I love hardware mysteries.

I mostly drive old 90s enthusiast cars, and I have had my fair share of undocumented switches.

The most surprising to date was in a Nissan Silvia, from 1989. Sometimes it wouldn't crank off the key, given the solution chosen it must have been a wiring issue. Instead of fixing that wiring, the previous owner had directly wired power to the starter via a "missle switch" style switch, and instead of mounting it anywhere remotely useful, it was just spliced into the loom and sat on top of the rocker cover in the engine bay.

So if it wouldn't start, I had to leave the key at "on", hop out of the car, bump that switch and then it would start. Obviously standing in front of a manual car while starting it is the dumbest thing next to wiring your starter to a switch in the engine bay. Fortunately I never ran myself over.

Another one, I will keep short, a 97 Skyline would only light up ready to start 1/4 times. Seemingly randomly, on key bump. Turns out the flash memory for the fuel map had corrupted, and depending on the temperature and a bit of randomness from the sensors, it would only hit a corrupted cell occasionally. It got worse and worse as more of the table corrupted, until it would only start say 1/60 key bumps.

It was a dodgy power wire causing the corruption, and fixing that plus reflashing the tune fixed the issue.

Steven Wright: "I have this switch in my house that doesn't seem to do anything. It's in a hallway, so every time I pass it, I flip it: up, down, up, down...up...down. A few months after I got the house, a guy from Indonesia called me on the phone and said...'stop it'"

Most of those GPS trackers for corporate use require a data connection, which is probably costing someone $€£ 10/month for the line at least.

Usually when you stop paying for that subscription, the line gets deactivated.

So probably nobody is getting that GPS trace.

> Unlike the Peugeot, the Opel has gadgets - quite a few of them.

It is funny because that Opel IS a Peugeot.

Same group (Stellantis), and same mechanicals as the contemporary Peugeot 208 with only minor aesthetics and branding modifications.

> I now know my car is being tracked still, and that they know I did try out what the car’s acceleration is like at full throttle.

At 101hp, I am sure noisy, but not thrilling.

Fake/simulated security indicator.