… a Ford patent application titled “Systems and Methods to Repossess a Vehicle” was published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Feb. 23, although it was submitted to the agency Aug. 20, 2021.
The document describes using vehicles’ built-in data connections to remotely disable “a functionality of one or more components of the vehicle,” which would serve as warnings if the owner has missed car payments.
Now is the time set ur self with alternative means of transportation; bus, trains and bikes. If you’re traveling use cabs/taxis.
How is this patentable? It’s the most obvious thing ever. I saw people talking about it half a decade ago.
Time to start chaining the frame to a tree.
This kind of crazy shit is why my car is manual and has no connectivity except for an FM radio and an OBD port. Also, my other car is bikes.
Anyone remember Stelantis making cars that play you God damned ads when you stop? Yeah…
It’s the beeping for me. The goddamned infernal, unstoppable beeping.
Come to a stop sign? Beep. Pulling into an intersection? Beep. Backing up? Lots of beeps. A car is next to you in the other lane? Beep. You turned on your blinker? Beep beep beep beep. You changed lanes? Beep. Going above the speed limit? Beep. The car saw a speed limit sign? Beep. You adjusted some setting? Beep.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. All goddamn day long.
Maybe you can disable some of it, but only temporarily, only for one drive. The next time you start the car again, it will go back to beeping, and it’s not easy to disable, either – it requires digging deep into arcane, non-user-friendly menus. I will never own a ‘modern’ car until there’s a way to permanently disable all this fucking beeping.
Damn, that’s a patent?
It shouldn’t be but if this makes it harder for other companies to do this, it would be kinda funny lol
That would be funny, but realistically this just determines who makes money from licensing the design to everyone else. Assuming the patent isn’t successfully challenged.
Exactly what I was thinking.
I’m not driving anything made after 2010 for the rest of my life, if I can manage it.
We need to break the integration between hardware and software. If a machine can run software, then the software must be owner-auditable and owner-replaceable. If it’s not, then whoever owns the software will own the hardware forever.
We also need safe, reliable, standard software for machines, and we need laws that enforce that machines be compatible with standard software before they can be sold.
It’s a tall order, but I think the only other option is to continue down the path of hardware with corporate-dictated expiration dates and built-in surveillance.
Yeah that makes sense
Make this shit the way it works please
Working on it. Part of the process is talking about it, refining ideas and building a coalition. It’s going to take the combined efforts of software nerds, hardware nerds, econ nerds, and policy / regulatory nerds to get something like this to succeed, and it’s going to take a sustained effort over years.
It also requires the destruction or at least a severe diminishment of the current global technofascist oligopolarchy so it doesn’t get co-opted as a tool for the ruling class, so… yeah, it’ll take a while. But I think it’s worth doing.
That’s not going to happen unless someone important dies because of it.
WIth the terrible safety record of cars, that may be more likely than you think.
Neither am I, but remember that that’s only a workaround, not a solution. The only actual solution to this shit is political.
That’s not really the only solution. It’s just the least violent solution.
Even if something is violent, that doesn’t make it stop being political.
Learning from Sony I see. You don’t own what you buy. It’s just an extended rental. Remember when this (below) was a joke a decade ago? Feels inevitable now. You’ll have to pay per passenger before you can start your ignition because your rental purchase only included your self, not your passengers. Subscribe now with my code FordSucksUDry and you’ll get 1 free passenger with each month.
I would normally agree with you. However, in this particular described use case, ford is saying they’ll disable it if you fail to meet your payme plan (or, in other words, you hadn’t actually finished buying the vehicle, so technically, it’s not yours). That said. They need to fuck off with this. They can come physically repo like a normal lender.
Oops! Our bad, you may continue driving down the 5 freeway! Thanks!
Jim Farley has to go.
I’m in the middle of driving a 2026 rental car for two weeks and it has a huge screen for maps, lane keep, adaptive cruise and all that. I hate the screen but like the other new features. The car still runs when it doesn’t have cell service. I wonder if I could just open the dash, sever a connection for the SIM card and it still all work or if I would have to pass some voltage through where the sim is supposed to be to keep the ECU from detecting a fault? I can find wiring diagrams online but they don’t list anything that seems gps or cellular sounding.
It may be as simple as pulling a fuse.
Doesn’t look like it on the fuse box diagram or on the connector pin out. That was what I was hoping for
I would imagine the exact fuse would be hidden from true view, since they wouldn’t want you to easily disable it. Google might help.
The silver lining to never learning to drive is that I don’t have to deal with this nonsense.
Plot twist: the tech has now been applied to bicycles.
Scooter superiority strikes again.
