I was highly confused until I read the article. Here is a summary:<p>1. Guy's mom pays off his car loan<p>2. Dealer says we installed a remote immobilizer to protect our loan<p>3. Dealer demands $200 to remove the device since the loan is paid off now<p>4. Guy understandably refuses<p>5. Dealer immobilizes car<p>I think this sort of behavior should mean the end of your dealership. I cannot quantify/identify the actual wrongdoing here but I'm pretty sure there is something illegal.
The article says it well. The GPS only benefits the dealers, and they demand that the customers pay the fees to install, maintain, and remove the devices. 60 years ago this kind of hostile, predatory bullshit would have been met with torches and pitchforks. Today people just have to eat it.
If it can be done remotely, it can be hacked. So just waiting for shady dealers paying hackers to disable cars their competitors sold to drive them out of business.
Note that every canadian pundit is rightly calling this illegal. Disabling a car they no longer had any title over was a mistake and everyone knows it. That said, cars are disabled every day for non-payment of even smaller amounts. These lockouts are vicious tools.
What's interesting is that with such system in place, you could easily kill people. For example, disable the car when you're in a deserted region that hardly sees a traveler every 2 weeks. And while the example is kind of unlikely, the possibility of that happening is frightening. Especially that the protocol behind is MOST LIKELY un-authenticated and could probabaly be spoofed easily by expert researchers.
Glad this made me remember Cory Doctrow riffing on similar scenarios in 2012 with his talk "The Coming Civil War over General-purpose Computing" <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI</a>
> "Immobilizers are most often seen in cases of sub-prime borrowers with questionable credit," he said. "The devices are very effective at keeping people on time with their payments."<p>John Oliver did a whole segment on these scummy dealerships, unloading shitty cars at massive markups deliberately (and not even hiding that they are) targeting borrowers who will probably default, so they can repo the car and resell it to some other poor person.<p>None of this is illegal (except in this case obviously) but it still feels like something that should be illegal, amazes me we're so poor at going after what's obviously a predatory business practice.
Aftermarket alarms, installing stereos and removing unwanted 3rd party electronics on newish cars are all cake compared to mechanical work for the most part.<p>I find it hard to believe that there isn't a car stereo/alarm/electronics shop in Sherbrooke that isn't known to other shops for removing these sort of things. You'd probably have pretty good luck going to the U-pull on a Saturday AM and asking the girl at the desk to point out someone who's a regular then offer them $50 to remove the system.<p>Obviously those sorts of actions are slightly outside of the box for most people but if dealerships want to act scummy then the workarounds become more widely known.<p>Edit: Please do some googling, window shop a few models, read a few installation instruction pdfs for trackers and aftermarket alarm systems before saying they're impossible to remove.<p>If you can install a stereo or aftermarket alarm then you can install/remove on of these. They are not designed to be Ft. Knox. They are designed to be a deterrent for the layman.
There's going to be future battles, effectively DRM for automobiles. Epson has chipped their ink tanks, so you can only use their inks in their printers. Apple does this with their own iPhone spare parts. You have no right to a 3rd party repair, or authorization to hack and replace the software with something else (hence the right to repair laws in the works).<p>So why can't car companies chip all OEM spare parts, and disallow the car from operating if it's had any unauthorized repairs? Just put it into the sales contract. No more 3rd party repairs. Reduced competition. More profit for the car companies and dealers.
How are these GPS trackers installed? I'm assuming they're somehow plugged in through the OBDII port under the dash. If that is the case, can't he just pull out the tracker and continue driving?
I wonder why his grandmother bought the car instead of giving him 13.000. then he could pay a car in installments and have the rest for any emergencies. I never understood why people prefer cancelling credits in an economic crisis instead of keeping them.
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Good news: blockchain of the future will prevent disabling a car for the debt of a person outside the chain of title.<p>Bad news: This is the kind of smart contract I see blockchain handling well: locking people out of cars, houses, hotel rooms, over non-payment.<p>ed: heh. I have touched a sore spot, apparently.