It’s definitely designed to be able to send signals to satellites, and there are satellites designed to pick up signals from devices that aren’t designed to reach them.
But, they can also just see where your car is going visually, and get any audio/video from inside with your phone that connects directly to cell towers, so you might be right that no satellite is actually ever spying on your car’s 3G modem.
Cars are all spyware now but if you choose a bike to avoid that, the spyware in the cars will not be used to blame the person who kills you instead of blaming you for riding a bike
There is a tiny number of cars available (mainly certain years of Nissan Leaf afaik) from right when batteries were getting kinda good but this stuff wasn’t all added yet
I bet the authorities can still pick up the telemetry with satellites. Of course, they can also just see the car.
Wow, so we’re not even in the top 30 when you count tied countries
The sources are just people who know saying it, like me. The designers wouldn’t publicly admit it or anything.
Cell phone range is impacted by ground obstruction, the curvature of the earth itself getting in the way, atmospheric effects
The closest satellites are about 160km up, where a 3G transmitter can reach when it’s looking straight up with no Earth and less air in the way
The companies that designed the 3G standard and manufactured some of the phones also do military contracts for stuff like the radios in spy satellites, they knew what they were doing
It also stands out as intentional because making the range go beyond the curvature of the earth is just crippling infrastructure, wasting battery and putting millions of people in danger (can’t call 911 with a dead phone)
Lower-power devices with mesh networking would have made more sense with the powerful processors and high usage phones were getting by the middle of the 3G era, but the “cellular” design is much more convenient to monitor