car companies are slowly becoming phone companies. Hope we don't see days when we'll have to subscribe to a plan to use the car.
Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start
291–300 of 744 posts
Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start
#292was 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…
Honorary mention also of Cory Doctorow's Unauthorized Bread short story: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...
And of course the 4chan greentext "Please drink a verification can": https://imgur.com/r/4chan/dgGvgKF
Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start
#293That 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…
>... TVs with built in ads?...
Hah, I have an Amazon Fire TV, not the stick, the actual TV. So...built in ads...huzzah... the UI on the TV has gotten progressively worse.
Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start
#294I 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.
Disclosure: I work for GM, anything here is solely my own opinion. Different revenue to a different organization inside the OEM. When you sell a $20k car, you get maybe $1k in profit, maybe less. If you can get $8 monthly recurring revenue you get maybe $7 in profit. Also consider that the lifetime is not 5 years. The AVERAGE age of cars on the road now is over 12 years. My parents drive 20 year old cars. Also consid…
Also consider that the lifetime is not 5 years. The AVERAGE age of cars on the road now is over 12 years.
Do 2nd owners typically subscribe to optional services?
Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I will definitely admit that I was guilty of this right up until I bought a Macbook Air in 2014. I had just assumed that Apple was a nickel-and-diming corporation, and just worked to extract cash from its customers. But I really didn't experience that at all. Outside of Apple Music and Apple Arcade (both of which are optional and neither of which I use/pay for) what exactly are the ongoing costs for most Apple…
The only things Apple charges subscriptions on are actual content services or server usage charges which are inline with literally every other business. Many people, even on HN it seems, have a completely distorted idea on what the products Apple sells actually are.
Yeah, I can't really blame them for charging a fee for Apple Music or Apple Arcade. Presumably they have to pay a recurring fee to the record labels for the rights to the songs or to the game publishers for the rights to the games, even if we pretended that the server costs were free (which of course they are not) and since they are, you know, a business and not a charity, of course they have to charge a subscription fee for it, just like Spotify (ad free), Youtube Music, Deezer, etc.
Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My scenario might be a bit extreme, but closest food store is 40 miles away. Closest charger is 200 miles away. (Talking from Europe) Visiting my parents take 300 miles trip (one direction), and requires charging stop. And this is considered here as relatively normal driving trip. And in winter, the range drops significantly. It is 7 month winter here. Why would I buy a car which is useful only for short weekend trip…
"It's not useful in my specific scenario, which I acknowledge is extreme, therefore the cars are useless outside cities." Not everything has to work for everyone in every situation to be useful. These cars are perfectly useful for many people, including outside cities.
Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
This is absurd victim blaming. The problem is there is a door handle that is designed with a failure mode such that pulling the handle DOES NOT OPEN THE DOOR.
Exactly. Couldn't they just have some system where the door handles have a magnetic dead-switch, that reverts to manual operation when no power is applied?
Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start
#298I 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.
Where did you get the 5 year lifetime figure? Toyota's vehicles are known for their reliability and longevity.
Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start
#299was 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.
My wife's cousin almost died from heat-stroke in her drive-way when her car trapped her inside the vehicle in full Australian summer sun because the battery failed while she was inside checking something. Doors and windows wouldn't open. Nobody heard her calls because the new car had good sound-proofing. She eventually managed to crawl through the panel behind the back seat to get into the boot (luckily she's quite petite) and get a tyre lever and smash a side-window so she could call out to a neighbour for help.
Re: Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start
#300That 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…
Disney is still in the lose-your-ass phase. The price will go up soon enough.