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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

#351

Post by ocdtrekkie »

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…

Kia wants $15 a month for the same app-based signal. It's straight highway robbery.

I suspect what you aren't accounting for is the 4G modem in the car that the manufacturer puts in largely to collect data from you, but would love to offset the cost of with upcharges.

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

#352

Post by seanp2k2 »

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.

They have a button that you hit with your thumb, not a mechanical handle. The manual door open lever is down by the driver's left foot (passenger's right foot) https://www.edmunds.com/chevrolet/corvette-stingray/2014/lon...

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

#353

Post by s1artibartfast »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #68
klipklop wrote: post #9

The solution is to vote with your wallet. These days consumers are pretty weak willed though and are willing to put up with almost any level of abuse for their shiny new toy. Look at what consumers are willing to (overpay) for during the pandemic as an example of that. $500 NVIDIA graphics cards going for $2000... Eventually people fed up with it will "jailbreak" their cars like the farmers did with John Deere tracto…

Vote with your wallet never worked, and is never going to work if your wallet is empty in the first place. Why do you think people don't all buy free range eggs and organic produce? Because it's out of their reach, even if they care.

They don't vote with their wallet because they don't care.

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

#354

Post by Thaxll »

servytor wrote: post #120
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…

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…

Very similar to the great movie Arrival.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life

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

#355

Post by npteljes »

ptudan wrote: post #21
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..."

This happened to me with zipcar once. Truly sucked

Would you please share the story?

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

#356

Post by jjk166 »

silisili wrote: post #329
jjk166 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything that's mechanically supposed to happen is irrelevant after the mechanism, with 2 tons of metal behind it moving at high speed, slams into something significantly more substantial than the thin layer of decorative sheet metal protecting it. You can not design things to be invincible, no matter how robust something is, with sufficient force applied in a certain way, it will fail. It's honestly an engineering m…

There was no accident here, unless I missed something. The guy just lost power to his door locks after he got in.

I'm talking more generally about cars not always unlocking after an accident.

In this specific scenario, you still have a component failure. Something that was supposed to be connected wasn't. It would be nice if they designed a better fail safe but it's not a case of "corvette handles aren't designed to unlock."

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

#357

Post by seanp2k2 »

wikibob wrote: post #277
judge2020 wrote: post #205

Earlier 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.

I agree; it's like all the rollaway accidents that happen now because of electronic shifters: https://www.safetyresearch.net/the-persistence-of-rollaway/

Design matters, and bad designs can literally be deadly. Why auto mfgs feel the need to "innovate" with shifter designs is beyond me. The worst part is how every mfg seems to be implementing a different design of bad electronic shifters, from wheels and touchscreens to one-click-at-a-time joysticks to single-function pushbuttons for some gears with others on a scroll wheel. They've taken something and made it worse with no benefit to the user. At least with those auto-flushing toilets, the intention was good, even if the implementation is still somehow so awful decades later.

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

#358

Post by PenguinCoder »

akudha wrote: post #223
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…

They are simply copying software industry. Tableau, Jetbrains... none of these need to be subscription based, but they are. They weren't, until a few years ago. I wonder whats next? My toilet won't flush unless I pay $5 for it, in addition to the water bill? It would be hilarious if every single item at home was subscription based, lol

You mentioned Jetbrains but not worse actors like Adobe, or Microsoft. Seems disingenuous.

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

#359

Post by josephcsible »

adrr wrote: post #270
matthewdgreen wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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…

Do they also push ads in their app like Tesla? Like referrals or upgrades? Seems to me like they are fleecing the owners.

You're using a different definition of "ads" than most people do.

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

#360

Post by egberts1 »

nashashmi wrote: post #117

Guys this is remote start. Not a key fob entry/start service. Sometimes this can be done via cell phone app. And there is always a monthly subscription for this option. But no it is not a monthly subscription for starting your car with your key fob in the pocket.

Ummm, no.
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