Fiat Chrysler's Android-Based Uconnect 5 Infotainment System Gains Wireless CarPlay and More

[ArtOfWarfare]

A $20k diamond ring or $30k Rolex doesn't have Wi-Fi.

Wi-Fi in a car was a stupid idea that carmakers put in because they were too cheap to put in cellular. Ford did this years ago to compete against GM OnStar. As I recall, it did absoultely nothing. If you bought one specific LTE dongle, you could hook your smartphone up via Wi-Fi to... LTE.

I had Wi-Fi in a current MY Nissan rental. It does absolutely nothing again but upload spyware analytics data.

You don't have Wi-Fi when you're out driving, and when you're home you don't need to do stuff in your car.

You use the wifi for reception when you're underground or in a parking garage and for downloading software updates.

Your car did nothing with its wifi because it was made by a company that's utterly clueless about how to do useful stuff on the internet.

 

[canonical]

This is news to me. Do you have any links to reputable sources validating this claim or is this just tinfoil hat paranoia?

As I recall, BMW published that the radiation levels within a vehicle using a mobile phone can be 10 times that outside, due to reflection off glass, and the signal being boosted to compensate for the vehicle moving. Hence their advice to use a snap-in adaptor (though it would have been better if that used an external antenna entirely, not just to supplement signal strength).

 

[belanger]

As I recall, BMW published that the radiation levels within a vehicle using a mobile phone can be 10 times that outside, due to reflection off glass, and the signal being boosted to compensate for the vehicle moving. Hence their advice to use a snap-in adaptor (though it would have been better if that used an external antenna entirely, not just to supplement signal strength).

I would love a source on this as the claim doesn't make much sense to me. If a cell phone could increase it's power output to dangerous levels while in motion, it could conceivably do the same in other situations. This would never pass the FCC regulations.

 

[konqerror]

I would love a source on this as the claim doesn't make much sense to me. If a cell phone could increase it's power output to dangerous levels while in motion, it could conceivably do the same in other situations. This would never pass the FCC regulations.

No study said it was dangerous, but rather that it happens. 10x (10 dB) is not much of an increase. The range from minimum to maximum power on a cell phone is a factor of around 10,000,000 (70 dB). A 10 dB loss from a car sounds very reasonable, though the original commenter is probably mistaken in saying it's due to glass. Glass is fairly transparent to RF. It's an issue of the metal car body.

However, you can tell people who get headaches and other claimed effects are fake: the power increase needed to pass through one wall in a house or building is roughly 100-500x (20-25 dB). A car has nice big holes for RF to propagate out, so its path loss is substantially less than a building. So if there's an issue with cars, its 2-3 orders of magnitude worse in a house.

You do get a significant performance boost from going to an external antenna not only due to reflections in the car body, but also because external antennas can be physically large, are set away from your body and other potentially lossy objects, and because they sit on a nice big metal surface.