My current car is old. I had a lot of repairs done on it recently. If I get a new car, I don’t want features. Lane assist, backup camera, DUI Camera, telemetry, auto breaking or other frankly silly features. Call me grumpy, but I find modern cars very distracting.
Can I ask a dealership to disable these at purchase? Is there a car that works best for being private besides just older cars?
I drive very little in a year. No, I can’t ride a bike.
Can you pay someone to ride a bike while you sit comfortably in a little covered wagon behind the bike?
Too hilly here. I wish I could ride a bike.
Looked into Ebikes at all? I’ve seen ppl, even some old ppl using ebikes in hilly areas. They really help with hills.
Not trying to say it can replace a car. For most ppl it can’t replace a car, so you still have to figure out the car issues. But it can sometimes be used instead for many trips. Cheaper to run, better for the environment, and lowers repair costs for the car over time. Also the car will last longer so you don’t have to worry as much about whatever new privacy hell exists years later.
I have.
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I have poor balance. I don’t even know how to ride a bike.
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I live in a crime filled city. It will get stolen.
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The city is essentially walled around by non-bike friendly highways. So, I still need a car for things unfortunately.
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I have disabled all kinds of telemetry and radio on many different kinds of cars.
You cannot buy a new car without it.
Your best bet if you’re concerned is to buy an 0s model. Contrary to popular belief, this all became inescapable a little over ten years ago. 0s models with systems like onstar are still acceptable because the 2g cell networks they use to operate simply don’t exist and the system itself was relatively easy to disable and we’ll documented in cases where it’s not easy.
Reply with your needs and habits and I’ll point you at the right model.
You are awesome. I drive about 5000 miles a year. I’m tall. Not sure if a Miata would work. I want something reliable and fixable. I had an older car (late 80s) that always broke and it was hard to find parts. I live in an area that gets snow. I also dislike leather interiors.
Xv 20,30, and the first half of 40 Camrys were made in a plant in Alabama instead of Japan and have factory body coating that helps them resist the salt.
The corollas are good too, but you lose headroom and a lot of other comfort features.
The domestic production is a huge plus because jdm vehicles are basically all built for the big ten year inspection that country requires by law; which is designed to fail cars and get them off the road to juice consumption. Export vehicles built in the same places as jdm tend to have “it wasn’t meant to be around that long” problems. Nissans are famous for this. Perfect beautiful car for exactly 12 years.
You probably don’t need a 4wd/awd. If you live down a dirt road (below the highway, as in you travel downhill on a dirt road to get home) or literally don’t know how to drive then you may need that feature.
Another fantastic option, classic car guy recommendation, first or second gen Honda fit. Roomy, reliable, performant. More spartan than a Camry, but they’re all hatchbacks. They’re getting expensiver now that people have caught on.
Small trucks: mid 90s to about 2012 tacomas and manual transmission 4cyl rangers unless you’re willing to put the work in to really know exactly which v6 you have because ford sold one that was basically perfect alongside one from the 70s that had three timing chains.
Full size pickups or suvs: gmt-800 up through the cateyes. The dodges are all falling apart from abuse and that time period was fords wandering in the wilderness years when it comes to the f150. You can’t afford the Toyotas.
Since you don’t drive much, make sure to tell your mechanic and actually get your oil changed at that 6 month mark instead of waiting the whole year.
I was eyeing up the fit. Those things have a deceptive amount of storage space. Thank you for the recommendations!
I just had a similar conversation recently… Looks like 3G is also dead, at least in US, so some cars from 2010s also can’t connect to the network anymore. However, depending on make and model, this “problem” may have been mitigated during a routine dealership service by upgrading hardware or software… Maybe it’s worth researching which models never got the “fix”
Some cars have a favourite button to disable the more annoying features like driver monitoring and lane assist with one button press once its set up in the menu.
The features are required to be installed by law.
I get not wanting the internal camera and telemetry crap, but not wanting the other stuff puts you in the same group of people that opposed seat belts when they first became mandatory for cars.
Backup cams, lane warnings, blind spot detection, and auto breaking are all incredible advancements that have significantly improved vehicle saftey.
The features I don’t like are things that take total control of the car like auto pilot, lane merging, auto park, or lane correction. It should not fight you trying to avoid something on the road. A little beep to say, “hey you’re leaving the lane” is okay, a little beep to remind you to keep your eyes on the road is theoretically okay (but we all know the massive privacy concerns with that one.)
And to answer your question, yes you can get still cars with less of those features. Often the more advanced automation features are sold as an add-ons package or at higher trim level. Unfortunately, comforts like heated seats or motorized trunks are part of the same package, there is no getting one with out the other.
I feel backup cameras are a gateway drug for cars. I would not turn a car down for having one for example. As other features go, I drive so little that the car doesn’t need to be fancy. It’s a way to get from point a to b.
Tell that to the kids and pets that got run over because they were in a blind spot, backup cameras help to prevent that.
I completely understand not wanting the whole suite of modern safety features, I hate most them too, but they do save lives. If you don’t drive that much, then they shouldn’t bother you if they are there. Most can be turned off anyway. If you’re that desperate to not have a rear cam, just tape over it, but please don’t.
Even the “cheap”, sub $30k new cars come with a lot of the safety features standard now. (Based on general internet rumblings), a used 2018-2022 higher trim car will probably be the sweet spot between having some of the safety features (that can be turned off), physical AC controls, and not having the ads and giant tablet screens. Personally, I wouldn’t go any older than 2020 unless you find something well taken care of. A 2018 model year would have be released summer 2017, 9 years ago.
I followed up with similar comments. The backup screen just seemed like a gateway drug to all the other distracting touch screen slop. I don’t actually hate back up cameras, it’s that it’s required to function for inspection and it’s one more part that can break.
Keep your existing car until it gets too expensive to repair. Find a similar car with low miles and then rinse and repeat. Do not waste your money on a new car.
That’s hopefully the plan. My worry is eventually I’ll have to get a newer car one day. But, until that day, I will stick to my car I have. Buying new seems silly.
when you buy the car they will most likely try and setup your phone to it to “activate your warrenty” just decline this if they ask you to do anything with your phone say no and just dont link anything for the most privacy an the other features should be able to be disabled in settings
That’s a thing? Ew.
Short answer is no. All new cars do it. Dealers can’t disable it. It is what it is.
There are a few niche cars that don’t have all the tracking cruft, good luck getting one.
The automatic emergency braking is probably one of the absolutely best safety features in “recent” cars…and i say “recent” because this has been standard equipment on all trim levels for probably a decade.
ABS brakes were a game changer. People used to panic and spin around taking out 5-6 cars.
I always thought ABS stood for Antilock Braking System.
In this case it’s automatic breaking systems.
I just don’t like the idea of my car making driving decisions. Plastic bag goes across the highway and I get rear ended due to the car breaking for me. Nope, don’t want it.
Good call, mine used to rapidly brake because it saw nonexistant obstacles. More than once.
what year?
I drive a 30-yrar-old Honda.
It’s totally worth repairing an old car.
Learn more about total cost of ownership (TCO). My car costs a couple thousand a year in repairs and maintenance, but that’s significantly less than replacing it would cost. Your car might be similar.
It’s totally worth repairing an old car.
it’s also a lot cheaper, especially if you have shitty credit
A time frame when Honda was still an excellent manufacturer.
Actual question considering I’ve had no reason to look at their newer cars:
What’s wrong with them now?
Build quality is lower. Parts don’t last as long, and driving dynamics are worse. Also, paint and exterior finishes are prerty trash.
I’ve owned and driven Hondas from the 80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s, and its an easy call to say the 90s were peak. They drove nicely, were cheap to maintain, and had excellent durability/longevity.
They are still decent cars, but not excellent as they once were. Toyota/Lexus are much better in the last 20 years.
One guys opinion anyway.
If old means 20 year old to you, I would recommend buying used from around 2015 ish. That seems to be the time things started going “smart”. Some not too recent cars can be software modded by good techs/tuner shops to disable stop-start and similar. Probably other annoyances too, but I would assume it’s very dependent on make, model etc.
That’s because backup camera law just passed in 2014, effective 2018. Which means that screens of some kind became mandatory in all cars.
Once you have to have a screen, might as well throw a few features in to make use of that expensive screen since it’s just a couple bucks here or there to add things like an infotainment.
Now that people need the touchscreen anyway for the infotainment, might as well get rid of those expensive buttons and just do everything with a touchscreen menu.
As long as we have all that other stuff, might as well throw in a cell modem and get some $$$ from the insurance companies and data brokers to get some ongoing revenue from these cars we sold.
And as much as I don’t like having to look at the camera to back up, it does seem to have a wider FOV and the backup sensors see things even further out, and the rear end of cars are just so high and back windows are so small (I think these are now all this way for rear end crash and rollover reasons) that you just can’t see out the back like you could out of an older car. It’s pretty much just how it has to be with the safety requirements these days.
My car is a 2012. It doesn’t have any of the stuff you mentioned, though I wouldn’t mind having a backup camera. I’m also fine with any safety features required by law since those aren’t surveillance–it’s the privacy-invasive stuff that will keep me driving this car until it’s no longer repairable. I put very few miles on it per year now that I’m retired, so it should last a long time.
I’m still interested to see if any replies here have alternatives for bypassing all the surveillance stuff. I saw an article on how to disable/remove the phone-home modem in a particular brand of car, and it was very complicated. You had to disassemble and remove a whole bunch of stuff just to get to it.
Yeah, Knowing myself I’d be breaking clips by accident.
You can maybe look into the base models of cars around 2019-2022. You won’t escape everything completely, but it’s better than getting an old car. I once had a 2020 Kia base model that only had the backup camera among the stuff you listed.
Also some of that vintage, it’s easier to remove or disable the parts that phone home, compared to newer cars.
auto-braking
It was really cool driving a uhaul that was way too big for me to be qualified to drive only to find it did some automatic ffucking braking or downshifting shit going down hills and it’s like, yes, thank you, that’s exactly what i want when i’m maneuvering something unfamiliar the size of a whale- random automated bullshit i don’t understand randomly fucking with what Im doing
Take a look at this list:
https://www.thetechedvocate.org/10-best-new-cars-for-people-that-dont-care-about-technology/
It’s a couple years old, but the info is likely still good.
Ironically I read that a bit ago. The issue is some of these features are required by law.
The key to answering this question is knowing where you live.
United States
