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They’ll never give a review like that because they need manufacturers to send them more cars to review.

My understanding is that they all got together and decided to raise rates across the board.

Used Vehicles became more valuable over the past few years as new vehicle production was issued halted in early 2020 and supply chain issues plagued manufacturers for a few years after that. Used car prices are just now starting to come down. I hardly ever saw cars for sale by owner that didn’t have over 200k miles on them and weren’t models plagued with major issues. People were still asking $5k for absolute junk. My advice over the past few years has been to buy a new car as it’s a much better value over any used car at the moment.

I bet you all the insurance companies are using a service that provides pricing via algorithms. In their opinion it’s not collusion, just math.

My completely uninformed guess is:

1. we all forgot how to drive like normal people during/after lockdowns and,
2. cars continue to get bigger and heavier, so accidents are more likely to result in total loss

It’d be cool if you could tap into the OBD2 dongle and find what its criteria is that denotes “rapid accelerations” or “hard braking” and them reprogram it to dampen that curve and never report more than maybe 5% less than what would trigger an acceleration or braking flag

It’s fine till you have an accident. Then your completely fucked.

Those deals, at least over here, are generally aimed at new drivers. I actually agree with them, to a level. It lets the insurance company rapidly sort the safe drivers from the idiots, and so discriminate on prices. It also trains new drivers to be safer. I remember how fearless I was when starting out. The quicker we get new drivers out of that mindset, the better.

I feel like fraud is a big risk for, what, less than $100/mo? You can do better.

They’re literally an insurance company. They have lawyers coming out of their ears.

Very true, I was focusing more on the story’s driver being “surprised” and “stunned” by the amount of data collected and that all that date didn’t convince an Insurance Company’s algorithm he was a driver worthy of paying them less than his current premium. I expect upwards of 90% of drivers would be stunned as well that they are not as good of a driver as they imagine and that “I’ve never having an accident” doesn’t carry as much weight with the algorithm as they might have hoped.

On some vehicles, you can apparently disable it.

Here’s what one guy found works on a 2023 Corolla, where it’s getting increasingly-more-of-a-pain-in-the-ass than in earlier models:

https://www.bitchute.com/video/epzioGDOdTeo/

Apparently, it used to be possible to just pull a fuse out of the user-accessible fuse panel in prior years, but that got moved to some internal-to-the-dash panel that’s hard to get at.

It also apparently disables the microphone (which you may or may not want disabled) and the front driver’s side speaker unless you also run wire leads bypassing the DCM.

I’d also add that I don’t know for sure what any other impact is. I’d imagine that it voids your warranty. I don’t know if the car manufacturer relies on this communication mechanism to push out firmware updates for the car, but if so, I suppose that one might not get firmware updates.

I also don’t know whether the vehicle maintains local logs, even if it’s not uploading them, so I’d guess that someone who can get physical access to the car might be able to get ahold of data that might have been sent to the manufacturer via the cell network. I don’t know whether part of the maintenance process might also involve uploading logged data to the manufacturer; I could imagine that being the case.

Apparently some older Hyundais disable themselves, because they can’t speak newer cell phone protocols, and those older cell towers are going offline, which causes the connectivity to be severed.

https://owners.hyundaiusa.com/us/en/resources/blue-link/2g-3g-wireless-service-update

EDIT: Note that even aside from the telemetry, one point that a number of people brought up when I was reading about this is that apparently car tire pressure systems also do surprisingly-long-range radio broadcasts (i.e. they really only need to go from the tire to the rest of the car, but can be picked up miles away) with apparently a unique ID, so while it’s not phoning logged data home, if someone has a radio listening for it, they can detect and log unique identifiers of cars within range. If you have enough people with receivers participating in a network (the way people have with AIS for ships and ADS-B for aircraft), then you can build a map of where vehicles travel, particularly if you can correlate signal strength across multiple receivers.

I’d imagine that you could cross-correlate any unique IDs being broadcast over the radio with license plate numbers and an image of the vehicle if you stick a camera somewhere aimed at a high-volume road, like an interstate highway. A single encounter probably isn’t enough to link license plates or the like – there will be multiple vehicles in broadcast range. However, once a vehicle has passed such readers twice, that’s probably enough information to uniquely identify the vehicle, since it’d be unlikely to have two different vehicles both in range of the receiver at the same time. Any additional encounters with just add confidence. I don’t think that it’d take a great many such readers to get a national database built up pretty quickly.

considers

I suppose that if you can correlate that with personal cell phone IMEIs – cell phones broadcast unique identifiers in the clear that are linked to the phone, not just to the SIM – that you could also do a pretty good job of determining who rides in a given vehicle, which is probably commercially-useful information.

The issue is the cellular modem built into most cars nowadays. It can vary in difficulty to disable or remove, with the added bonus of potentially taking other services that are attached to it such as Bluetooth. It fucking sucks. I don’t know more details than that.

So basically all modern cars. There are methods to rip it out. It can be really complicated or easy depending on the model. I think some dealerships also have their own box.

Push button transmission? It’s been done before.

Of course back then distracted driving was digging through the box of 8 track cassettes.

I was pissed that there was no aboiding getting an infotainment system in the car i bought last summer. 2015 Subaru Crosstrek has a sluggishly slow touchscreen that is a danger. Then i took a ride in my uncle’s 2022 Outback last year and it felt like a freaking slot machine at a casino. Every control ran through it and it was still disgustingly slow and sluggish.