
I have my eye on a new (to me) vehicle in the next couple of years. I’d gone from planning on buying new but have now settled on the lowest mileage 2019 I can find. New enough to be nice and safe and have physical buttons, old enough not to have all these objectionable “features.”
I refer the newest style of vehicles as “spaceships.” Call me old fashioned and old guy yelling at clouds, but I want my next vehicle to be, you know, a vehicle.

Those are separate, but equally concerning, things. Connected features are what this article is about, but telemetry is a different issue. On a new vehicle, you might disable the modem but lose several “features,” perhaps ones that you effectively have to have.
On somewhat older vehicles that don’t rely on connectivity to the same degree, disabling the modem only prevents telemetry data being sent to wherever-it-is that that data goes. That seems to be the sweet spot for me.