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.

Imagine a car without cellular connectivity

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.

Yes, and car manufacturers are becoming SaaS vendors

Yes it’s why China was able to leapfrog and become a EV manufacturing giant. They were never able to compete in the traditional ICE vehicle market with the Europeans, Japanese and Americans. Since building an internal combustion engine that complies with the regulation, is fuel efficient and fast is really difficult for them since they lack the century of experience that the other manufacturers have. An electric engine is much less complex and since China has decades of experience building batteries, electronics and software, because they make the smartphones for almost every smartphone brand in the world, they were able to set up shop and catch up to foreign competitors very quickly in the EV market.

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.

Cars have been giant ~~smartphones~~ {tracking and data collection gold mines} for years now

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

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

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.

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.

Ads between gear changes in 3…2…1…

They've been. Demand your privacy back

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

My radio doesn't even have a screen 😅

The only computer in my car is the radio, and that stays off most of the time. I'm honestly thrilled to not have so much tech in the car. Its nice to be able to fix nearly anything with some pliers, a multi-meter, and an adjustable spanner.

Software enables new revenue streams. Manufacturers can lock out features and force people to pay subscriptions. The industry wants to normalize that so they get bigger margins and a source of revenue that extends long after the initial sale. Motor vehicle as a service.

I like controls that don't distract from driving. Computers without any internet connection aren't a problem. I don't mind all the buttons and switches being connected to a micro-controller. It saves a lot of wiring and complexity. While I don't like screens I can see how they are useful for some people. Ideally you can use a vehicle offline and with the screens off.

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

What becoming?

Shit headline. "No" is the answer. Let'smoved on.

Bill Burr calls it "driving an iPad"

Combining two of the things I most hate. Makes sense.

My car is basically an accessory that turns my phone into a car, yes.

Giant Printer on wheels.