I’d love to buy an electric car, but I want one with no electronics, if that makes sense. Electric power train, but no screens, “driver aids” or other nonsense
You want the Slate then
The Bezos-mobile
Bezos has done a lot of horrible things, but making a $20k electric truck is not one of them.
I avoid shopping on Amazon unless absolutely necessary, maybe 2-3 times in the last ten years. I think his financial existence is an abomination. But if his truck company is the only manufacturer offering a $20k base vehicle then people have good reason to hand him money. Hopefully undercutting every other manufacturer by $10k+ will result in there being more cheap cars, and alternatives within that price range
don't worry, this is "casting the net" stage. The enshitification comes later.
No radio ability to connect to cell towers or WiFi would be nice. I think there's a brand doing this, but I forgot to read that article I saw about it just a day or two ago.
Edit: here it is: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/06/slate-says-its-electric-pickup-will-never-track-you/
No device should have more than two of these things.
I don’t see why a vehicle needs to connect to the internet at all. Or have a screen whatsoever. I don’t understand why a car can’t just be a thing with a gear shift and a fucking steering wheel that drives from point A to point B
We're being sold this idea of a car being like, a mobile family home or comfort space away from home. But the thing is, cars before 2015-ish were actually kinda comfy. Now they look and feel like robots. Kinda sickening. They all look so fucking ugly too every car is the same ugly round van/SUV shape now.
"Your insurance claim is denied, our algorithm says it's 70% confident your eyes were dilated in a way consistent with taking alcohol. Also, here's your court hearing date"
I always bring up the magic of Scotch's Magic Tape.
This tape lets most of the light through (useful for dynamic light features) while blurring the image as if out of focus or behind frosted glass. It is also mostly discrete unlike opaque tapes.
The car potentially can refuse to run because can't validate that the driver is not impaired to drive.
That's not the car's responsibility
I think the US government thinks it is, IIRC there's an upcoming regulation in 2027 for that
Yep, creepy, and point about the laptop camera is often invalid because depending on the model some laptops have a hardwired switch or cover for exactly this reason. Also usually have a light to tell you it's on, and aren't constantly in use.
And they don't pester you if you cover the camera either, and you have more control on whether they're online too.
anybody that doesn't think its an issue is an idiot
The car complains when the camera is covered. At a minimum that means making annoying sounds every time you drive anywhere, at worst the car doesn't let you drive. You can't just dismiss this, it's going to happen more and more, and they will be increasingly hostile to your workarounds.
Wasn't there some news a while ago that talked about how bad car companies handle user data?
Mozilla’s latest edition of *Privacy Not Included reveals how 25 major car brands collect and share deeply personal data, including sexual activity, facial expressions, and genetic and health information
[...]Says Jen Caltrider, *PNI Program Director: “Many people think of their car as a private space — somewhere to call your doctor, have a personal conversation with your kid on the way to school, cry your eyes out over a break-up, or drive places you might not want the world to know about. But that perception no longer matches reality. All new cars today are privacy nightmares on wheels that collect huge amounts of personal information."[...] (source)
Not sure if this was the one I was thinking about. There was also this revelation made by the German CCC (Chaos computer club, pretty famous) about Volkswagen and some leaked GPS data. Here is an English article about it. (There is also the German CCC video, but the English doesn't sound very good. It includes an interesting part where they show examples of how bad this GPS leak actually is. E.g. finding the cars of catering companies for important people.)
Criminals or spies could potentially use such data to create a detailed movement profile of the car owners. For foreign intelligence agencies, for example, it may be of interest to see whose cars are parked daily between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. near buildings belonging to the Bundesnachrichtendienst, Germany’s foreign intelligence service. Or those which are driven regularly to the U.S. Air Force base in Ramstein. The Cariad data provided such information.
Btw. Any person who in the year 2026 response to privacy concerns with "I have nothing to hide" is a certified moron and shouldn't be trusted with anything. They also have so little imagination that it should make everyone sad.
Cars collect data about you to sell them to insurance companies. There was a study by the mozilla foundation about this and they said that there is basicly no modern car that does not do that.
The only thing you can do to avoid them is buy an old car.
We got a modern BYD recently as a rental on a holiday that had this, it was really annoying. Anytime anything happened the car beeped, it was near constant different beeps - super distracting. Most of the things could be turned off, but had to be turned off each time the car was started, on a tablet buried in various menus.
The attention thing also wasn't working great with the driver wearing sunglasses, it'd randomly start complaining. It also complained when the driver would lean forward to get a better view around a corner or anything.
It was a very fancy car, but I'd definitely never choose a car with these features, even though some may probably be useful.
I'd also never trust one of these companies not to change the policy on what they can do with this camera in the future, at which point you'll have little to no choice about it. Or, to find out they messed up and now anyone can watch you in your car.
I'd go back to the dealership and complain, either ask for a refund or a way to be able to cover the camera, especially if they only disclosed it as you got the car.
This feature is mandatory in all new cars sold in the European Union since 2024
This car also comes with a ChatGPT based AI assistant which has a cursed Microsoft's Clippy vibe, so it watches, listens to everything. Why would anybody want that?
"what about the camera on your laptop"
God I hate these people. That camera has been covered by duct tape for years for very good reasons. A lot of them actually apply to a driver-facing camera in my car, coincidentally.
~~Btw OP, I think Renault has a contract with Palantir~~
You’re not being paranoid - that would be a hard “no” for me. I’d keep a clunker from the 70’s alive and drive that forever.
This is being touted for safety reasons, yet there are still no guidelines and headlight brightness, headlight height, hood height of pickup trucks, etc. Regulate the vehicle exterior for actual and immediate safety benefits before trying to float this privacy infringing shit.
Check the privacy laws in your country. If in Europe, you can have the services disconnected. Looks like a Renault so sometimes cars manufactured in the EU will come built in with the ability to turn off the feature.
Car data privacy is the worst there is today and will get much worse with timd. Mozilla foundation put out a report recently
This is creepy as hell. I liked the Renault 5 - until now. Fuck this shit. I wont pay a small fortune, just to enslave myself to a 1984-style digital panopticon. I am getting angry just by reading your story. Corporate greed is once again crossing the line, slowly shifting the overtone window. Everyone who is not concerned about this, is simply ignorant and/or borderline stupid.
If it was my car, I'd probably cover it. And if it then starts beeping, I'd maybe even locate the speaker and deactivate that one, too.
I wonder if it is even legal to sell you something like this without informing you prior to your purchase.
Fatigue detection is a real thing that doesn't use the type of AI that people think of when they hear that word today most often. It's not language based but instead it's able to recognize faces and posture, tell where your attention is focused, and recognize signs of fatigue like head drop, eyes closing, and attention drifting from the road.
It, along with other attention based driver safety features, are real and effective and can be done on device with a computer with less power than a modern cellphone.
It is, however, at least a little creepy. It's made a lot more so by it not being disclosed upfront with disclosures and full user awareness. It should be explained by both the website, the car manual, the salesperson and the car itself exactly what it's doing and where any video data is being sent. It's probably processing the video locally and at most sending telemetry about which driver just sat down and such, but 1) you might not want that 2) unless they actually tell you that you don't know.
It's not paranoia to want an explanation and appropriate assurances, or for it to be in your control. You don't need to assume it's the worst case for that to be true. It's probably a real safety feature with a couple of quality of life features taped on so people can see it do something, since you don't really see a passive safety feature. But without actual communication you don't actually know that.
It will be used against you at every opportunity.
I think it's unacceptable and indicative of this dangerous path we are headed down as whole. There's already been a few write ups on how cars are the most privacy disrespecting "devices" out there, which is wild considering we have smartphones.
With the driver facing camera we have no control over it also has complete access to our travel data, probably knows exactly who we are in the car with, records all our private conversations etc. etc.
It's so tiring to hear people defend this as if privacy is a thing of the past and anyone advocating it is being dramatic.
It's an EU decision. It will be coming to many more cars as it will be mandatory from July 2026 for all newly registered vehicles. Renault 5 is simply one of the first new cars to feature it.
According to the same law, it is illegal to use the system in a way that can identify the person, it may not save biometrics, and it must function in closed loop without sharing the data. It's looking for things like head nodding or looking away from the road for more than 3.5 seconds while driving over 50 km/h. The camera is likely using infrared lighting as it should also work at night.
Anyway. According to the manual, it can be disabled by double tapping a button on the steering wheel or through the touch screen menus, though it will default to being enabled everytime you start the car as per the legal requirement.
If you cover it with tape, wear a mask or drive somebody else's car in which you don't have a profile saved, it will simply use the last previous profile and show an icon in the dashboard as a warning that the function isn't working.
You have to log your profile into your car?? Fuck everything about that!
Wait till the 2027 gets the seat rectal probe to verify you by your large intestine. Also, they sell the data to health insurance providers.
"what about the camera on your laptop?"
My personal laptop does not have a camera, and my work laptop has a physical camera blocker.
It is very creepy. Especially if there is no official way to disable the camera, so that it does not complain about the camera being disabled.
It's creepy. And it may make me an asshole to say, but I'd never want an interior camera in the event of an accident. It makes the following court case so much more gray, since you now introduce the opportunity to say "they were on the phone, talking, listening to music, whatever" and shift what should be a clear cut case into something more.
It’s creepy even if it has a legitimate purpose. There’s a move to make this kind of tech mandatory in all cars, with the purported aim of stopping drunk driving. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/federal-surveillance-tech-becomes-mandatory-161321992.html
Log into your profile? On your car? Your car logs you in to a profile? What the fuck
All this would be fine if, and only if you actually owned your car and all the data in it. If you could assume no cell phone somewhere hidden away in the computer. If the data was encrypted with a key you had, not the dealer, not the police, just you.
But we all know that isn't the case. You might have a title to your car, and own almost nothing inside it. Everything is connected these days, which means someone is looking at that data and seeing dollar signs.
I don’t think you are paranoid. This technology is creepy as hell. Almost all cars are connected nowadays and send data back to the manufacturer’s server—visible or not. In the best case it’s just the service history, in the worst case live positions and more. Some cars stop working if the server is shut down *cough. Cameras equipped to unlock based on a face record biometric data. And honestly, would you trust your car manufacturer (!) to handle your biometric data?
I have a BYD Han, and the camera has a sliding cover, which has never been opened. Its crazy that you can't cover it without the car complaining.
Moz's landing page about car privacy.
Depends on the car ofc, but the worst ones not only send video from inside the car to the company, they send data from outside the car! Like people walking around and stuff.
Some of the recordings caught Tesla customers, opens new tab in embarrassing situations. One ex-employee described a video of a man approaching a vehicle completely naked. Also shared: crashes and road-rage incidents. One crash video in 2021 showed a Tesla driving at high speed in a residential area hitting a child riding a bike, according to another ex-employee. The child flew in one direction, the bike in another. The video spread around a Tesla office in San Mateo, California, via private one-on-one chats, “like wildfire,” the ex-employee said.
Other images were more mundane, such as pictures of dogs and funny road signs that employees made into memes by embellishing them with amusing captions or commentary, before posting them in private group chats.
“We could see inside people's garages and their private properties,” said another former employee. “Let's say that a Tesla customer had something in their garage that was distinctive, you know, people would post those kinds of things.”
Lots more troubling shit at the link. Tesla's probably close tot he worst, but most modern cars are like all the privacy clusterfuck of phones... but worse.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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