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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

#371

Post by jjk166 »

sokoloff wrote: post #213
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…

When I contemplate buying something, I care about the value it delivers to me, not the cost required to provide it. If I get $8 of value from something, it doesn't reduce my willingness to pay if I suddenly learned that it cost $0 or $1 to provide it rather than $5 or $6. Likewise, if I learned that it cost $10 to provide it, that doesn't make me suddenly willing to trade away $10 or $11 for something that's worth $8…

If you derive more than $8 of value from something, then buying the $8 thing is not explicitly off the table. But if you can get the exact same thing for free, or even just for $7 elsewhere, it would be really dumb to buy it for $8.

The cost that it takes to provide a good or service is useful for estimating the cheapest available offering. No one is actually going to sell something at cost, but in an efficient market with lots of competition the margin should be whittled away to something very low. If someone is charging significantly more for something than it costs to make, it means they are abusing their market position. Monopolies still need to price their offerings at a point where people don't rage quit and not buy at all, but their goal is to get as close to that number as possible while staying below it for the optimally large section of their customers.

Just because things could be worse doesn't mean they're good and you should be happy with the situation.

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

#372

Post by tw04 »

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.

But the handle DOES open the door. It’s just at your feet, quite clearly marked, instead of physically on the door. It’s specifically there so that if you are in an accident you can still release the door. It’s designed With the idea the car will see a road course and is far superior to a handle on the door.

It’s sad he died but I found that handle in the first 5 minutes of owning my first corvette. It has a giant red picture of the door opening.

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

#374

Post by nicce »

ceejayoz wrote: post #49
xyst wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the Apple Car actually materializes, I fear this will become the new standard. All cars come with all bells and whistles, but you have to pay monthly fees in order for them to function. - Want heated seats? $1/month - Want remote lock/unlock? $2/month - Want to remove rate limiting? $5/month - Want GPS in your car? $10/month - Want to use your "frunk"? $10/month - Want Apple CarPlay? $15/month - Want to activate h…

What monthly fees of this nature are required to use other Apple products? OS updates are free. The basic version of iCloud is free. "Find My iPhone" is free. Apple Maps is free. The App Store is free. Hell, CarPlay is free on the Apple end of things; it's some car manufacturers who've been charging for it. "Public will buy into it because the cost of the car is significantly less than their competition." Are we talk…

Excellent point. There has been arguments that subscriptions are mandatory for self-driven cars to keep them updated. But Apple manages to make complex devices without subscriptions with many years of updates.

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

#375

Post by taurusnoises »

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…

I'm not so sure about the whole "conscious capitalism" approach these days. Subscription economies have basically killed that complicated form of activism.... https://bobdoto.computer/Conscious-Capitalism

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

#376

Post by outworlder »

joenathanone wrote: post #95
ceejayoz wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What monthly fees of this nature are required to use other Apple products? OS updates are free. The basic version of iCloud is free. "Find My iPhone" is free. Apple Maps is free. The App Store is free. Hell, CarPlay is free on the Apple end of things; it's some car manufacturers who've been charging for it. "Public will buy into it because the cost of the car is significantly less than their competition." Are we talk…

Other than purposely slowing down your devices with updates to try and coerce you into buying the new model year? https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay...

All they needed to do was to display a "battery degraded" message (or, like on this very Mac I'm using - "Service Recommended".

The behavior they implemented was definitely the right call. And it's still there in other situations - if I have disregarded the "10% battery warning" I'll often notice my device being sluggish at 1%, at which point I'll plug in if I can. The alternative would be for the device to have less runtime, and I'm ok with the implementation.

Had they warned they were doing this, then customers would replace the battery in most cases.

By and large, Apple does NOT do what you are suggesting. As far back as my old iPod touch they released an iOS version that supported wallpapers. It didn't support my device. I thought they were trying to force me to upgrade, so I jailbroke it and enabled the feature anyway. Guess what, the GPU was not enough to display wallpapers, and the home screen had a bad framerate. Rather than giving the subpar experience, they disabled the feature. They could have also simply marked the device as unsupported. iOS (and OSX) updates work on a surprising number of old devices. For many releases, every new OSX release would bring performance enhancements.

There's plenty to complain about Apple - their profit margins are huge, the devices are difficult (in some cases, borderline impossible) to repair, the App Store situation, etc. But making devices obsolete with updates is not what they do.

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

#377

Post by hncurious »

rabuse wrote: post #322
hncurious wrote: post #274

SaaS is eating the world. Software, music, movies, games, books. Now the car industry and big pharma are flirting with this model.

You're not excited for your monthly Pfizer booster subscription to stay employed?

Hey, maybe we'll get a bundle deal with Disney and Pfizer+

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

#378

Post by amelius »

gentleman11 wrote: post #302
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…

My wife and I need a new car sometime soon. Is there a company that makes cars that are reasonably reliable but that are without anti features like tracking, electronic everything, bs parts replacement costs due to ip, features you are locked out of via software, subscriptions, software preventing you from working on the car without a special license, ads, etc? Look at the ways software is making the world a better p…

This is like buying a dumb TV, and is probably close to impossible.

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

#379

Post by 14 »

lastofthemojito wrote: post #184
Loughla wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - not sure why Toyota is getting hammered for this. Subaru does this as well. You can get app enabled remote start from your phone, if you buy their subscription service. I love Subaru, but that is a trash system.

That feels like apples-and-oranges to me if you're talking about a smartphone app feature. A smartphone app has to be regularly upgraded to pay nice with new OS versions, has to have back-end servers, etc. Toyota is disabling remote start functionality between the key fob and the vehicle if the vehicle doesn't have a subscription. I'm not surprised a smartphone app requires a subscription but I am surprised and disap…

I too am highly disappointed in Toyota here. A remote start is something you can buy at any auto store and have installed by a mechanic for a couple hundred bucks. Will they block people from going that route now? They charge such a premium for their cars and this just seems petty.

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

#380

Post by scblock »

xyst wrote: post #35
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…

If the Apple Car actually materializes, I fear this will become the new standard. All cars come with all bells and whistles, but you have to pay monthly fees in order for them to function. - Want heated seats? $1/month - Want remote lock/unlock? $2/month - Want to remove rate limiting? $5/month - Want GPS in your car? $10/month - Want to use your "frunk"? $10/month - Want Apple CarPlay? $15/month - Want to activate h…

You're describing actual cars from BMW and Tesla with an "Apple Car" straw man. I mean come on.
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