This isn’t just a case of some abrasive people involved. The guy who runs the project, DHH, is an open and proud racist. He posts his very straightforward racist beliefs on his blog. He made ruby on rails, and after being rejected from the ruby community he’s now trying to insert himself into the Linux/open source community. On top of that, the “distro” is Arch + some dot files. Despite that, he’s managed to raise millions of dollars in outside funding, which is insane for open source project. Either his industry connections are willing to look past the racism and hand him a bunch of money anyway, or they actively agree with him and want to build a space for racists in the open source community.
Add in the AI stuff and people have plenty of reason to boycott this project.
Many cars have the modem / LTE as a module that can be disabled. On my car, a 2018 Chevy, the LTE antenna plugs into a networking module in the footwell. I bought an antenna cable and dummy load resistor on Amazon for ~$10 and simply unplugged the LTE antenna in the car and plugged in the dummy antenna. That disables all cell network connectivity but doesn’t effect things like Bluetooth. It’s also easily reversible if someone wanted to do that for some reason.
You can probably Google something like “year make model disable LTE” or “disable telemetry” to get an idea of how hard it would be on your car. Some make it very cheap / easy and some make it very difficult.