I know you can yank the modem out of a SuperDuty. Say what you will about them, they're work-oriented despite the luxury packages available and don't force you into being treated like the product -- Ford will track your location if you don't pull the modem, but at least it isn't necessary for the ICU and it doesn't nag you about the anything being disconnected. Fuel prices and gas economy are another issue...

(You may be able to do this with other Ford models)

Motorcycles are the last refuge of vehicle privacy. No (japanese) sportbike manufacturer would dare track customer activity. They really do not want to know how thier customers use thier products.

Great question. It feels like there's no real options here except buying older cars. Mozilla did a review and every brand they looked at flunked

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-...

The "least creepy" were Renault and Dacia and the "most creepy" were Nissan and Buick.

Apparently there's tools like Privacy4Cars that could help you delete your car. Based on their website, it seems their primary customer is enterprise

https://privacy4cars.com/

A 90s Camry, Corolla, or Civic seems to have become the peak minimalist car. Shame we will never likely see an EV equivalent focused on utility and cost efficiency without all the bloat. I don’t think there is a good option sadly, any ICE car will eventually just become unmaintainable, and I can’t see a path to EVs that are just cars and don’t come with all this tracking.. hope to be proved wrong..

I’m hoping the new Slate electric cars don’t have this.

It's easy for me to say because I don't mind old cars, but you really don't have to go that old to find something without ad-tech or tracking. You can have a completely acceptable experience in say a 2015 Toyota Camry or Crown or whatever equivalent you get in your country, with lane assist and excellent safety, but no phoning home.

The answer really depends on how much you don't want to be tracked, is it a big concern worth a lot of effort and compromise, or do you just kinda wish it wasn't happening?

If the former, there are plenty of vehicles to choose from the relatively recent past. I haven't looked into it but I imagine a lot of cars could have their phoning home disabled too, and it'd be surprising if all of these cars will be paying for an internet connection/SIM for decades to come so eventually the modern ones will fall off the net anyway.

The one with a fuse on the modem circuit, no?

'course it does .. any custom build shop will leave such things out on request, a great many don't even add in remote networking to begin with.

eg: https://www.okaaustralia.com/