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from the vote-for-the-motion,-or-roko's-basilisk-will-run-you-over dept.
United States House Republicans expect to introduce bills later this week that would bar states from setting their own rules for self-driving cars and take other steps to remove obstacles to putting such vehicles on the road, a spokeswoman said.
The legislative action comes as major automakers are joining forces with auto suppliers and other groups to prod Congress into action.
Last month, a US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce subcommittee held a hearing on a Republican draft package of 14 bills that would allow US regulators to exempt up to 100,000 vehicles a year per manufacturer from federal motor vehicle safety rules that prevent the sale of self-driving vehicles without human controls.
[...] GM, Alphabet Inc., Tesla Inc., and others have been lobbying Congress to pre-empt rules under consideration in California and other states that could limit self-driving vehicle deployment.
As the number of self-driving cars on the road grows, will drivers proceeding on manual game the self-driving algorithms and lead to a ban on non-self-driving cars?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @04:00AM
Original poster here.
I just looked up the Ford comment, and here's a link to an article:
http://www.businessinsider.com/ford-exec-gps-2014-1#ixzz2puo4Oq5f [businessinsider.com]
The executive was referring to their GPS systems, and thus it must have been an uplink, not just a stand alone black box.
I wasn't thinking about stand alone black boxes in particular when I wrote my comment. At least with those, someone has to manually, physically connect to them in person to get the info. The older the car, the less history they keep (as far as I know.) I also know that some of them are highly proprietary and require special equipment and cooperation from the manufacturer to access at all. (This is based on what little I have read on the subject.)
As for disconnecting the uplink, yeah I think that will work on some cars. But you may have a constant nag on the dashboard, a check engine light, and perhaps even a reduced display. An example of this would be the odometer being replaced with "CHECK ENGINE", or "UPLINK FAILURE", etc, that will not go away unless the uplink is fixed/enabled. Furthermore, the car could simply store all the spy data, and wait until it goes into service. At this time, it may be hard connected for diagnostics, and then it can upload everything.
Also, in the future, they could easily set the car to simply refuse to start if the uplink chip isn't working. (I haven't read anything about this happening right now though.)
Most people don't care about their devices spying on them, so the manufacturers have a big incentive to step it up. That data is worth money, money, money. Plus, a lot of the people making these decisions like control, regardless of the profits or losses. Surveillance is control.