If my car showed me ads I'd return it and get a refund. It's a separate issue.

In my personal experience, for what little that is worth, the traditional AstraZenica vaccine really screwed me up. Badly enough that I couldn't work for a while.

The mRNA COVID vaccines have been fine. Maybe a day or two of feeling off, some shivers the first time. The traditional flu vaccine is much worse.

If they could create a generic flu one that would be great, so they don't have to predict it every year.

It's mandatory on all new cars, but you can disable it yourself if you want to. You are also allowed to replace it with your own system, although I'm not sure why you would want to. The eCall system is heavily regulated, so it only triggers in the event of a serious crash (usually only when the airbags deploy) and then calls the emergency services on speakerphone, as well as sending your location and direction of travel (using GNSS). It works in all EU countries and the UK, and there is no subscription cost.

The cost to the manufacturer is the hardware and some tiny per-vehicle fee to the mobile networks. IoT SIMs start from cents per month for small amounts of data in single quantities, for consumers, so the deal that the manufacturer has is going to be much better.

Sorry to hear you have those issues. I have some auto-immune issues too, though not that bad, and I was really worried during COVID.

Even now I usually get a private COVID and flu vaccination every year. I'm not in any of the categories that get them for free, but aside from the safety they provide, I usually travel over the new year and I don't want to get sick while I'm on holiday.

Darwinism at work.

Not so much a double standard, it's liability. If a human crashes their car, they are responsible. If a robotaxi crashes, the operator is responsible.

The operator will have a fleet of vehicles, so as well as the potential for a large number of very large claims being made against them, if the problem is systemic it might get their whole fleet "grounded" until they can put it right.

Are you talking about Waymo? That's not true at all. Their cars do drive themselves most of the time. They have the ability to call a human when they get into a situation they don't know how to handle, but even then the human doesn't do the driving, it only tells the computer if its plan is acceptable or if it should do something else.

In particular, all the safety stuff is done on the car.

That was Nissan's justification when I asked about it. However my current MG just asked once, and then told me that if anyone else drives it then it's my responsibility to check that they agree to the terms. Maybe MG don't collect as much info so don't need to ask every time.

Chinese cars are better in this regard, e.g. MG's current software lets you set which safety features you want disabled and then save it as a profile. When you start the car they have to be on by law, but you can load your preferences with a couple of taps.

No EULA agreement screen either.

The emergency call feature is mandatory in the EU, and free. Has been compulsory on new cars since 2018.

One of the nice things about mRNA vaccines is that they tend to have fewer side effects. Flu vaccine always makes me feel pretty bad. Hopefully this will be better.

That's what the refund covers. Diminished value, loss of resale value.

Those are not limitations of lidar. For example, snow and heavy rain are just extra noise, and we are pretty good at filtering noise.

Where they have issues is not knowing how to deal with or recognize certain obstacles, but even there lidar and radar have proven how valuable they are. As TFA notes, lidar can see solid objects with certainty, and radar can measure their speed. Tesla has a well known problem where it will drive straight into stationary objects at full speed (disengaging a few milliseconds before collision, for legal reasons), because the cameras can only react to what they understand. Radar in particular doesn't need to understand what it "sees", just that it is stationary and in the vehicle's path.

Highways are actually the easier problem to solve, it's urban areas that are difficult.

Apparently it was done as a software update at some point. I'd be booking the car in for warranty work to remove it, and getting a substantial refund if they can't fix it.

That was a think way back in the day with my Nissan Leaf too. It's not a legal requirement like they claim either. Other manufacturers like MG don't bother, they just have you agree once when setting it up. No ads either.