I want to buy a new car, but it needs to be privacy friendly. Sadly you cannot really buy any new Car that is.
Has anybody any experience on making your modern car not phone home to its company, by removing the hardware it uses to do?
I want to buy a new car, but it needs to be privacy friendly. Sadly you cannot really buy any new Car that is.
Has anybody any experience on making your modern car not phone home to its company, by removing the hardware it uses to do?
Speaking as someone who worked for a corporate auto maker, it won’t be an easy task since they try to make it as difficult as possible to disable online activation if even providing the ability at all.
The only real solution is pulling the head unit and trying to find any modem and desolder it, which who knows if it would function as it had before hand since everything is integrated.
It will also hurt resale value.
Or just put a power test attentuator on the antenna output.
It essentially absorbs the RF from the antenna and radiates it as heat. Since cell is pretty low power (1/2 watt max, IIRC), and a cell radio will stop trying to transmit after a while (though it will try again), I don’t think it would cause any problems.
But I’m not an RF engineer.
The newer cars from the company I worked for were always trying to phone home, not sure about other companies but this one was trying to lock you into the online ecosystem.