but it would be unacceptable for universal adoption.

Probably be better to just make cars do realtime verification of license status before letting someone drive ... but that's only better by comparison; people who never drive drunk will bristle at the heavy regulation.

Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take my angry upvote. "My truck done left me and my cellphone said I'm broke"

"but I won't let that bother me like it does other folk. I'll stand out on the roadside, thumb up in the air, and wait for some good passer buy to show me that they care"

Aite I'm sold

Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments

#45
post #7

Uhm, it seems like the auto industry is still letting its imagination run away with self driving cars. I don't see how a patent like this can be granted if we still generally don't have working self-driving cars. Even Tesla is getting forced to admit that "Full Self Driving" isn't really full self driving.

The videos of self driving Tesla are available on Youtube. Those can be quite convincing.

Quite convincing after they edited out all the dangerous mistakes.

Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be my conspiracy brain acting up but "multi-ton machine without manual override" sends all the red flashing lights and klaxons off in my head. Political assassination via cyber attack/backdoor? ezpz, find a tree, accelerate into it, claim it was the car acting up. Bug in the software? Sorry you're dying today because they wanted to repossess cars easier, your life is less important than protecting capital. W…

Your thoughts are likely not very far fetched, but in this case, to the best of my knowledge, IC and LEOs seem to be more worried about stopping individual 'bad guys'( quotations, because I hate this term ) from causing damage with ICE machines hence solutions like mandated remote off switch and so on. On the political assassination front, wasn't there a story out about one such attempt or did I dream it?

There was a suspicious "political staffer dies from freak single car accident" events shortly after the first Jeep Cherokee was remotely taken control of. That's what stuck with me.

LEOs are also notoriously corrupt and difficult to keep tabs on. Imagine police harassment when they have the ability to remotely shut off your car.

Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take my angry upvote. "My truck done left me and my cellphone said I'm broke"

"but I won't let that bother me like it does other folk. I'll stand out on the roadside, thumb up in the air, and wait for some good passer buy to show me that they care"

Elon says I'm lazy. I think he's a joke. Folks told me to learn to code. That's great, but now I'm broke.

Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments

#49

I work in security and anti-fraud is the use case of last resort for terrible ideas. When you finance a car, the vehicle becomes collateral for a loan, but it belongs to you. A technology like this means that the vehicle still belongs to Ford, which means if something goes wrong with it, or if you get sciatica from their shitty seats, you can class action sue them into oblivion. The reason we have laws is so that peo…

Surely they would do this for leases instead of sales? Why would Ford want to do this for sales anyway, in the case of a sale, the financing company pays ford in full. The only exception would be if ford financed the car with its own financing arm. Incentives could be aligned to make leasing the preferred option for most people who are likely to miss payments then.

Also I’m not sure you’re correct about the ownership and the lawsuits. Sure you can sue anyone for anything but why would this be any different from me leasing a car from ford and the same thing happening? That doesn’t seem to have been an issue for automakers so far…

For the record, this sounds like a dystopian nightmare to me. I’m not in favor of the concept.

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