Mazda's $10 Subscription for Remote Start Sparks Backlash
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Re: Mazda's $10 Subscription for Remote Start Sparks Backlash
#2Companies love subscription based services. I have to assume it's becauce they're much more lucrative. But many times companies forget the other part: what value are they providing? Telling me I now have to subscribe to something I'm using to owning isn't going to work, or shouldn't work.
Re: Mazda's $10 Subscription for Remote Start Sparks Backlash
#3Companies love subscription based services. I have to assume it's becauce they're much more lucrative. But many times companies forget the other part: what value are they providing? Telling me I now have to subscribe to something I'm using to owning isn't going to work, or shouldn't work.
The problem is it does work, a lot, and not enough people push back to hurt their sales, versus the number of people that just pay it, or weren't going to use the feature anyway.
Same thing with all the data collection and privacy violations of many other companies as of late. They keep doing it because it's not hurting their bottom line. I think tech people often forget that we are not their target audience.
Re: Mazda's $10 Subscription for Remote Start Sparks Backlash
#4Companies love subscription based services. I have to assume it's becauce they're much more lucrative. But many times companies forget the other part: what value are they providing? Telling me I now have to subscribe to something I'm using to owning isn't going to work, or shouldn't work.
Very much indeed. Lots of auto makers are quite naive … there should be laws governing this …
Re: Mazda's $10 Subscription for Remote Start Sparks Backlash
#5> However, irrespective of whether one can afford (or is willing to pay for) a subscription, the key lesson from all this is that, if automakers have their way, the car ownership experience is going to change dramatically in the near future.
Yep, unless people stop buying cars that offer these features, it's just going to get worse and worse. But here's the thing: they won't.
Re: Mazda's $10 Subscription for Remote Start Sparks Backlash
#6As some in the comments correctly point out, this service requires a cellular connection. Which involves costs for Mazda. It's appropriate for them to charge a small monthly fee for the service. My only real complaint about this is discontinuing the keyfob-based feature. All that said, I see no need for remote start, anyway.
Re: Mazda's $10 Subscription for Remote Start Sparks Backlash
#7Companies love subscription based services. I have to assume it's becauce they're much more lucrative. But many times companies forget the other part: what value are they providing? Telling me I now have to subscribe to something I'm using to owning isn't going to work, or shouldn't work.
The problem is it does work, a lot, and not enough people push back to hurt their sales, versus the number of people that just pay it, or weren't going to use the feature anyway. Same thing with all the data collection and privacy violations of many other companies as of late. They keep doing it because it's not hurting their bottom line. I think tech people often forget that we are not their target audience.
> The problem is it does work, a lot, and not enough people push back to hurt their sales
All the evidence in the car industry to date I've seen appears to show charging subscriptions for hardware functions that were previously free or included from factory with no ongoing cost tends to back fire - BMW famously first tried a few years ago to make heated seats subscription based, and has fully backtracked etc.
> https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/bmw-will-not-cha...
"We thought that we would provide an extra service to the customer by offering the chance to activate that later, but the user acceptance isn’t that high. People feel that they paid double – which was actually not true, but perception is reality, I always say. So that was the reason we stopped that."
Remote start, widely available as a free to use feature in many Mazda models to date, falls in the same bucket really. If BMW can't make it work at the premium ends of the market, difficult to see Mazda doing it either.
Re: Mazda's $10 Subscription for Remote Start Sparks Backlash
#8Companies love subscription based services. I have to assume it's becauce they're much more lucrative. But many times companies forget the other part: what value are they providing? Telling me I now have to subscribe to something I'm using to owning isn't going to work, or shouldn't work.
How long are memories? Annoying a subset of your customers for 20 years in exchange for orders of magnitude more profit for the rest of time?
We're seeing it in housing right now - predatory institutional investors buying up stock while younger generations are increasingly coming to terms with the idea of renting for their entire lives.
Re: Mazda's $10 Subscription for Remote Start Sparks Backlash
#9Companies love subscription based services. I have to assume it's becauce they're much more lucrative. But many times companies forget the other part: what value are they providing? Telling me I now have to subscribe to something I'm using to owning isn't going to work, or shouldn't work.
In theory they much better align expenses with revenue. If you need to maintain servers and pay for LTE plans in perpetuity to make this functionality work, then a subscription makes more sense than bundling it with the purchase price. People are just tired of paying for this kind of thing though, every aspect of human existence is being loaded into a subscription service.
Re: Mazda's $10 Subscription for Remote Start Sparks Backlash
#10As some in the comments correctly point out, this service requires a cellular connection. Which involves costs for Mazda. It's appropriate for them to charge a small monthly fee for the service. My only real complaint about this is discontinuing the keyfob-based feature. All that said, I see no need for remote start, anyway.
It only requires cellular because that's how Mazda designed it. Plenty of remote start systems have been built without requiring cellular.