It doesn't take much of a leak. Radiation likes to radiate.

I used to keep my work phone in a Faraday bag sometimes. (I had my reasons[1]). It usually worked. Occasionally, it didn't work and the phone would demonstrate this by doing phone-stuff like ringing even while it was snug inside of that conductive bag.

So sometimes, the radiation was radiating well-enough despite my efforts.

Not so long ago, I was chatting with someone here on HN about blocking RF at GHz frequencies using aluminum foil. I was sure that it would be trivial, and they were sure that it would be difficult. So I tested that.

I started pinging my phone on its LAN IP, and wrapped it in foil. I found that I could increase latency some and also institute some packet loss.

But I couldn't stop it altogether -- not with a sheet of aluminum foil, anyway. No matter how carefully I made the creases, pings simply kept happening. (Having satisfactorily demonstrated to myself that were right and that it would be difficult, I stopped testing at that point.)

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So here in reality, suppose the [car's] cellular connection finds that it has a connection occasionally. What's to stop it from buffering data and sending it in batches during times when it works? A few dozen lines of code that's geared to that purpose, perhaps? Or maybe a few hundred lines, instead?

Not that the difficulty matters much; the software is all closed up and inscrutable.

If the value of batching data to deal with intermittent connections is greater than the cost of producing the code to do this, then it can be assumed that such code has been or will be written.

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[1]: An abusive manager I had liked to turn on the tracking system that the phone had. I didn't mind being tracked while I was on the clock, but I placed a higher value on my privacy than on her ability to be a snoopy bitch when I was not on the clock. My Faraday bag solution was adequate for that phone, at that time, with that particular tracking system, and for my particular desires, and I had access to the system with which to validate the adequacy of this success, but it was by no means perfect.