12.19.21
Gemini version available ♊︎You Cannot Own a Car Anymore…
Summary: 5 months ago we wrote about privacy issues and safety issues associated with today’s (new) cars; it’s getting a lot worse before — if ever — it gets any better, as Louis Rossmann explains
Later today we’ll write about new attacks on car ownership, adding to issues we’ve already covered here before.
As a sort of teaser, consider the new video above, brought to our attention by numerous readers, which means people are increasingly concerned about such rapid erosion of “tech rights”…
The latest outrage concerns a stupid (not “smart”) fob. Rossmann asks, “is it contacting Toyota’s servers?” It basically “uses radio waves”, so Toyota adds no resources of its own; and yes, this “function will not work” if Toyota does not allow it, so it’s about “you not owning anything” (it’s even things inside the car “not being repairable”). It’s a grossly “overpriced service” and this can lead to “every company in every country” working like a price-fixing cartel against the ownership of cars. It became “more common in recent years” (“trial”, “premium”, “pay for subscription” etc.).
“Toyota, as it turns out, spent 4.5 million dollars on lobbying against people’s interests in this one particular domain.”Rossmann notes that Toyota doing this is a wake-up call because people don’t typically expect this kind of company to resort to this. He says, “imagine you buy a house” to be offered a free trial for control over how cold the refrigerator gets and you are eventually left on your own after 3 years, unable to do what you did before even though the functionality is already there. That’s very like DRM on printers and coffee machines. Artificial limitations are turned into an extra profit opportunity. That’s the only purpose of such schemes.
Toyota, as it turns out, spent 4.5 million dollars on lobbying against people’s interests in this one particular domain. The concern is — as Rossmann repeatedly stresses — unless people fight back, all car manufacturers will do this, leaving people with no other choice.
And “that’s how it works on both sides of the Atlantic,” an associate of ours has noted. “That’s one of the reason Louis has collected money to buy his own lobbyists for the Fight to Repair work.” █
ᶃ Gemini Space
This post is also available in 
Content is available under CC-BY-SA