Except it’s autonomous, it doesn’t report to anywhere.
It’s the scale that always crushes these things, on 1 car yes you can do that. But there’s hundreds of millions of vehicles in this country, if they’re reporting that kind of data back constantly the system will just be crushed.
Then of course there’s the fact that NOBODY has ANY plans for central control, so they simply won’t be having the necessary stuff in the cars.
And finally, why the hell would the government even care? That’s always the final rub for these control conspiracy theories. The government doesn’t give a damn where you’re going, they don’t care what your hobbies are, they don’t care if you’re a fat alcoholic. Heck, actually they kind of prefer out of shape people, they tend to live long enough to pay a lot into social security, but die young enough to not get much out.
So in the end, it is, much the loyalty card kerfuffle, and so many others, not going to happen. We will not have centrally controlled cars, period. Not this century. Maybe a dozen massive technological leaps from now we’ll have smart roads that drive the cars, but that’s a looooong way off, and we’ll all be dead by then.
Except once the government gets its hooks into the cars’ systems, they won’t be truly autonomous. That’s not really the best word to use.
Most cars being built today have the capability to report back to the mother ship. GM calls their system “OnStar”, but every car maker has something equivalent. If they can unlock your door, they can do just about anything else that the programming allows.
Just because there aren’t any plans to do what we’re talking about, doesn’t mean there won’t be sometime in the future. And just because you don’t know about any such plans doesn’t mean that they aren’t being considered.
As you say, the government doesn’t care about tracking the great majority of people as they go about their business. But there will always be people that are not, shall we say, obedient and docile sheep, and that small subset of the population is what the government will be watching.
Anything that CAN be abused, at some point, WILL be abused.
It will be interesting to see what happens to Apple over that locked iPhone, and what the government will try to force them to do, most likely as a condition for having access to the US market.