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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

#181

Post by nostrademons »

azemetre wrote: post #53
HPsquared wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like in politics, voting with your wallet only works if alternatives are available.

It also implies that money is worth more above all else. What happens when every car company decides to follow this model because it looks great on the short term? Am I suppose to vote with my wallet and start a new car company single handedly? Well no. This is why we need to legislate these issues and concerns. Saying vote with your wallet is already a losing position, the corporations already have a much larger wal…

> Am I suppose to vote with my wallet and start a new car company single handedly? Well no.

That's exactly what you're supposed to do, except probably not single-handedly. You're supposed to find investors with cash to burn, engineers who are frustrated with their big corp wage-slave jobs, and frustrated consumers and bring them together.

There's about 4300 EV startups funded in the last 15 years [1], and 27 have gone public or are in the process of going public via SPAC in the last year [2]. Some of them (eg. Nikola) don't even have the "hire qualified engineers" and "build a working product" part down and still managed to raise billions.

[1] https://tracxn.com/d/emerging-startups/electric-vehicles-sta...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-07-06/hyperd...

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

#182

Post by derekp7 »

donmcronald wrote: post #156
selfhoster11 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sooner or later, we won't even remember how it was before. Who even remembers the internet before advertising morphed it into something completely different? How long was that period? 5 years? That's what worries me. After a long stint of playing entirely only smartphone games, going back to play some older titles on PC was... really weird. None of the usual pay to play friction or engagement traps that are so ubiq…

Most kids don't even know what it's like to play a game that's not riddled with ads and designed around microtransactions. There are a lot of things that require a generation (of people) to change. For example, the latency of game streaming services is awful if you're used to a local experience, but if you ask a 12 year old that's never experienced low latency, local gaming, they don't even realize it could be differ…

I don't know -- when I was a kid, in the arcade, the machines constantly prompted me to insert another quarter to continue playing.

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

#183

Post by somerandomqaguy »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #101

I don't know how could anyone think it is a good move inside toyota. $8 falls in the range that it is irritating for consumers yet the lifetime revenue per car is probably 1% of the average car value(5 year lifetime with 2 years free means $250 lifetime revenue). Is it worth it for 1% increase in revenue.

It actually makes a lot of sense, unfortunately.

For the new car buyer, you pitch it as cost savings for the time you own the car. The OE Toyota Long Range remote starter is $1000 so if you go with the app, if you only own the car for 8 years then you're saving money as the new car owner.

However the overwhelming majority of car sales in the US are used, and the average age of the American car is now 12 years old. Outside of maintaining a spare parts supply chain, you don't gain any additional revenue from used car sales. With subscriptions, a 2020 model year car can still be generating revenue for a company in 2035. Plus you can adjust the subscription price year after year as desired.

I don't like it personally, but I can see method to the madness.

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

#184

Post by lastofthemojito »

Loughla wrote: post #169
winternett wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah - not sure why Toyota is getting hammered for this. Subaru does this as well. You can get app enabled remote start from your phone, if you buy their subscription service. I love Subaru, but that is a trash system.

That feels like apples-and-oranges to me if you're talking about a smartphone app feature. A smartphone app has to be regularly upgraded to pay nice with new OS versions, has to have back-end servers, etc. Toyota is disabling remote start functionality between the key fob and the vehicle if the vehicle doesn't have a subscription. I'm not surprised a smartphone app requires a subscription but I am surprised and disappointed that a feature on a car's key fob does.

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

#185

Post by jmiserez »

phkahler wrote: post #109
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…

Reminds me of this tragic but true story about a man and his dog that died in a Corvette because the door failed to open electronically. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2015/06/11/te... If your car door uses electricity to open, you best know what to do when that system fails. Death should not occur due to failure to RTFM for a door.

Regardless of model it's a good idea to put a emergency hammer / glass breaker in your car. (addendum: also to rescue someone else, not blaming the driver)

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

#186

Post by loudmax »

mavhc wrote: post #72
egberts1 wrote: post #3

One less car to shop for. scribbling out Toyota (heading out to the delearships, non-Toyota, that is.)

Toyota was never an option as they failed at electric cars

FWIW, my 2019 plug-in Prius has worked out well for me. It has a little over 25 mile electric range, and when the battery is out it switches to gas. My commute to the office is short so I can make it to work and back on a single charge, and if I happen to need to make a detour I just burn a little gas.

The caveat here is the short commute. If my commute were significantly longer the 25 mile electric range wouldn't amount to much and the weight of the empty battery would negate its benefits.

Of course none of this justifies an $8 monthly charge for basic functionality, which is frankly outrageous. I have no intention of subscribing to this service.

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

#188

Post by jsmith45 »

wedowhatwedo wrote: post #51
xyst wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the Apple Car actually materializes, I fear this will become the new standard. All cars come with all bells and whistles, but you have to pay monthly fees in order for them to function. - Want heated seats? $1/month - Want remote lock/unlock? $2/month - Want to remove rate limiting? $5/month - Want GPS in your car? $10/month - Want to use your "frunk"? $10/month - Want Apple CarPlay? $15/month - Want to activate h…

I don't understand why non-apple customers feel that apple is this way. I have a Mac and an iphone and haven't paid Apple a penny since the purchase of the devices.

The seriously overpriced accessories they sell is probably part of the reasons non-apple customers tend to assume this. Like they have a few accessories that cost about 10x more than pretty good quality third party alternatives, and often more than double what it costs for literally better build quality third party alternatives.

And I'm not talking about the accessories that have enough active electronics to possibly justify it (pencil, or airpods), but things like cases, wheels, stands, dongles, etc.

Apple accessories very much are trying to nickel and dime people (on top of hardware that is already quite expensive), so it is unsurprising that people would (mistakenly) assume that Apple would try to do the same with digital subscriptions.

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

#189

Post by ryandrake »

dijit wrote: post #151
NotPractical wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this content really have a place on here?

Honestly. This is quite pointed satire at the current state of things. If you showed someone from the 70s how things are today, they would view these two things as not as dissimilar as we do.

I was going to say! Since quite a large number of HN's readership is hard at work actually building these paywalls, digital restrictions and gatekeepers, unnecessarily Internet-connected devices, and other corporate-mediated dystopias, I'd say Please Drink Verification Can is exceedingly appropriate here.

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

#190

Post by ghaff »

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…

I fully expect that, assuming we get to autonomous driving someday, either the system or the entire car will only be available as subscription services. It just won't work any other way given the manufacturer will be on the hook for the proper maintenance and updating of a safety critical system.

And it probably applies even more broadly as things that were historically just hardware have an increasingly large software component.

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