> many of those features were available over 433MHz radio well before cars were connected to the internet.

And as I've said before here many times, it usually had really shitty range making those features nearly useless. It's not the same. If you have to be within like a 15 second walk (if even that far), remote start is practically worthless by comparison. It takes at least a few minutes to really start cooling down or warming up a car. And having such a limited range to just hope you hear the lock honk/beep isn't nearly as useful to find a car rather than just seeing it's position on a map.

As someone who lives in a place where we get months of 100F+ days having reliable long range remote start is a killer feature. I don't think I'd bother buying a car today without that feature.

> This new phone app solution requires you to pull out the phone instead of the car key

Well, I don't normally carry a car key as I just usey phone for that these days...so...about that...

> turn on gps, wait for a fix (imagine that in an underground parking!)

Have you never used a device with AGPS or a modern smartphone generally? I can't remember having to seriously wait for a GPS fix, and it can find location from things like cellular and WiFi networks. My experience is almost always just open the app, tap vehicle location, and boom practically instantly there's a map with the last known location of my car. There isn't any waiting.

Remote starters generally had really poor range. I know, I've owned a few of them over the years. Often you need direct line of sight and have to be somewhat close, usually only slightly better range than the regular fob assuming you installed it right.

It was a terrible experience compared to being able to issue the command from anywhere. I can be in the middle of a shopping mall and start having the car cool down well before I get there, while before I'd practically have to already be on the right floor of the parking garage.

The technology required to make it possible for you to send a remote HVAC command to your car without Ford necessarily being able to tell that you did that is complex enough that I expect most FAANG companies wouldn't pull it off successfully.

It takes someone to store some of this data somewhere. I'd prefer more choices on how this data is handled, no doubt. See the last sentence of my previous comment.

But yes, generally speaking and replying to your original question of "requires telemetry to remotely access certain features on their car", yes it takes some kind of access to telemetry data to access telemetry data. The whole feature is access to telemetry data in the end, presented in useful ways. Whether Ford uses some kind of homomorphic encryption to handle that data or sets up end to end encryption between your phone and the data receiver from the car or allows you to configure third party telemetry retrieval services is a whole different question to ask.

When dealing with an industry and company that historically has trafficked heavily in deception and legal sleight-of-hand, this is not something that can simply be assumed.

Do they have contracts in place with every single entity they provide your personal data to, regardless of context, that they are not allowed to sell/exchange/give away said personal data to data brokers or insurance companies and that such an agreement must be made with any and every company that, in turn, acquires this data?

Oh! And lets not forget the ever-important derivative information.

Information derived from your personal information that Ford or any other car manufacturer collects that can still identify you should also be off the table for ever getting in the hands of data brokers or insurance companies under any context.