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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

#381

Post by Swenrekcah »

moooo99 wrote: post #179
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…

Toyota wouldn't be doing it to cover costs, it would be there to generate profits. I wouldn't even mind if the app is good. We have a BMW with connected drive, the connectivity included is basically useless. It has a latency of around 2-3 minutes, depending on your cell signal. The price of a service rarely does reflect the actual cost of providing the service, especially with SaaS margins. And $8/mo is not a whole l…

To conserve energy and help the planet your phone has now stopped using the lower half of the screen. To unlock whole screen functionality please pay $0.2 for each instance.

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

#382

Post by jjk166 »

jsmith45 wrote: post #188
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.

The seriously overpriced accessories they sell is probably part of the reasons non-apple customers tend to assume this. Like they have a few accessories that cost about 10x more than pretty good quality third party alternatives, and often more than double what it costs for literally better build quality third party alternatives. And I'm not talking about the accessories that have enough active electronics to possibly…

People are paying for the branding, not the item. It's the same reason a rolex is substantially more expensive than a watch that tells time just as well - people spend money on more expensive versions of things that provide no additional practical benefit explicitly to demonstrate that they have money to burn. If you don't care about the brand, you can still buy third party options and they work just fine at a fraction of the cost. Indeed if you had to pay for the expensive apple version, it wouldn't mean anything that you spent so much, and then it would ironically be significantly less valuable.

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

#383

Post by falcolas »

derekp7 wrote: post #182
donmcronald wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most kids don't even know what it's like to play a game that's not riddled with ads and designed around microtransactions. There are a lot of things that require a generation (of people) to change. For example, the latency of game streaming services is awful if you're used to a local experience, but if you ask a 12 year old that's never experienced low latency, local gaming, they don't even realize it could be differ…

I don't know -- when I was a kid, in the arcade, the machines constantly prompted me to insert another quarter to continue playing.

The nice thing about those games is the cost could be offset by skill. FTP games now offset the cost using time, when you can offset it at all.

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

#384

Post by novok »

jodrellblank wrote: post #116
mavhc wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just don't connect them to the internet, now you have a TV that's cheaper than it should be because they expect to show you ads, but they can't

Won’t be long before they have 5G chips in and that isn’t your choice anymore. Kindles have done that since 3G, cars have started doing that, Tesla trains AI on all owner driving data, VW new electric (ID3?) will be their first with a mandatory perma HQ connection, IIRC.

I don't think you can buy a kindle with a cellphone radio anymore, and the ones that had them cost extra.

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

#385

Post by novok »

14u2c wrote: post #197
zeroflow wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The topic with the TVs is going to be a problem for me in a few years. My current TV is from 2013 - it may have some years to go, but at some point, it will fail. I've had a short look at the market, and all the "good" brands (Samsung, LG, Sony) show horrific ads. It looks like the cheap brands simply sell your data. Then there are some local brands, which sell non-TV TV's (no tuner, there's a tax on that). They don'…

What you are looking for are generally sold as "large format displays". Basically tvs for commercial purposes that do not have any of that crap. Most projector manufacturers, even the consumer ones, have also been good about avoiding "smart" features.

They cost inordinately more than what profit they are getting from ads & spying, and are often missing things like multiple HDMI inputs. It's not a real solution, but a bad workaround.

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

#386

Post by greedo »

MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #146
caymanjim wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to get a Tesla, but I won't, because you can't own a Tesla. You can only pay licensing fees to be the user, and Tesla can modify or disable the car at their whim, while also tracking and recording your every motion. We need lawmakers who actually care about privacy and ownership rights.

When I worked in mortgages in a previous career, we had a presenter talk to us about Private Mortgage Insurance (PMI). Back in the day, banks by default would just tack it on as an extra insurance for them in case you were to default. You're basically paying insurance against yourself to cover the banks losses. Once it was added, it was basically permanent for the life of the loan. Then one day, a senator I think fro…

Unfortunately, most businesses will only react to three things; stuff that makes them money, stuff that costs them money, and laws that are enforced effectively. Look how hard Apple is fighting against allowing alternative payment systems for apps. And against Right to Repair. Yet they start to budge a bit when lawmakers make them feel uncomfortable, or even pass laws (though most of Congress isn't really interested in the legislative side of the job.)

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

#387

Post by soared »

jbay808 wrote: post #363

I wonder if this, too, is a symptom of near-zero interest rates. With an interest rate of zero, future cash flows are valued equal to present cash flows. That increases the net present value of recurring payments (approaching infinity, actually). So it becomes increasingly attractive for companies to discount the initial sale price in exchange for a recurring payment. In a higher interest rate environment, that would…

Interesting thought. Here’s the math. Toyotas current incentive is zero down, 1.9% apr for 72 months. The typical rav4 costs $33k.

Over the life on the loan (6 years) you’d pay about $1,500 in interest. If you paid $8/mo it would take 15.6 years to have paid a total of $1,500 in monthly fees.

Likely if you pay $8, you also pay for another subscription. So say $16/mo on average makes $1,500 in only 7.3 years.

Monthly subscriptions may be comparable in revenue to what the dealership earns from financing.

This may be way off, I don’t really know how any of this works but I am currently shopping for a Toyota :)

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

#388

Post by ketralnis »

nicce wrote: post #110
Faaak wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many electric cars on the market that are just plain "old" cars: hyundai ioniq, renault zoe, peugeot e-208, etc... No subscription and they work quite well.

But they are practically useless outside of cities. No range so they are not an option.

For you maybe. I live in a city, so something useless outside of a city is just fine by me. If they're "practically useless" and "not an option" then who's buying them all?

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

#389

Post by nobody9999 »

jsmith45 wrote: post #188
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.

The seriously overpriced accessories they sell is probably part of the reasons non-apple customers tend to assume this. Like they have a few accessories that cost about 10x more than pretty good quality third party alternatives, and often more than double what it costs for literally better build quality third party alternatives. And I'm not talking about the accessories that have enough active electronics to possibly…

>The seriously overpriced accessories they sell is probably part of the reasons non-apple customers tend to assume this.

That's not it at all. At least not for me.

I'm a "free as in freedom" rather than "free as in beer" kinda guy.

And that's why I won't touch Apple gear. Heck, I don't even like beer.

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

#390

Post by soared »

black_puppydog wrote: post #28
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…

Actually it isn't. There are tons of examples of whole industries just switching to user-/customer-hostile practices/products, meaning there's simply no more way to vote with your wallet. Happened like that with even trivial things like the milk market in Germany. Within a year or two, fresh milk had suddenly all but vanished from the shelves. Once pay-for-fob becomes the norm, good luck trying to enter that market w…

Your example was true in the 2010s, but I don’t think it’s true in all industries anymore. For example, when the Denver post and other newspapers were gutted by private equity and turned to crazy bad tracking, it took a couple years but a local alternative with a subscription only/ad free model popped up.
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