Latest Posts

Connectivity Assholes

Corporate Fuckery, Drive Time, Two-Minute Hate

Normally I reserve the above epithet for people who have their phones surgically attached to their hands, or bosses who insist that employees Stay.In.Touch.At.All.Times., yeah even unto night time, weekends, and vacations.  (Just because you’re attending your sister’s wedding or mother’s funeral — requiring use of paid time off [PTO] instead of compassionate leave, FFS — doesn’t mean that your boss shouldn’t be able to demand your time to attend to That Pressing Corporate Need.)

No, the connectivity assholes I refer to here are “services” like GM’s OnStar, Hyundai’s Blue Link, NissanConnect, AcuraLink and Toyota Connect.  Via Insty, I see the following is happening (from the annals of Corporate Automotive Bastardy):

Connected services is a catch-all term for everything your car can send and receive over the internet. It includes features such as automatic 911 call-outs after an accident, roadside assistance after a breakdown, over-the-air (OTA) software updates, vehicle health reports which can be sent to your dealer, wi-fi hot spots in the vehicle, and phone apps that allow you to connect to and even control some of your car’s functions.

They’re also big business. Most connected services require a paid subscription once the free trail (usually three months to a year) runs out. As more and more of them are added to your dashboard, automakers hope to make billions of dollars annually just on subscriptions. That doesn’t mean older vehicles will be supported forever, though.

Anyone who’s ever touched a device with a computer chip in it knows that device will eventually be obsolete. Cellphones, even if they still work fine, will eventually stop receiving software updates. Right or wrong, this is the way of the world. The average American, though, keeps their car for much longer than they keep their phone, and the average age of a vehicle in America is nearly 13 years old. Meaning, a lot of people could potentially be affected if other automakers follow Acura’s lead in cutting off cars newer than the average. And that’s not to mention those who own used examples of older models.

While it’s arguably bad customer service, there’s no law or contractual obligation requiring automakers like Acura to continue supporting older models with outdated hardware and software. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Yeah, click HERE to accept the (300 pages of) Terms & Conditions Of Service.  (Wait;  you all do read those before clicking, right?)

Somebody tell me how many times I’ve ranted on these pages about people handing over their privacy and freedom of action in the name of “conveeeeenience”, because I can’t be bothered to look it up.

This is why, in all my lottery dreams, I am convinced that I would never buy a modern car, but would pay a premium (in service / maintenance costs etc.) just to own a car that is completely and utterly under my personal control.  I have actually come to the point where I would buy any car — in reasonable working condition — that has an ordinary key to start it, whose operating system contains not a single chip and does not send my usage data to just anyone who wants to see it, for whatever reason — which includes insurance companies, the police, the State, the advertising industry and all the other forms of bureaucratic bastardy that have infested our personal lives like some creeping fucking cancer.

A pox on all of them.

Hiatus

Sports

Some sporting news, as it pertains to me only:

1.) The English Professional League (EPL) football 2024/25 season is over until late summer.  There goes my weekly sports event.  Bummer.  At least Chelsea made the top 5.

2.) Formula 1 — which is almost weekly — is starting to heat up, and now that the always-boring Monaco GP is over, we can look forward to some actual drama.

3.) The cricket season is starting up, so that’s good — albeit not weekly — because South Africa has a pretty busy season this year, starting with a tour of Strylia (always a good competition, provided that the Strylians can refrain from cheating).  And speaking of touring Australia, I have to wait until January next year to watch the Ashes (Oz vs. England).

4.) Golf tournaments coming up:  US Open and the Open Championship (British).  I only watch the four majors:  Masters (McIlroy), US PGA (Sheffler) and the two above (winners TBD).

5.) I don’t watch basketball of any description, so whatever happens there is of no interest to me.

6.) Ditto baseball.

7.) Ditto (ice) hockey.

8.) Ditto the NFL.

9.) Ditto tennis except for Wimbledon, and that only occasionally.  I pretty much haven’t watched it since they stopped playing with wooden racquets.

10.) I don’t watch any women’s sporting events, because the skills are crap and there’s no nudity.

Okay, you can all get back to cleaning your guns / cutting your toenails / whatever.

My American Car Experience Part 3: The Greenhouse

Drive Time

In planning for  The Great Wetback Episode Of ’86  my emigration to the U.S., I’d made prior arrangements with a rental car company to reserve and pre-pay a 3-month rental, so that I wouldn’t be stuck without wheels on my arrival.  I went with a prepay so that I could pay in rands and not in dollars because #CurrencyConversionRape, and would only have to pay the sales tax when I turned it in.  (In those days one could do such a thing because the rental companies loved getting paid in advance, especially — as was the case here — when made using a corporate club card e.g. Hertz #1 Club or Avis Preferred, National Gold etc.  I don’t think you can do this anymore.)

So I arrived at the airport in Austin, and made my way to the rental counter clutching my prepaid contract with some confidence because the club card showed that I was an employee of one of the company’s largest clients worldwide.  The rental counter lady looked at the contract and gave a little frown, causing my heart to sink, but it turned out I needn’t have worried.

“We don’t have any of that group’s cars left, but we can give you another, so if you don’t mind [smile], we’ll just upgrade you, and as you’ve prepaid, there’s no extra charge.”
“Okay.  What car will you give me?”
“I’m afraid the only one left is a Chev Camaro,” she said, and looked at me anxiously.  “Will that do?”

Then she gave a puzzled look at the sight of a customer sinking to his knees while uttering an apparent prayer of thanks.

It looked like this, a Camaro Sport Coupe, only in black:

In retrospect, when I sank to my knees I should have been asking “Why me, Lord?”, because this was the beginning of a three-month ordeal.

As I tootled around Austin with Trevor — who had himself emigrated some eight months earlier — a couple of things became apparent.

a) A Texas summer should not be coupled with a black car, of any size or description, and b) the enormous rear window actually had a greenhouse effect on the car’s interior.

In other words, Gentle Readers, driving this thing around Austin was akin to driving around in an oven set to Broil.

Worse yet, the Camaro had an anemic V6 engine, so like my earlier experience with the Silver Bullet, it had no poke whatsoever.  Trying to coax any kind of speed out of the thing simply meant that the need for a gas refill would appear sooner rather than later.

Of the handling, we will not speak.  Okay, do let’s talk about it because it didn’t have any.  It slewed around corners at any speed, the steering was vague and imprecise, and because the car was wider than a blue whale, maneuvering through traffic was a nail-biting experience for one not accustomed to driving such a beast.  I don’t know how Trevor felt about it, but all I can recall is several instances of sharply-indrawn breath and muttered “Fucking hell, that was close.”

How I survived the three months without a fender-bender or a scratch on the car is a testament to both luck and the ability of other drivers to avoid this sweating maniac’s clumsy driving.

And have I mentioned how hot I was, that summer in Austin?  I soon found that the only way to get into the car without fainting from the heat was to open the front door, start the engine, then get out quickly, close the door and scurry back to our apartment for about fifteen minutes to allow the Camaro’s A/C (which was excellent, I will admit) to bring the interior temperature down to, say, 98 degrees.  Some might say that I should have just lowered the windows to allow the breeze to cool the thing down, to which I should remind everyone that it was June/July/August in Austin, Texas.  (I remember driving back from a trip to San Antonio, and passing one of those signs outside a bank which showed the temperature to be 95, at 2am.  So don’t talk to me about daytime temperatures and lowered windows.)

Amazingly, when I was ferrying any of the local girls out to dinner or lunch (it happened a few times), they didn’t seem to be bothered by the heat.  Clearly, they were acclimatized and I wasn’t — despite having just come from Africa.

Anyway, the time came for me to hand the thing back to the rental company, and while I was left without transport for a few weeks (#VisaDelay) it wasn’t as big a problem as I’d thought it would be because as it happened, I was shacking up with one of those local girls and she had no problem with lending me her car on the few occasions when I needed one while she was at work.

Then my visa was approved and I left Austin to take up my job at the Great Big Research Company — just in time for my first encounter with a Chicago Winter.

But that’s another story.