They Know

The engine computer saving its RPM at the point of failure isn’t a huge deal IMO. First, it has to have that data to function anyway. Second, the manufacturer should be able to protect itself against being taken advantage of with invalid warranty claims. Third, over revving can be proven through the mechanical damage itself. Fourth saving this data is helpful in figuring out what’s wrong with an engine.

It’s all the other data that isn’t necessary to save that I am concerned about. Recording RPM, spark advance, fuel trim, etc doesn’t bother me.

New cars really do suck. You have a tough job finding the positive aspects about them. If one digs far enough, into a pie of poo, one can usually find a pony, I salute you for your ability to still make a living finding the pony. Most people still refuse to acknowledge how deep this totalitarian rabbit trail goes.

A few weeks ago, we lost ‘connectivity’ at our house in town. Six hours into the three day outage, I noticed my tenitus completely went away. In all, we have 7 devices in our house that constantly gather data about us. A modem, Roku, two laptops, a desktop, wifes smart phone, and earbuds, Our Tee Vees are from 02-04 so not counting them. I’m realizing my house is nothing more than a microwave, with doors and windows best left open. Whenever she and I want to have a private conversation we go out in the garden. Now I get why the Russians were such heavy drinkers.

I loved driving our old (’39 Chevy, IIRC) cattle truck, 4-speed, hi-lo axle. You can’t fake it. It would be absolutely impossible to downshift like that, because you had to double-clutch to get the revs to match.

Get rid of synchromesh. Let people get a real driving experience.

Harley got in a jam with EPA a couple years ago. Now, you change tunes in the ECU using a non approved (not Harley) tuner it’s instant warranty void if you bring it in for warranty service. “Well, I’ll just tune it back stock first!” Nope, the unit keeps a record of the renegade tune forever and rats you out once hooked up to the Harley mothership. I’m sure the car companies have the same protocols.

Yea…they know alright. They (the deep state and Biden/Harris) got to the mob boss head of the longshoreman’s union and let him know that he better tow the line, at least until the election is over. The mob boss was working under the assumption that this was a free country, and he can operate is extortion racket with no consequences. He didn’t realize that America is no longer a free country but a banana republic, and the mob boss has new bosses to report to, or else.

:Would you feel you were in your own home if your home were transmitting data about you and your doings within it to the contractor who built it? Or maybe the government?”

If you have any Google, Alexa, or Facebook product and that extends to Microsoft, that is exactly what is happening.

The Googlag is everywhere.
I bought a new Sony Walkman and found out it was a “Google enabled” device. It went right back. My mom got a new AC unit that came with a Nest thermostat. She only has DSL abd the cursed thing eats up so much bandwidth reporting to Google that she couldn’t even get her email.
I replaced it and the nest is going to the range with me tomorrow.

“ Would you feel you were in your own home if your home were transmitting data about you and your doings within it to the contractor who built it? Or maybe the government?” – Eric
You can be sure that Siri, Alexa, and all your “smart” devices are doing exactly that. I keep getting offers from the local utilities for ‘free’ smart thermostats, the catch being it’s only free if I hook it up to my WiFi, and then it will be under their control. No thanks, I have regular clock thermostats that work perfectly fine. People are intentionally bugging their own houses because they think it’s cool to say “hey Siri, turn on the tv to channel five” rather than push a button on the remote. That’s why I drink.

Here’s me not being connected in my daily driver old ratty musclecar:

https://ibb.co/31Jv2vN

All of those new car problems I read about here, I’ll never know!

Off topic but still related to the computer controlled auto issue.

A young fellow had a vehicle run away on him and he could not get it stopped or shut off:

https://www.inforum.com/news/minnesota/i-am-going-to-die-teen-in-runaway-vehicle-saved-by-crashing-into-minnesota-trooper-car

Eric, the car doesn’t need to be transmitting anything to Hyundai to snitch on the driver.

I’ve been hacking on modern ECU’s for years, on my own cars mostly, and this was going back to the 1990’s, anything that has electronic fuel injection. These ECU are generally manufactured by just one of a handful of companies, and they keep statistics on engine usage. For example, my Lotus, built in 2005, which is considered an analog car with no fancy systems, divides the RPM range into 10 buckets, and it keeps track of how many hours the engine has spent running in each bucket, for example, “50 hours at RPM between 5000 and 6000”. It also keeps track of the three highest RPM’s it’s ever seen, and my 11,000 RPM missed-shift is in there for all time. Luckily, no harm done. My Infiniti had these statistics, my wife’s BRZ keeps these statistics, a friends VW kept these stats. While I’ve found ways to read them out, I never found a way to change them since modern cryptography is hard to defeat.

I’m 100% with you, that cars are rolling spy devices these days, but basic engine usage statistics have been with us forever, specifically to catch warranty voiding behavior.

55 years ago I drove Studebaker Lark during my first year in college. I was revving the engine one day at the family home driveway, sheered the timing pin, the car’s engine quit.

It was the rev limiter, sheering the timing pin, I guess.

That angry cat was cussing up a hellish storm at Paul Krugman. One thing about it, the protester wasn’t smiling.

“What has Israel ever done for the United States?” asked John Mearsheimer.

The answer John spoke: Nothing.

I overrevved a yamaha fzr600 once, bad. Had just switched the shifting pattern from 1 down 5 up to reverse or 1 up 5 down, which was a racers trick to be able to upshift leaned over. You didn’t have to have your foot under the lever, which you couldn’t do at extreme lean, just push it down.
Anyway, was winning a race with some pressure from behind. Had a brain fart at redline, full power, and downshifted!!! You could see the puff of smoke come out to the pipe (video). I got passed at that moment, but regrouped and won it. lucky I didn’t get smashed from behind. No engine damage.

The question I have is did the kid know that over-revving the engine would kill it? Dropping from 5th to 1st didn’t kill his engine in GTA-5, so why would that happen IRL? It didn’t in Fast and Furious XIV either, so why would it blow up on his hot new Hyundai?

I know your point was more about the black box recorder than the incident itself. I work in an industry that lives for logging and keeping track of everything, so I guess I’m not too upset to know the machines are recording me. In this case though, I can’t fault Hyundai for checking the black box. Without knowing the boy, I can’t necessarily blame him either. No one taught him how to drive, or ingrained in him a sense of mechanical things. Likely because his assigned parent didn’t have that sense either.

Boys will be boys. Boys, without men, will be psychopaths and fools.

Back in 2019 I had an “uncontrolled landing” with my DJI Inspire 1 Pro. It lost link to the controller and initiated a return to home, as programmed, at an altitude too low to avoid the big rock it flew into on the way back to the launch point. Completely the fault of the pilot who should have verified RTH altitude as part of the preflight checklist. I managed to recover most of the airframe, which was sent off to DJI for repair. They checked the logs, flat out said it was not eligible for warranty work (I didn’t try to claim it was, just part of the boilerplate in the quote) and sent me a very expensive quote for repair. I took my lumps and cut a check. Lesson learned.

We can argue all day about customer service and warranty claims, and the merits of data loggers. But the fact is, people will make false claims every bit as often as companies will deny them. This is the world we live in. 200 years ago you could have someone vouch for you. If you carried a letter from someone well known in town, that was good as gold (as was your out of town bank’s money, since someone else trusted you). This was how commerce and travel were done back in the time before government issued credentials. If no one would vouch for you, you’d get the askance look from the shopkeeper or maybe even be denied service without hard currency. Reputations mattered.

But that was all replaced in the age of mass production and marketing. Now that natural human tendency to trust each other and not the outsider was manipulated for profit. Of course you can trust Oscar Meyer, they have that cute jingle we all know. And their products are packaged in clean modern plastic, not like that local butcher whose store looks old and tired and wraps up your order in paper! Why, you don’t even have to interact with Oscar, just grab what you want and move on! No awkward conversation when you’re not in the mood or anything.

And that leads to no one being trusted, because why should you try to keep your reputation intact if you aren’t interacting with anyone? It is completely normal to go about your day without ever speaking to anyone, conducting business as “self service” and automatic payment using cards (a form of that old voucher system) and living quite well. So when the big corporation does something stupid, like neglect to clean their production line for months, the Mighty Regulator! comes in to save the day for all of us. Except that the regulator is easily bought by the corporate interests, who sit on expert panels defining the regulations, so what are they really doing anyway?

Trust no one.

Cover your ass.

Read something similar where bmw denied a claim over money shifting ages ago, Ill post it in a reply later, coffee hasnt kicked in yet

As far as modded vehicles, right car’s dealerships are lenient with mods, brought my tuned Mustang and Bronco to them and they didnt really bat an eye, but ymmv, always ask the hypothetical “How would you feel if I modded it”. That, or diy for most jobs

For our Appalachian-American friends — best wishes from Alejandro M! ❤️

https://sinfest.xyz/btphp/comics/2024-10-04.jpg

I think there probably is something that could be done about cars transmitting data over the air. Like finding the device, or its antenna, and clipping a lead here or there. Or maybe a noise jamming device along side it. It might not be easy to figure out because, come to find out, automotive digital devices have insane amounts of built-in security. Not against someone hacking your car, but rather against you doing anything about it.

They have things like built-in encryption for the stored program code, data logs that are digitally signed, and tamper-proof interfaces that prevent reverse engineering.

But the fucken things are electric and transmit a signal. It is possible to get on the CAN bus or whatever bus they have and figure something out. It’s just really not easy and could potentially brick a car. That’s why clipping an antenna lead or surrounding it with something that would block the signal is a better choice.

I have some developer kits that can talk on the CAN bus. But it’s a huge learning curve. What we all need is not for some individual like me personally to figure this out, but rather for a wave of hackers, to chip away at the problem, bit by bit, until that nut is cracked.

It’s possible. It’s just really hard.

‘Except not buy one.‘ — eric

Before the vehicle telematics era, this statement would have been extreme heresy, resulting in confiscation of your typewriter. No car buff ever expressed such a sentiment in the Before Times. One argued the merits of GM vs Ford vs Mopar, or foreign exotics — but always in the context of which one constituted one’s object of desire.

But that’s all over. Gov-gimped, chip-encrusted, adipose spymobiles that imperiously hector their henpecked owners [‘eyes straight ahead, slacker!‘] now induce disgust and contempt. Choosing a new vehicle now resembles our hideous elections: which cynical, lying, child-molesting grifter will be the least destructive?

But as Eric points out, there’s another option: refuse to play. Compared to Cuba, where old beaters from six decades ago are still kept running, America has a large reservoir of pre-telematics, pre-Clownscreen, hydrocarbon-fueled vehicles. Most of these can be kept running indefinitely.

Half of vehicle manufacturers are likely to disappear in the next five years. Our job is to ease their passage to the corporate afterlife with a knife to the back. They abandoned us. Now we kick them to the curb and steal their wallets.

This time if you want me to come back, it’s up to you
But remember I won’t allow the things you used to do
You’re gonna have to toe the mark and walk the line
This time will be the last time

— Waylon Jennings, This Time

I have a neighbor with a late model Mustang. He will sit in the car & rev it (here’s a nutty thought, why don’t you drive it?) for no good reason. I told another neighbor were it not for the gd rev limiter, we’d all have a hearty chuckle at his expense. Can’t fix stupid.

BTW, @Eric, I’ve seen stories about Ford severely nitpicking battery claims from Mach-E and Lighnting owners, much as you predicted a while back.

I get the point Eric, but he revved a *Hyundai*.

My wife had a co-worker file for Bankruptcy for $30k in credit card debt on about that much annual income, but, less than a year later, the Hyundai dealer outside Tampa found someone to buy the paper so the pinhead could drive a new Tucson off the lot.

I didn’t ask about interest rate or length of loan, but my guess is that it would have made my Ford Credit lifer father spin in his grave.

This article touches quite a few issues. Totally agree on the underlying theme. Don’t want your data monitored? Then don’t buy a new car.

The problem with this Hyundai example is that what the owner trying to do (if story is true) is to immoral and fraudulent. This sort of immoral behavior has become rampant in society.

If the Hyundai owner has over-rev’d the engine with even a single botched downshift, then the engine damage is on him and he should man up and own the results.

The problem of course is that he would now like Hyundai to pay for his mistake & abuse.

In days gone by, this would have been much tougher for Hyundai to reject the warranty claim but as you say, data recording in both the engine ECU as well as by the vehicle electronic data recorder (EDR) is now common. Both for the very same reason – to protect the OEMs from those customers that lie to benefit themselves at the expense of the OEM.

Just think how the Audi unintended acceleration debacle of the 80s would have turned out had Audi had EDR’s to prove that drivers were pressing the gas pedal instead of the brake they claimed they were pressing.

Unfortunately people had a high tendency to lie to benefit themselves at the cost of others.

How many of us know someone that has purchased an item, used it for their intended purpose, then returned it for a refund? I regularly see hobbyist car guys on pubic forums bragging about having gone to Harbor Freight to purchase some needed specialty tool, using it successfully to do their repair, then returning the tool for a 100% refund. It’s appalling behavior and yet others congratulate them on the deceit.

Recently I’ve been seeing an increasing trend in the form of buying a new auto part from AutoZone (or any parts chain) only to find a used, non-functional, returned part in the box that someone fraudulently returned for a refund and the dope at the parts counter simply put back on the shelf without even looking in the box. This has happened to me, and it just recently happened again with a friend.

This is fraudulent behavior, and it is theft. It ends up costing all of us in the end via higher prices.

Recently