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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

#241

Post by mavhc »

loudmax wrote: post #186
mavhc wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 am…

They invented the completely BS term Self Charging Hybrid, so they're evil by definition.

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

#242

Post by lotsofpulp »

brewdad wrote: post #167
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.

I have no idea what Toyota's margins are like at the manufacturing level but it's not uncommon for dealers to only make a few hundred dollars profit on the sale. $250 of additional lifetime revenues could be quite significant.

~6% to 7%

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TM/toyota/profit-m...

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

#243

Post by lotsofpulp »

hoffspot wrote: post #135

I've been a Toyota Tacoma guy for the last 22 years (and counting). Three Tacomas and I have a son that we're deciding on a vehicle for in the coming year. This is how you take someone with massive brand affinity, someone who would even likely pass that brand affinity to the next generation, and push them to look at other options. Charging monthly for a service that isn't cloud enabled? If this is true, Toyota, you a…

FYI, remote start is a pretty easy aftermarket add on, especially for Toyotas.

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

#244

Post by barbazoo »

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.

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

#245

Post by nuccy »

Fezzik wrote: post #152
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…

Subaru has the same thing on their new cars - subscribe annually to Starlink or no remote start for you! I live in a winter wonderland where remote start would be a dream but no way I am paying a cent for this feature. I’ll have to look in to the after market options.

VW diesel cars can be equipped with Webasto (auxiliary heater which burns diesel). One gets a remote (in my experience reaching up to 500 meters) which can be used to start this heater along with car's climate control. The advantage is that it consumes 1/3-1/5 of what an idling engine does, while heating interior and engine coolant much faster. The disadvantage is that it consumes battery charge, but to counteract that the car is equiped with 30-50% bigger battery. Though this was never a problem for me, from my experience on 94Ah battery it can run for hours without any effect on engine starting, while heating the car in some 10-15 minutes when it is below freezing outside.

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

#246

Post by randomizedalgs »

This is a classic example of price discrimination. Slowly but surely, companies such as Toyota will converge to a state where every consumer individually pays the maximum amount that the consumer is willing to pay for the product.

$8 a month may not seem like much compared to the cost of a car, but that's the point. Toyota will be able to get free extra money from a large population of people (many of whom will later barely even remember that they are incurring this regular cost).

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

#247

Post by lotsofpulp »

jldugger wrote: post #216
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.

I agree it's possible, but their services offerings are all paid, and there are enough of them now that a discount bundle exists[1]. And then there's the App Store / iTunes / iTunes Match. Even checking out to buy hardware tries to upsell you AppleCare+ service. There are many reasons it's done this way, but I can see the reasons people might compare it to being turned upside down and shaken for loose change like a p…

> but I can see the reasons people might compare it to being turned upside down and shaken for loose change like a piggy bank.

How?

Licensing music requires ongoing payments from Apple to music owners.

iCloud requires Apple to maintain data centers and bandwidth.

TV+ requires ongoing investment into creation of new video productions.

News+ is similar to music, Apple has ongoing costs to pay the owner of the journalism.

Games also gets new games all the time, so presumably there are ongoing expenses there also.

And fitness+ might be one where there is less need for ongoing expenses, but they do seem to be adding content regularly.

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

#248

Post by beervirus »

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.

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

#249

Post by jjtheblunt »

influx wrote: post #10

BMW tried to add a subscription for iOS CarPlay. Seems they had enough backlash that they canceled it. Total bullshit they would even try that.

BMW wants something like $180 to update the maps in my 2014 i3, and a couple days stay in the service shop to be sure blah blah blah.

Nope.

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

#250

Post by jsmith45 »

paulkrush wrote: post #4

If this keeps up, some used cars will have a higher value than new ones. People will have to break EULAs to drive cars in mines or buildings with no radio access. "Error: please tow your car to an RF access area to enable movement..."

It has already happened. There was a case where somebody's new Ferrari straight from a dealer brought to some store to have a baby seat installed. Some sort of anti-tamper or anti theft system apparently triggered while they were trying to see if any of the baby seats fit (nope!). And this happened down inside a concrete garage, so no signal reception.

Ferrari apparently has some means of disabling these interlocks over the air, but well, no reception. A technician gets flown out, but apparently is unable to fix it, so it will need to towed to a dealership to fix. Apparently whatever interlock tripped will try to make the car phone home, and if that fails, it locks down harder than normal such that it can only be fixed with tools found at a dealer.

To summarize: Car: I think I'm being stolen. I'll lock down, and call for help. The lines are dead?!?! I really am being stolen. Activate computer self-destruct.

Also the technician had to manually release the handbrake to allow it to be moved, since apparently it was locked down enough that doing that the normal way was not possible.

I'm as skeptical as you are about the details of the story, but it was posted second hand, and I'm not sure the poster even understood all the details. The most details exist in the comments of the third reddit post. The linked Hacker news discussion was based only on the first, and some of the discussion there occurred before OP had clarified some things.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24754662

https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/j914... https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/j9ji... https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/j9qn...

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