Privacy is in my top two concerns for EVs (and any vehicle purchase I make). I am increasingly avoiding every privacy destroying option out there, be it cars or services in general. It is, unfortunately, becoming nearly impossible to be privacy aware but the more resistance people put up the better chance we have of maintaining some privacy.
Any bit of telemetry in a modern EV is also in a modern ICE. There's no reason to hate on EV's for telemetry, you have to hate on the entire modern auto industry.
I don't think EVs are any worse than any other car. My F150 Lightning has precisely as much telemetry as the ICE version. Which is to say, more than I'd like. But I realize most buyers don't care.
Not good privacy by default, but as a hack you can also just buy a Bolt EV for like ~14k or so, then disconnect the location tracking antennae which takes like 30 mins of fiddling and $12 of parts.
I always buy used so I have some time left, but not much. When I bought my last vehicle the person had one of those insurance GPS devices in it. I can't even begin to understand why anyone would do that. It is so obviously going to be used against the driver and it is also obvious that it will eventually become 'required' and that just depresses me.
If you drive the speed limit and otherwise follow all those things they teach you in drivers ed but almost nobody does once they pass their drivers test those will save you money. The average driver is really bad.
Not at all - telematics schemes also penalise subjective measures such as "over-revving" and "cornering with too much lateral g".
Royal Mail drivers in the UK found themselves being disciplined for exceeding telematics thresholds when the company transitioned back to petrol-engined vans, from diesel, because they are driven in a very different manner.
Those are things I was taught not to do in drivers ed. I don't know how the UK compared. For that matter, I took drivers ed 30+ years ago, and I don't know what all has changed.
The point about the insurance GPS is that they will eventually use it against the person. 'You were going 5mph over the speed limit before the crash...' that kind of thing. Giving them more information will just lead to the consumer being hurt. Oh, and they will clearly sell that info to anyone they can get to buy it of course. That part isn't great either.
