Verizon Retrofits Vintage Legacy Vehicles With Smart Features 87
An anonymous reader writes: Verizon have released an after-market system called Hum that can bring 'smart' features to 150 million existing cars of various vintages going as far back as 1999. The system consists of an on-board diagnostic (OBD) reader plugged into the vehicle's OBD port and a Bluetooth-enabled device clipped to the visor. It's the presence of the ODB port that limits the maximum age of the car to 1996. Hum comes with an app, and enables features such as automatic accident reporting, roadside assistance services and the tracking of stolen cars. The service will cost $14.99 per month via subscription.
Just what I need for an old car! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Just what I need for an old car! (Score:4, Insightful)
Another monthly payment on top of everything else. Thanks, Verizon!
Don't worry. You'll feel better when it's not Verizon offering you an optional monitoring service for a small monthly fee.
Soon it will be your auto insurance provider demanding you install this standard monitoring service that comes with your new insurance policy.
Of course, they'll sell this concept under the guise of making everyone safer and thus lowering insurance claims. Odd part is somehow this will cost you the consumer more in the end.
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They already tried with me. 5% off? No thanks State Farm. Go spy on your other customers.
Progressive was more generous for me - 30% off for Big Brother device. The only issue that price with 30% off was still about the same as competitor offer without device.
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Don't worry. You'll feel better when it's not Verizon offering you an optional monitoring service for a small monthly fee.
It will look like nothing compared to your Self-Driving Car Cloud Support fee of $0.30 per mile driven.
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"Soon it will be your auto insurance provider demanding you install this"
Doubtful. New cars will already come with it. Old ones usually get state minimun insurance where the service wouldn't really benefit the inusrance company anyway.
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To say nothing about the ridiculous price. Especially for a service that's unlikely to be used in any given month. F'em all.
If it's not working all the time, it's not working. That's the whole point of these systems. A lot of what it offers (like, knowing where your 85 year old grandpa's car is when he's late coming back from golfing and not answering his phone) isn't useful if it's only online and using its SIM card and burning some bandwidth when the driver decides just that moment to turn it on. If $15 bucks for a mobile device's connectivity and use of their services is too much for you, just don't buy it. There are plenty
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Where in China are you writing from?
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Hopefully this is not continuously tracking your car and sending details of every minute of your travel to Verizon.
If you want to know where grandpa is, it could just send a message to the car and retrieve the position.
If there is a fault code or an accident, it could just send a message.
The data use requirements for this should be minuscule (and so should the price).
It seems targeted at clueless technophobes who are willing to pay for (false) security.
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Just what older cars need: An add-on exploitable wireless security hole that you pay fifteen bucks a month for. Thanks, Verizon!
Look, you can't have a Panopticon if you can't monitor everybody.
Why do you hate America?
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Re:Just what I need for an old car! (Score:4, Funny)
Vintage, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Vintage, eh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Thinking the same thing here... I don't consider anything made after 1980 to be "vintage".
Stupid headline had me thinking how they managed to stuff all of this into a 1963 Chevy II Nova SuperSport...
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I was told that PCs from 1999 were "antique", so go figure! I could have replied that they were i686 + PAE, but I sadly know better than to do that when unwarranted.
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That's hard to imagine. Either I'm old, or that's really stupid.
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You're old. Historical plates are for car older than x-years old. At some point 2015 cars will be historical. Unless you want historical to mean 'of historical significance' but then you would have government officials deciding that list each year instead of spending time on important things.
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Everything is vintage when you're abusing the word to refer to things unrelated to wine.
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"Vintage" is good. "Legacy" is bad. They want you to think of your old car as "Legacy" so you'll want to upgrade it.
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I suppose ye Americans are living in a faster-paced consumerist throw-away society. If it's not this year's model it's considered old.
Turn of phrase. The average car age, not even it's lifespan, is 11.4 years now. There's actually a LOT of 20+ year old cars on the roads.
Re: samzenpus makes clicks for Dice (Score:2)
Also, Dice eats balls. CTRL+F vint - no matches.
I can't tell if samzenpus is the idiot, or submitter, but either way someone needs to die in a fire. Fires are deadly, but slow. And well deserved.
That Verizon? (Score:5, Funny)
Hopefully they didn't use the code from their tech dispatch system- I don't want my car to give me a two hour window for a drive to the corner store, and then miss it anyway.
So now even old cars can be hacked! (Score:3, Funny)
I hope nobody retrofits bicycles... Otherwise everything is lost!
Ask this: Will you accept liability? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Ask this: Will you accept liability? (Score:1)
Want to see something creepy?
Sort the letters:
CAN -> ACN
OBD -> BDO
CAN is one less than OBD! #illuminati
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I don't know what's more stunning. The fact that what you said is true or the fact that you noticed such a thing.
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Vintage? (Score:5, Informative)
"as far back as 1999"
Thats not vintage
A vintage car is one made between 1919 and 1930.
1918 and earlier then its a veteran
1931 to WWII and its post-vintage
Vehicles made in the latter half of the twentieth century may be considered 'classic' but certainly not vintage.
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No, vintage is anything made before the year 2005.
Stupid teenagers.
Signed,
a little kid.
Two possibly useful features and one useless one (Score:3)
The accident reporting and roadside assistance features could be useful. As soon as these become readily available, though, one of the first things that a car thief would do is pull the dongle out of the OBD II port and throw it and the visor widget out the window, making it impossible to track the car. As a built in module, it works, because it's difficult for a thief to remove, but if it can be removed in 30 seconds without tools, it's worthless for tracking a stolen car.
Re:Two possibly useful features and one useless on (Score:5, Interesting)
The accident reporting and roadside assistance features could be useful. As soon as these become readily available, though, one of the first things that a car thief would do is pull the dongle out of the OBD II port and throw it and the visor widget out the window, making it impossible to track the car. As a built in module, it works, because it's difficult for a thief to remove, but if it can be removed in 30 seconds without tools, it's worthless for tracking a stolen car.
Thing is, accident reporting and roadside assistance features can be had with any cell phone. And also some aftermarket in-dash radio/gps units.
Having these features as an add-on to the car would be convenient, if not for the monthly cost. It seems like Verizon is really reaching here.
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You got robbed. $12.
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Or a Scangauge 2, which also plugs into the OBD II port, can be placed anywhere where its contents can be useful.
Of course, a generic Bluetooth OBD tool for $10 from Amazon + Torque is another solution.
As the above, none of the above require a constant connection, no cellular device, no monthly fees, and you can place it where you want.
Companies wanting to attach stuff to your ODB2 port for data mining is getting old. From insurance dongles which will ding you if you stomp hard on the brakes or have a long
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Great, now old cars can get hacked too! (Score:3)
I had a feeling those with cars that hackers could not take over at will may have felt left out. Ain't technology great?
Or you could... (Score:5, Interesting)
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That's true, I was just proposing the solution I had personal experience with. The point is, none of these solutions require a monthly fee.
This is similar in my view to Comcast or whatever they're calling themselves these days trying to sign people up for a security system at an inflated price monthly price that continues ad infinitum, when you can *buy* the equipment and incur no recurring cost for less than a year's cost of the service.
Cable companies still seem to be locked into the business plan of "pr
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But then you have to think about what the codes mean. You don't have a 'certified mechanic' to interpret things for you.
The horror.
um, no thanks (Score:2)
Hum that canÂbring 'smart' features to 150 million existing carsÂof various vintages going as far back as 1999
With all of the potential for malicious hacks in modern cars with "smart features", why would I want to introduce an attack vector into a car that's relatively secure? And pay fifteen bucks a month for it?
ELM327 + Torque Pro app (Score:2, Informative)
You can buy a cheap ELM327 module that plugs into your OBD2 port. It can connect to your Android over Bluetooth, and then run the Torque Pro app. Very cheap, and a one time price, and gives you a lot of functionality that Verizon wants to gouge you for. It may not have some of the extra frills. But with these devices internet connected, what could possibly go wrong? Didn't somebody just demonstrate a hack of internet connected Jeeps?
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But with these devices internet connected, what could possibly go wrong?
Well for one thing, what's the security like on an el cheapo ELM327 dongle?
I drive an older car because it ISN'T smart (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a 10 year old Honda Civic, base model, power nothing. I really am not looking forward to buying a new car as it seems they all have some Smart (TM) enabled tracking computerized bullshit that does nothing to enhance driving safety or performance, it just adds more shiny stuff to the sticker price.
I need a reliable set of wheels. Period. It has been my experience that adding computers to things does not make my life any simpler or easier, it simply adds a new layer of headaches.
Please, everyone, fuck off with the IoT shill - some of us don't want it or need it.
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10 year old Honda Civic weighs next to nothing and if engineered for no PS or PBs, it would then likely be easy enough to drive for most drivers. That said, this car probably has PBs as most even base model cars and trucks do.
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No power steering or power brakes? That must be hard to drive!
Many cars had Vacuum-powered break assist, which many drivers did not know about. They were often not consider to be "powered", since they were not hydraulic-assisted like the power steering.
And since this thread is about computer controls, they might qualify anyway, as non-computer-controlled. Certainly they were more reliable than the computer controlled breaks in the Toyota, that was subject of a court case last year.
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You forgot "and get iff my lawn!"
You're not on my lawn because my older car is on my lawn, on blocks.
Now get off my car!
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Yep, this. My 2002 truck is more pleasant to drive in a lot of ways than my 2011 commuter car.
- No "I Agree" button on the touchscreen sever single time I start it up.
- AC controls that are a couple simple knobs, not monstrous buttons that get reset to outside air and AC every time I cycle through the defrost setting to get back to front vents.
- No XM selection I have to cycle through to get from my iPod back to FM.
- No downloaded messages about how my carbon footprint is doing for the last month that star
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I don't know of (m)any cars that have active, continuous tracking (maybe Tesla's?) but you're also missing out on a great deal of safety features. Crashing a 10 yo car vs a current car will differ greatly in survivability. Not that a 10yo car is 'old' or in any way needs to be replaced but avoiding safety features on purpose seems idiotic.
So your old car can get hacked too! (Score:1)
So hackers will be able to cut YOUR brakes just like on the new cars!
The future is now! (Score:2)
That's so cutting edge, what's next, something that will fit in my pocket?!
Also known as: (Score:2)
"How to ruin cars that don't come with this crap."
Well that's one of the worst summaries I can REM (Score:2)
Verizon have released an after-market system called Hum that can bring 'smart' features to 150 million existing cars of various vintages going as far back as 1999.
1996. Maybe a couple of 1995s.
The system consists of an on-board diagnostic (OBD) reader plugged into the vehicle's OBD port
OBD-II, actually.
and a Bluetooth-enabled device clipped to the visor. It's the presence of the ODB port
That's On-Board Diagnostics, not Ol' Dirty Bastard. And also, OBD-II.
that limits the maximum age of the car to 1996.
That's why it's OBD-II. Because cars before 1996 had a variety of interfaces, some of which went away and some of which just got folded into OBD-II. We now call these "OBD-I" collectively, although they actually have broad variety.
Hum comes with an app, and enables features such as automatic accident reporting, roadside assistance services and the tracking of stolen cars. The service will cost $14.99 per month via subscription.
So, it's like Onstar, which wasn't mentioned here why? Seems kind of obvious.
You know I wasn't thinking? (Score:2)
Maintenance, fuel, registration and insurance aren't expensive enough. I need another recurring fee and some privacy invasion. I'm sold if it's compatible with my Zune though.
My car is too old. Thank goodness. (Score:2)
Please Verizon! Now give us window cranks! (Score:2)
Please Verizon... give us window cranks! Maybe... you could find a way to inject mesenchymal stem or progenitor cells directly into the vehicle's OBD port that would circulate in the wiring harness until they find and attach to the window crank receptor ligands, which still reside in the motor body driving the worm or ratchet gear in door panels. The cells would begin to grow knob complexes in door panels, culminating in functional window cranks that can manually turn cranking motors, with a simple clutch
Or you can (Score:2)
The OBD-II reader can be found for about $20 on lots of sites. You don't need the Snap-On readers that cost $1,000 or more. And you definitely don't need to pay Verizon an additional $14.99 a month in addition for what you're shelling out for Verizon mobile service too.
Unecessary (Score:2)
Meh.. it's just another telecom offering for a monthly fee what any good maker could provide themselves.
You just need a Raspi set up as a car computer with ODBC reader. Add a GSM modem for those emergency calling features. I suppose you could use that for tracking too. Better yet though.. get a ham license and track the car via APRS. It's free! Saves minutes on your sim card.
Total price if you are a good scrounger.. less than a years worth of Verizon's service. After that it's basically free so long as you