Thanks for adding some balance to this. I find it especially unlikely that any manufacturer is going to risk losing sales in California over something as clearly beneficial to car owners as this, not to mention the number of women who buy cars elsewhere who reasonably expect the manufacturer to protect the vehicle’s owner.

The letter seems really disingenuous, too. There’s some vague fear mongering about the testing time but it’s not like this is the brake controller or something.

https://www.autosinnovate.org/posts/press-release/automakers...

The requirement in the actual bill seems pretty simple so I wonder how much this is either a sign that their internal processes are poorly designed (making it hard to ship updates) or something like losing data mining opportunities if they implement it by disabling the telemetry system entirely.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

yeah, I'm also getting some cartel / illegal-or-should-be-illegal anti-competitive practice vibes from this coordination of having the "Alliance for Automotive Innovation" push out the message.

because do I believe that some of the manufacturers are unable to ship a "disable location data" checkbox given a 2-year timeline? sure.

but do I believe that every single one of the auto manufacturers is unable to meet the 2-year deadline? no, absolutely not.

what seems more likely is that most of the manufacturers were able to meet the deadline, but a few of them don't have their shit together and weren't able to (possibly only for a subset of models)

and what should happen from there is the compliant cars get updated and can be sold, and the ones with updates that are behind schedule get pulled from the market until the update is available.

and like, that's the "free market" at work. if you write better automotive software that you're able to update more quickly, you'll be able to sell it even when requirements change. if you write bad software that's hard to update, you're going to end up losing sales because of it. and then companies that write better software will tend to succeed in the long run.

in particular with this regulation, it would be a significant black eye for a car dealership to say to a customer "you can't buy that car...why not? oh, well it tracks your location and phones home with that data. and that can't be turned off...to the point that their engineers had 2 years to add a checkbox disabling the feature and they couldn't do it"

so what happens instead is the automakers put up this united front where they try to insist that unless the law is changed to suit their demands, they will stop selling all cars across the entire state. which, no, fuck off, that's bullshit.

they should update the software to comply with the law. and if they can't do it, they should admit "yeah we baked location collection so deeply into the software that even on a 2-year timeframe we couldn't ship a simple checkbox that allowed disabling it".