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

arstechnica.com

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

#201

Post by notJim »

nicce wrote: post #110
Faaak wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many electric cars on the market that are just plain "old" cars: hyundai ioniq, renault zoe, peugeot e-208, etc... No subscription and they work quite well.

But they are practically useless outside of cities. No range so they are not an option.

They're not great for long roadtrips, but they would be fine for weekend or short trips to places with charging. For example, from where I live to the coast is about 80 miles, and many of the coastal cities have at least L2 and some L3 charging. This would be fine with many of these cars. You might not need to charge at all with some of them.

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

#202

Post by petre »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #114
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.

Right? I'm in the market for a new SUV and I just took Toyota's off my list.

Subaru is doing it as well.

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

#203

Post by noahtallen »

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…

Even worse, D+ streams 4k HDR at no extra cost. And, subjectively, seems to have a higher bitrate or better compression than other popular services. (Looking at you and your garbage compression, Netflix!)

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

#204

Post by crooked-v »

jsmith45 wrote: post #188
wedowhatwedo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In the car analogy that would be more like all the trim levels and hardware addons being hugely overpriced... but that's definitely not a new thing in the car world.

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

#205

Post by judge2020 »

silisili wrote: post #178
phkahler wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait what, do Corvettes not just unlock and open when you pull the handle? Every vehicle I've ever owned, from the 80s to now, manual or electric lock, the front doors both open when the handle is pulled, locked or not. If this isn't the case, I'm almost inclined to consider that criminally negligent.

> Police believe that when James Rogers got into the vehicle, a cable became loose and cut off the power to the operate the horn and locks. Rogers did not know how to manually unlock the vehicle and became trapped inside

> the 2007 Corvette has a manual release located on the floorboard by the driver's seat

Having random cables cut doesn't help the situation, but the issue was not knowing how to manually release the latch and not having an emergency window breaker.

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

#206

Post by bumby »

silisili wrote: post #178
phkahler wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait what, do Corvettes not just unlock and open when you pull the handle? Every vehicle I've ever owned, from the 80s to now, manual or electric lock, the front doors both open when the handle is pulled, locked or not. If this isn't the case, I'm almost inclined to consider that criminally negligent.

My Nissan Versa has manual locks that do not unlock when the door handle is pulled from the inside, to include front doors (not a child safety lever issue). Granted, they’re manual so it’s easy to just unlock but from a human factors perspective I can see people panicking and just yanking on the door handle in a critical emergency like a fire.

I’ve always considered this a serious safety design flaw.

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

#207

Post by olivermarks »

jmiserez wrote: post #185
phkahler wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I have the one with the seat belt cutting blade in the handle hanging on a loop on my truck dashboard. Separately I think all cars should be required to have manual door locks (as well as electric locks if it's a luxury car). I also think all BEVS should have a manual battery ungang lever for trapped energy emergencies.

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

#208

Post by alkonaut »

rajbot wrote: post #54

My Volvo has a remote start option, but it costs $200/year to subscribe to the Volvo On-Call service to be able to use it.

I think they lowered it quite substantially, at least now mine is around $40, which is much more reasonable.

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

#209

Post by bumby »

jasonpeacock wrote: post #194
silisili wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait what, do Corvettes not just unlock and open when you pull the handle? Every vehicle I've ever owned, from the 80s to now, manual or electric lock, the front doors both open when the handle is pulled, locked or not. If this isn't the case, I'm almost inclined to consider that criminally negligent.

In my 2021 Honda CR-V this is a configurable option - you can decide which behavior you want. For example, you don't want your kids to open the doors while you're driving. Or you don't want a car-jacker to reach through the window and open your door.

How is it configured? Electronically or through a switch on on the door jamb?

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

#210

Post by mcguire »

sokoloff wrote: post #164
brewdad wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You obviously don't live in a rapidly growing suburb. Half of my town's roads either didn't exist 12 years ago or have been reconfigured to handle the additional traffic flows.

A 3-year old phone has a way better navigation system than a brand-new automobile OEM nav system. Plus it auto-updates and will usually tell you where the cops are as well.

And vice-versa.
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