US regulator tells GM to hit the brakes on customer tracking The Federal Trade Commission has banned General Motors and subsidiary OnStar from sharing drivers' precise location and behavior data with consumer reporting agencies for five years under a 20-year consent order finalized January 14. According to the order [PDF], GM turned connected cars into surveillance devices by collecting …
Because the only time it's acceptable to collect customer driving data is for a brief time leading up to the incident; and the only time it's acceptable to view is under a court order.
It's never acceptable to sell that data to a third party - including, for example, insurers that are owned by the car maker.
And don't even consider sending me adverts on any device that happens to be in the car...
Those are driven by paid and certified pros.
Even 20 years ago American locomotives collected 96 parameters every second for analysis. The companies also used it to illegally run trains with computers back then. The impetus behind AI has a long history.
It should be very clear to the customer, with explicit information highlighted about how the data will be used, but providing data proving you're a good driver is a good way to reduce your premium. I don't want to be lumped in with the boy racers who are accidents waiting to happen.
(Posting anon as I'm in the industry)
This reminds me that some time ago I rented a Toyota Prius, which gave feedback on my driving. Over the course of a week the app helped me get into the habit of accelerating and braking smoother, and generally becoming a better driver. I hoped to find a phone app that would give me similar feedback while driving my own car, but the few options I found all had either dodgy privacy policies or none at all that I could find.
Does anyone know of a privacy respecting one? One that doesn't sell my data would presumably have to be be paid, and that is fine.
Jokes aside, the "average ability" it's quite pointless, for the sake of conversation what i consider basic driving skills are:
-keeping your speed appropriate considering the surrounding traffic
-acceletrator/brakes management: don't floor it-hit the brake-repeat when following somebody
-keeping reasonable distance from the car in front of you to avoid hitting brakes for any speed adjustment
-using indicators so other drivers understand what you have in mind before you are actually doing it
-"keeping the car rolling"
Non of these skills require special cars or tires nor track driving eperience, greatly improves traffic and safety and saves gas too
Nothing angers me more when driving is seeing people managing their speed by slamming on their brakes when there is absolutely no one ahead of them. If you are going to fast, ease up on the throttle. And it is not as though they do it once, they do it repeatedly. hit the brakes, slow down, speed up, oops too fast hit the brakes, slow down, speed up, etc, etc, etc...
50% below the medium average, certainly.
From my experiences of driving around my local area, and despite the impression of there being an awful lot of terrible drivers, I think that is perhaps just because I notice the bad drivers a lot more than I do the good ones, so I suspect that the majority are probably better than the median average.
That may confuse some US readers because I am aware that when they refer to the median whilst driving, they mean something completely different ;)
Excuse me for being blunt, but this wasn't basic driving skills, it was about making the OP smoother (better). I agree most people drive very poorly but you can't lump it on the driving school system, it's always going to have to be a balance between getting people safe (enough) they can be on the road unsupervised against the costs of tuition. Now if you were suggesting some form of repeated testing, so say checking people every 10 years after they initially passed their test, with lessons enforced for those who have slipped in to bad habits, that I could get behind.
From a former race instructor, spend your dough on a day at a reputable high performance driving school. It won't break your car and the training will stick with you forever, no matter what you drive.You will learn how to be smooth at any speed.
Bobble-head accessories can also be used to indicate how smooth you're driving. Cheaper than a track day but not as good at night.
IIRC, Jeremy Clarkson, in the days of the old Top Gear before the reboot, suggested a driver safety device... A great big metal spike pointing at the driver from the center of the steering wheel.
Which would cause the driver to drive in a manner that would reduce the likelihood of them impaling themselves on said spike
From (increasingly unreliable) memory it was Alec Issigonis that suggested that in around 1960. I think it was part of a general suggestion that motorists would become less safe the more comfortable they were, so included suggestions that car heaters were also a bad idea.
that car heaters were also a bad idea.
When I was in halls of residence in my first year in college, the heating used to get switched off around 2300. With drafty windows, it didn't take long for the room to get cold. The person in charge of the halls of residence was an ex-public school master type, and apparently, it was his directive to turn off the heating at that time - in order to encourage the student residents to get tuck themselves into bed and to discourage night-time activity between them. I'd have thought night time activities between students was one way for them to keep warm - something the old school master hadn't thought of
Re: Race track day.
When I was learning to drive our school organised a track day for the participating student drivers.
Proper racetrack, proper instruction. Cornering, braking, wet skid pan, emergency stops, instant change of direction, etc.
You are correct, this has stayed with me for over 50 years.
Totally agree, and upvoted.
I'm 74 this year and my birthday treat to myself last year was blasting round Brands Hatch in a variety of performance cars ranging from a BMW police interceptor to a race prepped 66 Mustang. As well as the hands-on experience, the instructor feedback is extremely useful.
Then if you really want to take it to the next level you could do what I did before that - half a day of one-to-one tuition at drifting school. Knackered old Toyota with a welded-up diff, but boy can those things can take some abuse! The only downside - blisters on five fingers afterwards, but well worth the pain.
I hope VW aren't selling my data. The collision alarm goes off when it feels like it. Even on an empty motorway.
The safe distance sensor seems to have a trigger range of about a kilometer at 50km/h.
I wonder how many drivers were hit with premium increases because of sensor inaccuracies.
The front collision alarm in my Bolt goes off about once a month. Driving through construction zones will often set it off. It also fails to understand that alarms are unnecessary when you're already moving into the adjacent lane to avoid the vehicle you're approaching. But then, the adaptive cruise control will jam on the brakes when you're on the expressway and someone going faster than you pulls into the lane ahead of you. Toyota's adaptive cruise control seems to understand that the gap will widen on its own.
I was very disappointed to read that Nissan was rated the worst for driver's privacy by research done by the Mozilla foundation.
The article claims that the "privacy" policy of Nissan allows them to gather biometric data, medical history, sexual activity and other dangerous PII.
Which was concerning to me because I had been a fan of Nissan from back when it was still called Datsun.
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/nissan/
I bought a 25HP tractor over the summer. It has a 3 cylinder Diesel engine, and a hydrostatic transmission. It has minimal electronics, keeps track of the number of hours it's run and shows a few basic bits of info about the machine.
I wish we would go back to building cars like this, just a giant machine with minimal computer controls. We don't need all the electronics systems they have, just simple designs that work.
The funny bit about all this is how long it went on for. People in Chevy Volt discussion forums had been complaining about this for years. Then it carried over to Chevy Bolt forums. That's how I learned about it before buying one. I yanked the fuse to the OnStar modem before driving my new Bolt home for the first time, which earned me a curious look from the salesperson. After receiving confirmation that I had been opted out (plus a few more days for good measure), I finally reinstalled the fuse as it also powers the hands-free microphone.
Why no, I don't find it curious that Chevy would put something else on the modem's circuit to discourage people from keeping it off...
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