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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

#341

Post by rurp »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #76
donmcronald wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 use a similar strategy of targeting 2 to 4 year old used cars in good condition, and then swapping out when they get around 10 years or 100k. It's worked quite well for me. I have no idea what I'm going to do next time I'm in the market for a car, because every trend I see in the industry is stuff I do not want. And it's not just cars. It's freakin' everything. I don't need a touch screen on my fridge. Like that jo…

I just went through this, buying a car to replace the one I'd had for 13 years. Oh man, I had no idea how terrible the car industry had gotten; it was every bit as bad as you're fearing.

I had a slight preference for an automatic transmission but ended up looking mostly at manuals since those often lack a few of the "modern" anti-features. I wish I had better advice to give, the experience honestly bummed me out quite a bit.

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

#342

Post by gambiting »

Phenomenit wrote: post #225
jkaplowitz wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might very well justify some fee, but $8/month is excessive if one only cares about remote start.

Yeah I pay less than 40€ per year(390 sek) and with it I also get emergency services with towing etc. There's a button in the ceiling.

Btw I also own a Volvo and at least here in UK you get emergency services regardless of whether you pay for the Volvo On Call subscription or not. Breakdown cover is provided for every new Volvo as long as you do the service at a Volvo garage, nothing to do with On Call subscription either.

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

#344

Post by maxerickson »

gambiting wrote: post #337
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.

On most(all?) Modern cars you can't unlock the door from the inside if the door got locked from the outside. I think it was made law to work like this? In order to prevent thefts where someone just runs a tiny rod through an opening and pulls a handle - that doesn't work anymore. If you get locked in the car while inside there is no way to open the door, you'd have to break a window to get out.

What do you mean by modern?

My 2013 car has a physical lock pull, which the door lever is connected to, so the lock opens when you pull the lever to open the door.

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

#345

Post by jldugger »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #247
jldugger wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 journalis…

I'm not saying there aren't costs associated with building or running these services that need to be paid for. But owning the OS and pushing subs in the default apps is just as annoying when Apple does it as when Youtube does.

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

#346

Post by sokoloff »

silverpepsi wrote: post #87
donmcronald wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm totally on the same page. After my millionaire frugal friend told me he managed $88/mo TCO, I've been chasing that target nonstop

That’s impressive. We’re around $100/mo for everything excluding fuel on our 2005 CR-V, bought by us in 2011. It’s going to have to last several more years to get down under $90/mo. (If your friend said that 10 years ago, I guess I’m under that already.)

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

#347

Post by tqi »

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…

$8 is a lot but to be fair, Disney+ is almost certainly losing money per subscriber. $8 in this case also has to cover the cost of the 4G connection, which likely is in the $1 to $2 range.

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

#348

Post by stvsu »

petre wrote: post #202
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup. Subaru offers remote start via an app at $75 for the first 3 years when you buy a new car, but it renews at $300 (prepaid for 3 years) after that.

Ridiculous

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

#349

Post by BobbyJo »

ameen wrote: post #307
servytor wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unrelated, but one of my favorite quotes from PKD is this one from Now Wait for Last Year: --- “All right," Eric agreed. "If you were me, and your wife were sick, desperately so, with no hope of recovery, would you leave her? Or would you stay with her, even if you had traveled ten years into the future and knew for an absolute certainty that the damage to her brain could never be reversed? And staying with her would…

Thank you for sharing this. I've often wondered how some folks deal with misfortune, take it in stride and work through them than abandon all hope for an easier route. Perseverance and Endurance are a rarity in today's society.

> Perseverance and Endurance are a rarity in today's society.

No, they're just quiet.

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

#350

Post by phailhaus »

ameen wrote: post #307
servytor wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unrelated, but one of my favorite quotes from PKD is this one from Now Wait for Last Year: --- “All right," Eric agreed. "If you were me, and your wife were sick, desperately so, with no hope of recovery, would you leave her? Or would you stay with her, even if you had traveled ten years into the future and knew for an absolute certainty that the damage to her brain could never be reversed? And staying with her would…

Thank you for sharing this. I've often wondered how some folks deal with misfortune, take it in stride and work through them than abandon all hope for an easier route. Perseverance and Endurance are a rarity in today's society.

How are you measuring perseverance and endurance? I find that such claims tend to be completely made up, based on some "sense" you get from hearing a couple of viral stories.
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