Honda has pledged to invest $64 billion to develop seven bespoke electric vehicles, which it plans to launch by 2030 on its way to selling only EVs and fuel-cell vehicles after 2040. However, there doesn’t seem to be a consensus within the company that there is enough demand for EVs, which is reflected in its limited selection of available battery-powered models.
This is true for Japan’s home market but also for North America, where Honda sells two vehicles (the Prologue and the Acura ZDX), both of which are made by General Motors on the Ultium platform. Whenever Honda’s top executives come out to speak about selling fully electric vehicles, it always sounds like a mixed message that, in part, reaffirms the brand’s commitment to electrification while also suggesting it’s not yet convinced this is the way.
In my case, he’s only half right:
I don’t want any new car at all. They’re all mobile surveillance platforms, snooping on everything their drivers do and reporting to the mothership, who in turn “monetizes” their data and does god know what else with it.
Well fuck that - be the surveillance machine equipped with an ICE or an electric motor. Big Data-riddled modern cars is the reason why I ride the bus.
Toyota does at least offer you the ability to completely disable data collection. Once their remote start/charge/climate control etc for free ran out, I disabled data collection and deleted the app off my phone.
You can physically disable it?
No but Toyota has a privacy website where you can opt out of all data collection for the vehicle. They warn you that you lose the ability to track the vehicle if it is stolen too, which sucks, but they won’t let you keep that and opt out of everything else so I just opted out of the entire package.
Dang. I’d never be able to trust logging in to a website in order to opt out of data collection on my own hardware. I hope they are honoring that.
Given that they won’t even track the car for theft purposes past that, I am fairly certain they are.
I suppose you could always just try and find the SIM card and remove it too…