People manage to turn purses and watches into status symbols - I’m pretty sure cars will continue to be the same in that way. They’ll just be luxurious or performance oriented in new ways. Your automated people carrier will have genuine Corinthian Leather and the fastest net connection around.
I agree with the thrust of this but I’ll bicker with the terminology. A bit. 
A “transport appliance” is (in my personal parlance) a vehicle that the user doesn’t care about at all, beyond “Does it work?” Like my attitude to my clothes washing machine. Or my niece’s attitude to her car: “Does it start? Great; I’m done.”
What you’ve correctly identified is (in my personal parlance) the “no user-serviceable parts inside” or the “Apple” model. I can care deeply about the various superficial features of the gizmo: UI, color, stylishness, status-symbol value, even performance, etc., but at the same time I (the enthusiast buyer) have (near-) zero ability to tweak what I bought.
Rather like this comment from upthread:
They’re bloodless. You can’t improve it by fiddling with it, so why even try to go any deeper than “Turn it on, turn it off”?
The speed limiter that kicks in at 93mph in this case is because that corresponds to the max allowable RPMs for the electric motor. After that RPM and speed, presumably with some safety buffer, the motor will self-disassemble.
Only having a single gear in the transmission leads to that kind of thing.
@Capn_Carl It’s exactly this. Plus, your phone might tell on you, too, because of it’s location tools.
Understood, but someone really has to want to know what my car has to say about my driving. I don’t worry about it.
The instant you crash into somebody, the cops, those somebody(ies)’ insurance company(ies), and your insurance company will be extremely intereted in your telemetry. Until that event I agree that nobody much cares about your telemetry. Today.
Right now some insurance companies will give you a price break if you let them spy on you through continuously monitoring your telemetry. And the happier they are about what they see, the lower your rates. That economic incentive is popular with many people. Not me, and I bet not you.
But soon enough the “proven benefits” of this monitoring may result in it being mandated in at least some states. Big Brother is on the march. Or at least increasingly along on your drive.
As AI gets better, the temptation to use this data for all sorts of things will grow. The innocuous stuff being recorded about you and archived today may be used in nefarious ways in the future.
We should all strive to mask/hide private data as much as possible. As it is, there is so much location data on you being archived that 20 years from now someone will be able to trace your exact movements last week. Or an AI will be able to classify your driving habits and any sketchy destinations you’ve visited (‘sketchy’ by the standards of the future, which may be radically different).
The instant you crash into somebody, the cops, those somebody(ies)’ insurance company(ies), and your insurance company will be extremely intereted in your telemetry. Until that event I agree that nobody much cares about your telemetry. Today.
This has been possible for years, but I doubt it is common. Can you provide evidence?
Typically, the officer is going to look at both cars, at skid marks, speak to drivers and witnesses, maybe write a ticket, and leave. If a driver has exonerating or damning video, they might offer it to the officer, or to their insurance company.
I’d be shocked if analyzing telemetry from accidents is happening on any large scale.
I agree it’s not happening on a large scale today. At least not for conventional cars involved in humdrum accidents. OTOH, you T-bone a school bus while doing 90mph on a surface street and IMO it’s a good bet any data recordings are going to be subpoena’d by somebody.
Consider the devices I mentioned that insurance companies offer to their drivers who voluntarily (in exchange for a discount) install them to track their driving. If you have one on your car and crash and call your insurer to handle it, do you think they ignore the data they’ve been paying for? I strongly doubt it, although I have no cite for you.
NTSB/NHTSA is working on regulations for how semi-self-driving cars will report data. Tesla, for reasons of their own, chose to make their cars as heavily instrumented and recorded as modern aircraft are. And Tesla cars “phone home” with all that data routinely, not just during / after a crash. NTSB/NHTSA is discovering they really like access to that stuff and want more cars to follow suit. It’s coming.
Even once all the telemetry is out there for the taking by LEOs or at least by courts, do I think it’ll be routinely accessed after a bog-standard stop-and-go rear-ender crunch w no material injuries? Probably not.
This sounds promising, but the second law of thermodynamics has to spoil it somewhere.
Hi @Capn_Carl. Ref my post 2 above this one in reply to your post.
See this thread which has just appeared and the cited news article:
The article states the police did pull the cars’ telemetry (more likely onboard data recorder, not really tele-anything), as part of their investigation.
Although this was a pretty spectacular crash, similar events occur nearly daily in most major metropolitan areas.
So digging into data recorders & telemetry post-accident is happening at least some. And IMO more all the time.
I didn’t realize that Tesla had embraced the subscription model for features like self-driving mode. I know there are other software-only features that you can purchase. More subscription-based features are coming down the pike, and I’m suspicious of this change in delivery. There’s a purchase option, but I wonder if that’s the way customers want to spend their money. Besides entertainment systems are other manufacturers using this model?
BMW has started charging a subscription fee for seat heaters…
This sounds like the first half of a talk show joke.
A lot of people view it that way! https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23204950/bmw-subscriptions-microtransactions-heated-seats-feature
OMG, that’s just awful. It’s bad enough that my water filters and home air filter run that way.
I’m ok with satellite radio subscriptions or other works where there is value added–i.e. Sirius where they are producing content. Features on the car that are locked until released? Did you decrease the MSRP? No? No.
But that’s the argument the manufacturers are taking. When you buy a car without seat heaters, as an example, you don’t pay for them. The difference here is that instead of buying them upfront for several hundred dollars, you pay a monthly fee instead. And suppose you move from Minneapolis to Phoenix, you can cancel the subscription, where if you bought them upfront you don’t get any money back. Pains me to argue the side of the manufacturer, but there is at least some sense to it.
Sometimes one can enable factory options already on the car.
I had a 2008 Toyota Yaris hatchback, the first car I ever bought new. I went to YarisWorld.com, the Yaris enthusiast website. I read that Toyota never sold factory-installed cruise control in the hatchbacks, but they just left off the switches and wiring that controlled it. I also found out how to install said switches and wiring in my Yaris. One trip to Radio Shack and less than ten dollars later, I had a perfectly functioning cruise control on my stripper model Yaris.
I predict black-market hacking will proliferate if the car companies try to push the subscription model. Hard-wiring seat heaters can’t be too difficult!