What's your driving privacy worth to you?

Magic Spinning Triangles on a Stick!

neon4891 wrote: so much for considering going to progressive

+1

Progressive can suck it.

Don't worry. The LHC will end the world before all of this take a toll on us anyway.

I'll bet I could save quite a bit on my car insurance with this. I might consider letting them put it on my Z3. Not on the Miata / Track Slave.

I think it would drive me crazy though always knowing that it's there tattling on my every move or mistake. But think about it. Why would Progressive make such an offer? You really think they want to LOWER your rates? It's not their business to do so. They want to increase rates accross the board. But they need a reason to increase rates and this gives them their reasons. If they lower the rates of a few, let's call them "outliers", so what? Overall, net income will be up. It's good business I guess.

Roger that. They can kiss my @$$. Any black box near my car will suffer a most unfortunate accident...

midknight wrote: And those turnpike and other toll road express passes that are linked to a sensor in your car? Think they can't figure out your average speed between toll booths?

Ohio timestamps the tool booth tickets.

I remember my grandfather telling me (very young, I was) that they would ticket you if you passed through too fast.

20 years later, I was cruising parts of the Turnpike at over 115mph, probably averaging 80mph including waiting in line at the tollbooth, and never saw a ticket.

Mental wrote: If you guys remember OBD IV, it was a similair program. The current OBD III already has the ability to rat you out for speeding or polluting or not following the maint schedule and ODB IV was going to enable to car to do this wirelessly. But privacy folks and gearheads shut that down. Whats interesting to me is that if the goverment tries this, we can usually get it shut down, but as soon as a compnay does it, we all line up like sheep. Big Brother is companies, not the goverment. Right now your On-Star equiped vehicle can have most of the controls taken over by an operator sitting in a call center thousands of miles away. We would never let the goverment do this, but pay extra for the privledge of having GM do it.

+1

I absolutely cannot understand why people want this. I specifically will NOT buy a GM product because of OnStar.

ReverendDexter wrote: +1 I absolutely cannot understand why people want this. I specifically will NOT buy a GM product because of OnStar.

I can see one good thing about OnStar: My brother, living in Minnesota, will take his buddies Tahoe out onto a frozen lake, and call the call center, saying that he thinks he made a wrong turn and needs to know how to get back into town.

The call center is in southern California. They don't quite understand the idea of frozen lakes. priceless reactions.

ReverendDexter wrote: +1 I absolutely cannot understand why people want this. I specifically will NOT buy a GM product because of OnStar.

+2

It doesn't even matter to me that GM may make some fairly capable cars these days. Call me a member of the tin hat brigade, but it looks more and more like I'll be driving the current fleet forever.

I too can confirm (numberous times) that The Ohio Turnpike does not issue time stamped tickets (though I am suprised they do not.) It seems to me that this would be a real revenue generator. If not in tickets in the fact that once it was known, most people would stop at the captive audience rest stops and purchase some over priced E36 M3 (or highway robbery.)

What about rental car companies and On-star. Does anyone know if Enterprise tracks your data?

I agree with most of what's been said. I wonder if there's ever going to be a day where I can get a newer car than the one I have that isn't completely controlled by computers (which goes hand-in-hand with the complete inability to do any work on the car yourself), and not filled with useless bullE36 M3 like power everything, nav systems, Bluetooth, heated steering wheels and a freezer in the glovebox.

And I have EZPass, but lately I've really been thinking about ditching it. Of course they still take your damn picture no matter which toll booth you go through. Cell phone too, wish I could ditch that piece of crap. Screw it, just live in the middle of nowhere in the Northwest Territory Canadia and grow my own food in a greenhouse and live off of the grid entirely.

The black box is becoming more and more common. Autoweek just did an interesting article on it. I guess at least one person on the waiting list for a GTR took a pass after finding out about the black box. I guess Nissan wants to void the warranty on their sports car if anyone drives it in a sporting fashion...

Here is the article