Hello people, my family recently bought a Renault 5 e-tech. The car itself is great, but there are some aspects that creep me out, especially the driver-facing camera. We didn’t actually know that such a camera existed before we bought the car, it was only mentioned as the car was given to us.
The cameras official purpose is to see, if you are tired and paying attention to the road, by some “AI magic”, I suppose. You can also let it scan your face, so that you automatically get logged into your profile.
I personally think, that that is kinda creepy, especially as there is no visual indication if the camera is currently recording and no official way to disable the camera hardware-wise. When it is being coverd, the car immediately complains about it.
When talking to friends or family about it, I got one of two reactions: equal concern, or “nice feature actually”, “what about the camera on your laptop?”, “you are way too paranoid”, “I have noting to hide; it is only me driving being recorded”.
I have also seen such cameras in other cars, BYD for example.
What do you think, is this creepy or am I too paranoid? Does anyone know where the actual data is processed, on device or on some cloud server? Do you have any experience with such cameras? I couldn’t really find any information about it on the internet.
You can probably do an hybrid conversion of a popular ICE vehicle.
The newest kits replace the transmission and adds a battery in the trunk. The engine is then converted to run at a fixed RPM for max efficiency. You can also plug them in to charge at home and on short trips they never even start the engine.
Aside form the lost Trunk space, there are very few downsides.
There really should be more investment in this area so it becomes available dor mor cars.
Any examples of such kits or estimates of the cost?
5k to 8k depending on vehicle. Nothing mass manufactured yet. A lot of those products in the developing world. Lots of full electric conversion kits as well, but range is usually short to keep cost and size low.