[iAMkenough]

As an aside, what new cars don’t include location tracking?

My experience is they all have satellite connections and require some level of telemetry. My car throws a persistent check engine light and error message on the radio if you disconnect the telematics control unit.

[tmerch]

I don't have this info unfortunately. I can say from personal experience that you can remove tracking from the 24 and older Subaru BRZ for about $50 usd, or less if you make your own passive adapter. I can also say the 24 and older low trim brz does NOT have tracking installed from the factory. From my research before buying the brz, many if not all Subarus of this era use the same hardware. There's an older version of this hardware as well that can also be deleted (and should be deleted because it's an older cellular tech that is no longer active and leads to battery drain while the car is unused).

The only problem my car has now is an occasional failure of Android Auto with a time sync error. There's an ota update for the head unit available that may or may not be related. I don't plan to install it. I only put 1000 miles on the car before removing the cellular connection so they could log the engine break in period as being done correctly for warranty purposes, so I'm not sure if it was an existing issue or related to removing cellular.

Afaik, having built in gps is not an issue since it's a receiver and doesn't transmit. The tracking issue is because of cellular.

I would check if the low trims exclude telematics before buying a car. If so, you can probably remove it from the higher trims but do your research.