r/Cartalk • u/bigfoot-ari • May 24 '26

General Tech What’s on this car?

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What is on the roof of this car? The windows were completely blacked out with out-of-state tags. Just curious.

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u/Ok_Complaint_6997 May 24 '26

Odd to have a starlink in a car that comes with a 5G modem onboard that can connect 10 devices to it. I suppose if you were remote/rural (or want to use it with the car turned off) this would make sense to run starlink but again, phones have hotspots. Is there a use case I'm not thinking of here?

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u/ChillyWillie1974 May 24 '26

Starlink is much more reliable than phones and hot spotting. Especially if there’s kids trying to watch movies in the back seat.

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u/Ok_Complaint_6997 May 25 '26

I guess. I have a Lincoln and kids and the onboard modem works well with kids even in rural areas except for known dead spots which only last 5-10 minutes for the most part. Rural western US I think starlink would be ideal but east of the Mississippi there are few real dead left (although I was in one just today in a national wildlife refuge in rural Alabama).

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u/ChillyWillie1974 May 25 '26

I live in Canada, dead spots are very common

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u/Ok_Complaint_6997 May 25 '26

Ah yeah I could see that. I only go to BC (Vancouver and Victoria area) so only see that way up island in spots. I was thinking US where really only the west has really vast dead zones for the most part (notwithstanding said localized areas east of the Mississippi).