261–270 of 497 posts
I am confused here... this is the car, that person buys and person owns. It is used to haul said user's butt from point A to point B. (a) like wtf? (b) what is it about these companies that want to commoditize everything?
A German philosopher had a lot to say about this a couple hundred years ago... I think his name was Karl.
Modern cars are such enshittified garbage. I was in a modern Toyota recently and every time you start it, the screen shows a "Guest mode activated" that you need to explicitly dismiss. The only way to disable this is to install some stupid Toyota app which I would never install. Then you dismiss the popup and the home screen is "Experience Drive Connect" which is some stupid Toyota subscription which I would never su…
Tell the dealer you won't buy unless they disable all that garbage. They may say they can't, and if they let you walk out maybe they really can't. Then ask them for a discount so you can replace the head unit with one that doesn't spy on you.
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Whoever came up with the idea that the car should beep loudly even close to the speed limit has clearly never driven a car. The best way to silence it is to constantly be over the speed limit or well below.
Probably made worse by the fact that _every_ VW brand car I’ve driven has read about 10% high on the speedometer. I think I’m going 100 kph, but timing using the km markers on the highway show I’m going about 90. When I talked to the dealers, they said that the speedometers only have to be accurate +/- 10% according to the SAE specifications. After DieselGate I assumed that the high reading was to game the fuel consu…
I believe the requirement is only one way - they can read high by a certain % but they cannot read low. Which makes sense. But that means in reality they will usually read a little high.
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That was just engineers engineering their way into creating Electrify America :)
I am pretty sure that was not the engineers, but someone higher up the food chain ordering people to do that. I might be wrong, but maybe I missed the obvious "/s" or "/i" here.
Clearly the engineering team didn't know ahead of time that Electrify America would be the end result of dieselgate. Had they known, perhaps they would have been more eager to do the engineering work though! haha
It was just a fun inside joke, since nobody could have assumed the fines would create Electrify America. Personally I'm glad Electrify America exists, though the way it happened was probably not the best path to get here.
EA even has successfully moved on from just being an org forced into existence and are actively trying to take care of customers and produce a good product now that they have some competition.
Isn't this for the same reason why you can't do banking on an unlocked bootloader phone? There's no way to verify the integrity of the system, and any malicious app can just grab your banking credentials or enable criminals to unlock and drive away with your car.
I get that Google doesn't want to be sued for failing to protect its users and indirect users of the mobile phones sold by other companies, but for advanced users there should be an option to update the signing keys used by the bootloader, so that you can unlock, flash your custom ROM, update keys, and relock bootloader. Such a phone should still be considered "trusted" by Google Integrity APIs. But currently there's no way to do this, so basically you don't really own your hardware.
I gave up on custom ROMs trying to extend my devices' lives and bought a Fairphone instead, so I have the assurance from the vendor that I will have software updates for a very long time.
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Unless, of course, said owner cared for the environment
Said owner cares about their experience above the environment. Sure people care about the environment, but it is always lower than all the other factors in their personal list of things they worry about. That is why so many rich fly private jets to environment conferences. People put Greenpeace and similar bumper stickers on their SUVs that never go off road and rarely have more than one person inside. They care abou…
I was lied to. Had I known that was the case there is a good chance I would have gone with a different car.
My car was recalled and reprogrammed and it no longer had the torque it had at first.
Of course now it’s clear that most if not all manufacturers were doing the same trick, they just weren’t caught at it.
The solution is not to try to shame or force Volkswagen to support GrapheneOS, the solution is to (legally) force them to allow the car to run a custom CarOS, for which the community can write their own app
That's a non-starter in most countries. Since the car software is tied into a number of important safety features and regulated controls, custom operating systems will never be supported. There are already massive problems with people miswiring head units to play videos while driving and updating their ECU to spew pollution into the air. You're not going to convince any significant number of people that it's a good i…
The solution is not to try to shame or force Volkswagen to support GrapheneOS, the solution is to (legally) force them to allow the car to run a custom CarOS, for which the community can write their own app
Could it be a right-to-repair issue? That seems to be the only legal wrench available for forcing automakers to open up access to anything.
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The emissions scandal is completely different, because in that case they were illicitly making the car work better for its owner.
Unless, of course, said owner cared for the environment
It wasn't "more CO2" grade, it was "more NOx" grade. This in urban settings will actually kill more people with respiratory problems.
VW's "clever hack" probably, statistically, killed people.