I am not in the market to buy a new car, yet. But were I, my wife and I would be looking to EVs. When I entertain the hypothetical, I pause at my sense of the industry treating vehicles (all of them, seemingly, not just EVs) as an IoT appliance, tethered to the manufacturer one way or another, even if you don’t subscribe to extra services.
I believe the following should be rights:
- Purchase any new car and operate it without any dependency on “phoning home” for any reason.
- To be able to physically remove the component(s) of the car’s computer that allows it any connectivity to cellular, wifi, even GPS networks or any other methods of connecting to any other party.
- To apply software updates for free locally, as a customer, at least if they’d otherwise be delivered over the air for free, through a physical port.
- I think there needs to be some guarantee of continued software support, at least for security and bugs, for a reasonable estimate of the lifespan of the car.
- And I want to see right-to-repair legislation evolve to explicitly cover EVs to the extent practical—but aggressively. Maybe I can or can’t swap out the battery system myself, I don’t know. But there should still be reasonable self-service options guaranteed to owners.
Perhaps the consumer can leave the comms components in, as well (in order to use those functions for other purposes, or just to save themselves the trouble), and opt-out via software—but easy user-executed physical air gapping of a vehicle should be a right.
All of this for privacy, independence, sustainability and for security, especially when operating an EV past a manufacturer’s support window if it is otherwise safe.
I don’t think there’s a single EV on the market that voluntarily meets these privacy criteria. Am I wrong?
Who is working on this? Is there any draft legislation in Congress?