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Comment by vanilla_nut | Hacker News Reader

I own a Subaru Crosstrek from this same era, it definitely has the Starlink bits in the cockpit ceiling.

There must be more to this story. I've parked that car in an underground parking garage with absolutely no signal on any carrier for at least 2 weeks straight (likely more) with no issue. I've parked it for days at trailheads and wild camping spots around the High Rockies where there's also no signal.

I 100% believe that the Starlink module is poorly programmed, reliant on false assumptions of 3G always existing, and capable of draining the battery. But I would really love to know why that's never happened to me.

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It could be that the modem can still see the phone tower, but its handshake to create a 3G connection fails, which it then retries indefinitely.

That would be different to having no signal whatsoever, where modem wakes up, listens for a tower, concludes there’s nothing there and goes back to sleep again.

That would explain why this issue is only cropping up now that 3G is being turned off, and how this scenario was missed by engineers. They assumed there was either a tower they could communicate with, or nothing. They didn’t account for a perfectly good tower being available, advertising itself as a recognisable network, but refusing to handshake.

I feel like this is it. I camped hundreds of days in areas with no service for miles and never had this problem. My battery ended up dying in my driveway in town.

I’m in the same boat, the one time I had issues with the battery on my 2020 crosstrek was when I accidentally left the dome light on for a week. Looking at the class action lawsuit seemingly related to this: https://www.subarubatterysettlement.com/ looks like the Crosstrek and Impreza aren’t included in the class.

Perhaps they are not impacted for some reason.

I can back this up. I regularly go car camping in the middle of nowhere in the Rockies. Absolutely no service for miles.

I hadn't gone camping for ~4-5 weeks, but still drove my car every day. Suddenly had the battery issue, pulled the plug, and the issue is gone.

I don't really know how to debug this. Something recently changed, but I don't know what. You'd think my battery would've died during all the time that I was out of service.

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