As the title says - I’m currently looking for an EV to replace our old gas-powered car. Do you guys know of any recent EV reviews - by the Mozilla foundation or others - regarding the privacy aspect of the cars?
My impression currently is that the problem has intensified, not lessened, since 2023. I’d love to be wrong though.
From personal experience, I can tell you the older Chevy Bolts (2017-2023) you can remove the fuse labeled “onstar” in the user manual and it should, hopefully, disable telemetry and tracking.
You’d be giving up some features though, like location based charging (where it automatically switches to charge up to a certain percentage at home).
Whatever car you’re looking at, you should search online “[year] [make and model] disable telemetry” and see if anyone else has already figured it out.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BoltEV/comments/1bhsqx0/my_experience_disabling_onstar_in_my_2023_bolt_euv/
Reddit seems to have quite a few people doing this for the bolt, I haven’t looked into other cars.
You also give up the compass and Bluetooth for some reason by doing that.
I followed the guide and can confirm it didn’t disable Bluetooth or the compass. The data line was capped using a 50 ohm terminator that was then wrapped in alternating layers of plastic and metal tape with to make a rudimentary Faraday cage. The GPS line was kept on so the compass works just fine.
This is not an EV review. It’s all cars.
You should assume that every brand of new car except Slate is collecting every piece of data they possibly can. Spend your time figuring out which ones can be disabled without major impact on functionality instead.
I wouldn’t be surprised if slate had a secret modem, tbh. It’s backed by Bezos, so I would assume the worst until someone not affiliated with the company can conclusively prove that they aren’t collecting driving/charging/location info.
Just pop out the headliner and unplug the data antenna under the sharkfin. Or, cover the sharkfin with metal foil duct sealing tape.
The car will work fine. Most KIA models allow you to opt out of data collection.
At some point, this will be a sales feature.
