I have a 2010 Toyota Corolla. She’s been my trusty steed for the last 14 years and is in good working order. I recognize she won’t last forever, and if, god forbid (mostly for her) I get in an accident, I will need to get a new car. So what dumb cars do you drive, and what would you replace them with?
If you want a dumb car and they disable the modules or features that could fail and are considered “smart”, and adjust costs appropriately, then what’s the problem?
If a Toyota connects to the internet to receive instructions to disable things built into the car, it is too smart of a car for its own good.
Are you seriously on the “sell my heated seats back to me” train? Because that’s happened too.
Modern software works like that.
I resto-mod EFI onto old carb’d vehicles and I wish it had wireless updates. When you scale to Toyota’s size, it makes very little sense to require a service tech to perform software updates manually.
I sort of support the idea of selling a car with components disabled. It costs more to re-tool the assembly line than it does to build it all the same. For instance, many trucks have wiring to support towing but it’s not plugged in.
This is because there are additional costs such as warranty repairs for those types of components.
If a seat heater stops working, but was never enabled, it doesn’t need to get fixed under warranty. You also don’t need to worry about software code causing problems with that module since it’s disabled.
I don’t support anything that obstructs someone from turning that feature on though. If you can wire up a switch to heat your seats then great. I can understand why you shouldn’t expect to be able to hack the ecm or module to make it work though.
You’ve launched into full-on apologia for why dumb cars are bad, this just makes your suggestion look worse