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Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

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Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

#261

Post by kps »

lkozma wrote: post #8

was posted here sometime ago: The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please." He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you." "I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you boug…

> Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly

Joe clearly doesn't have an Apple door.

Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

#262

Post by nanidin »

brewdad wrote: post #148
black_puppydog wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it isn't. There are tons of examples of whole industries just switching to user-/customer-hostile practices/products, meaning there's simply no more way to vote with your wallet. Happened like that with even trivial things like the milk market in Germany. Within a year or two, fresh milk had suddenly all but vanished from the shelves. Once pay-for-fob becomes the norm, good luck trying to enter that market w…

My local news used to offer an ad-free experience for about $10/mo. I happily paid it. One day they updated their site and starting nagging me to turn off my ad blocker. Wouldn't let me read anything. I canceled that day and told them why. Now they get $0 a month from me. They keep begging me back with $5/mo offers. Nope. That bridge has been burned.

Similar experience with my local newspaper also. They don't get it. We don't want ads and their content is not worth the slap in the face of paying for and then getting shown ads in return.

Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

#263

Post by alistairSH »

winternett wrote: post #103
lkozma wrote: post #8

was posted here sometime ago: The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please." He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you." "I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you boug…

Many other car makers do this too. My Volvo has a remote start feature installed (that I paid for in buying the car) that is not accessible without enrollment in a (pretty much useless otherwise) monthly subscription service. It's flat out criminal considering that I could have just bought the device with a remote at Auto Zone for 1/4 of the price (that also doesn't allow the auto maker to track/log each time I use i…

Toyota is being lambasted for forcing a subscription on a function between the key fob and the car (RF signal). There is no app to port to various device OSes. There is no server infrastructure to maintain.

Subaru's subscription is for remote start via app.

Which is Volvo's service?

Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

#264

Post by dr-detroit »

servytor wrote: post #120
lkozma wrote: post #8

was posted here sometime ago: The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please." He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you." "I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you boug…

Unrelated, but one of my favorite quotes from PKD is this one from Now Wait for Last Year: --- “All right," Eric agreed. "If you were me, and your wife were sick, desperately so, with no hope of recovery, would you leave her? Or would you stay with her, even if you had traveled ten years into the future and knew for an absolute certainty that the damage to her brain could never be reversed? And staying with her would…

Chilling when you think of all the demi humans that "walk" around in 2021 with those big plastic smiles.

Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

#265

Post by otikik »

donmcronald wrote: post #40
zeroflow wrote: post #6

That is just bullshit. A $8/mo charge for a app based remote start? I could live with that. Servers need power, the app needs updates etc. A $8/mo charge for something which does not incur costs for Toyota? Hell no. It seems like bit by bit - every single industry is going down a fucked up route. TVs with built in ads? Cars with pay-by-month features? DRM locked coffee machines? I really hope, there is some sort of e…

There were people in a thread on Reddit saying they have cars with $40/month of subscription services. That seems absolutely insane to me. My family buys used cars, usually in the 3-5 year old range, we do our own repair work, and drive everything for 10-15 years. It's usually close to 15 than 10. We drive them until they drop. I figured it out one day and the lifetime TCO has been about $100/month per vehicle. We re…

It seems there is a market there for people like you and your family: removing/disabling/hacking the DRM on those used cars.

Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

#266

Post by ljm »

NotPractical wrote: post #113
Y_Y wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can do better than a link to a Reddit thread with a screenshot of some text. I found this on GameFAQs slightly modified from the original and posted the day after, on 2013-06-16. -2018 -wake up feeling sick after a late night of playing vidya -excited to play some halo 2k19 -"xbox on" -... -"XBOX ON" -"Please verify that you are "annon332" by saying "Doritos™ Dew™ it right!" -"Doritos™ Dew™ it right" -"ERROR! Plea…

Does this content really have a place on here?

They're not so different from the old bash.org quotes (as in hunter2) or the old b3ta ones. It's just classic internet culture.

I think this particular one satirizes a patent Microsoft filed showing how to detect how many people are watching a TV (via the Kinect).

Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

#267

Post by barbazoo »

beervirus wrote: post #248
barbazoo wrote: post #244

Why people remotely start their car is beyond my comprehension most of the time. Unless you're in an extreme climate and absolutely have to bring the car's interior temperature to something survivable, what's the point? We don't have to warm up the engine anymore past a few seconds either. All I can think of is the waste of fuel and unnecessary GHG.

Is Texas an extreme environment? Not particularly, but still, it’s nice to get the air conditioner going a minute or two before getting into a car in August.

Open the windows maybe? Sure it's nice but I wonder if we should consider living without the luxury of having an ICE bring your car to the perfect temperature. I guess people have less GHG emission guilt as me.

Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

#268

Post by Kon-Peki »

donmcronald wrote: post #40
zeroflow wrote: post #6

That is just bullshit. A $8/mo charge for a app based remote start? I could live with that. Servers need power, the app needs updates etc. A $8/mo charge for something which does not incur costs for Toyota? Hell no. It seems like bit by bit - every single industry is going down a fucked up route. TVs with built in ads? Cars with pay-by-month features? DRM locked coffee machines? I really hope, there is some sort of e…

There were people in a thread on Reddit saying they have cars with $40/month of subscription services. That seems absolutely insane to me. My family buys used cars, usually in the 3-5 year old range, we do our own repair work, and drive everything for 10-15 years. It's usually close to 15 than 10. We drive them until they drop. I figured it out one day and the lifetime TCO has been about $100/month per vehicle. We re…

> We really, really need legislation that says advertised features can't require an ongoing subscription

I recently bought a new car. All of the things on the window sticker that required a subscription said "(subscription required)". Is this not enough?

Or are you talking about things like TV/Internet/Radio advertising?

Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

#269

Post by tantalor »

lykahb wrote: post #260

It is a common opinion in this thread that it is unethical to charge for enabling a feature that only needs the local communication between a key fob and a car. And that it is fine if there is a cloud in-between, such as remote start from a smartphone, because it has maintenance costs. If majority of the car buyers agree with this distinction, it would simply create an incentive to route more communication through th…

> it is fine if there is a cloud in-between

But there doesn't need to be cloud in-between for an app to talk to your car. You don't even need Internet. In fact my phone already talks to my car via the King of Denmark, so I'm told.

Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

#270

Post by adrr »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #92
zeroflow wrote: post #6

That is just bullshit. A $8/mo charge for a app based remote start? I could live with that. Servers need power, the app needs updates etc. A $8/mo charge for something which does not incur costs for Toyota? Hell no. It seems like bit by bit - every single industry is going down a fucked up route. TVs with built in ads? Cars with pay-by-month features? DRM locked coffee machines? I really hope, there is some sort of e…

$8/mo is genuinely a lot of money for this kind of infrastructure, even if there are developers and servers to be paid for. Assume that there are only 100,000 users. This would imply $9.6M per year in revenue to cover infrastructure and dev salaries for a system that handles ~2 queries/day/customer! And 100,000 is a very small number. Presumably Toyota has millions of customers. If you think that's reasonable, consid…

Do they also push ads in their app like Tesla? Like referrals or upgrades? Seems to me like they are fleecing the owners.
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