I was in mainland China a week ago and rode in a few different domestic electric cars when taking DiDi (Uber), from BYD and others. All pretty great experiences, good build quality. A surprising percent of the cars on the street in Kunming were electric - maybe 25%. The other cards make me expect good things from the Xiaomi.
My problem with Xiaomi is the absolutely crazy data gathering.
I visited one of their mall stores of theirs and literally the only product (out of many) not requiring an app was some sort of shaving machine. A goddamn pole fan requiring an app!
On the other hand, all modern cars seem to be pretty bad at this. Tesla cars appear to be a privacy nightmare.
- The car companies claim not only the owners' data, but the data of _any passengers_. I don't think people reasonably expect that sitting in a friend's car grants consent to collect data on them.
- Almost no brands allow people to request their data be deleted.
- Nissan claims the right to know their owner's sexual activity. Kia claims the right to know their owner's sex lives.
> - Almost no brands allow people to request their data be deleted.
I assume this has an implicit "in the USA"? Trying this in Europe would be an awfully bad idea -- GDPR has teeth, unlike most American consumer protection regulations.
Realistically, even iot wall sockets and switch controllers are now a well served market. Is there any electrical appliance that has no merit being externally controllable, and thus a potential data source?
We'd need Synology to gain way more market power than Apple and Google (and Xiaomi and every other global makers) to get a full user managed hub instead of the cloud first approach we have now.
> My problem with Xiaomi is the absolutely crazy data gathering. [...] On the other hand, all modern cars seem to be pretty bad at this.
Exactly. We'll hardly find one car, or for that matter any object with enough electronics on board which is both closed and connected, that doesn't use the technology to gather data on the user. Spying is a profitable business nobody in the industry can resist to.
They are a global brand now. If you use their apps in Europe you are presented with the choice of cloud locations (Germany) and they do comply with the GDPR. There are far worse actors out there then Xiaomi.
Why would there be insurance penalties if my car can't talk to its servers? Or why would a car go into emergency mode every time I took a holiday up in the mountains?
