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What are modern cars like with regard to needing a data connection? My car (2012) just stored all the data from North America locally and that's been incredibly useful when driving without cell service. The Google way in other products seems to assume an internet connection is available, and offline performance is an afterthought.

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My car from 2016 had its own cellphone data and gps. It was unclear to me if the data connection was always on, or if I had to pay for something to enable it.

It seems like even in base model cars, cellular connections are included and enabled for vehicle services. We recently bought a base model car, and without any sort of subscription, the car is connected to always-on cellular as such that the car can be started from a phone app.

Another manufacturer I bought a few years ago had similar capabilities, but only included a couple years of access to it before a subscription fee was involved.

My guess is car manufacturers can get a pretty special rate for cellular plans that are almost certainly IPv6 only and have extremely low/restricted usage for car telemetry.

Seems like a good guess.

I wonder what the privacy story is here?

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