There is a fundamental truth you have to understand about car companies:They do not exist to make cars. They exist to make money. That distinction, analyst Kevin Tynan tells me, is why they’re not really interested in making affordable electric vehicles.
Perhaps that’s an oversimplification. Tynan is the director of research at an auto-dealer-focused investment bank, the Presidio Group, with decades of experience as an analyst at firms like Bloomberg Intelligence. What he means isn’t that automakers have no interest in affordable products. It’s that their interest begins and ends with winning customers who will eventually buy more expensive, higher-margin products.
One of the auto industry’s dirtiest secrets is that at scale, it doesn’t cost that much more to make a bigger, more expensive than a smaller and cheaper one. But they can charge you a lot more for the former, which makes this a game of profit margins and not just profits. In recent years especially, that’s a big part of why your new car choices have skewed so heavily toward bigger crossovers, SUVs and trucks.
I disabled the OnStar box on mine and went over it with a flipper zero. Overkill I know but it was a fun afternoon seeing just how many radios and how much signal generation there is in a modern vehicle.
The only radio now is remote start and key auth.
Sidenote if you have an older car you might want to get an OBD2 lock, they’re 30 bucks and are a pretty handy theft deterrent. Metal ones tend to be better.
My manual transmissions are an even better theft deterrent at this point I think, LOL!
(Also, my two oldest cars predate OBD2.)
I never even considered using my flipper to check for outbound signals. I have been wanting to track down the installed LoJack for a while and make sure it’s properly disabled, that might help.
I’m sure you’ve seen it but this guide got me started
https://docs.flipper.net/sub-ghz/read