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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

#391

Post by xtracto »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #124
itsoktocry wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The solution is to vote with your wallet. Right on. In 99% of cases, your choice of vehicle brand is fungible. Corolla's are good, cheap cars, but so are Accords, Mazda 3s, Focus', Altimas, Imprezas... Buy something else.

>"your choice of vehicle brand is fungible" I disagree wholeheartedly. One of the things Toyota has done is to establish itself as a reliable automaker of quality. People specifically think of Toyota/Honda as the vehicle makes which are most likely to last a long time and put up with abuse. Contrast this to the reputation of GM or Daewoo. You also have the human element, where people are attracted to brand marketing…

> One of the things Toyota has done is to establish itself as a reliable automaker of quality. People specifically think of Toyota/Honda as the vehicle makes which are most likely to last a long time and put up with abuse.

I find these and Apple "apologies" funny: "Fucking Apple and their monopolistic practices!!! ... but they are so pretty, there's nothing as pretty in the market". Well, having bad market practices is part of the product feature, so you can vote with your wallet for a product with less bells and whistles but better business practices. People using Open Source have done it for a long time.

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

#392

Post by brokenmachine »

chris1993 wrote: post #299
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.

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 p…

It's too late now for her of course, but you can take the headrest off the seat and use the metal prongs to smash the windows to get out.

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

#393

Post by caf »

donmcronald wrote: post #40
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…

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…

We really, really need legislation that says advertised features can't require an ongoing subscription.

All that is needed is for the advertising to be required to make it clear which features require an ongoing subscription.

I don't see the problem for the used car market - if anything, the fact some features won't be functional without a subscription ought to depress the used price of the car. If you take it to an extreme - say, a car that requires a daily payment to run at all - you'd find that the market price of such a vehicle wouldn't be far above the scrap value.

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

#395

Post by xtracto »

Karsteski wrote: post #2

Sigh... While I look forward to having an electric car someday, the trend in new cars does not look promising. Far too many instances of car companies having too much control, because of the advent of internet-connected vehicles. Is there a solution to this? I don't know. Especially because I can see legislation cementing these sorts of practices in very much convoluted ways. One can only hope competing car brands em…

I love and work every day in computers, but I like my consumer electronics as dumb as they can be. I just need to complete a joke of "I like my electronics as my XXXX: dumb as a rock"

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

#396

Post by crackercrews »

Interesting that if you purchased upgraded audio, you get this remote unlock feature free for the first 10 years instead of the first 3.

Perhaps in the future they'll sell all the vehicles with the same audio system, but just disable certain speakers or add noise to the signal if you've not paid your monthly premium audio fee?

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

#397

Post by xanaxagoras »

Syonyk wrote: post #62
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…

> How do you pull yourself up by the bootstraps if the bootstraps require a subscription you can't afford? Can't have those upstarts worming their way into elite circles now, can we? I thought you'd understand. Once a poor, always a poor, you know. There's a rather depressing trend of this sort of stuff lately, and a lot of it is coming from people who claim they care about lower income classes - but then convenientl…

Who would have thought the revolution won't be sponsored by Toyota or Pepsi? The corporate SJW movement is all marketing, it's really depressing to see it work on people.

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

#399

Post by Karupan »

Only a matter of time before this happened. When Tesla OTA updates breaks autopilot or they remotely disable it [0], I thought to myself surely this isn't setting a good precedence for the rest of the industry. Why settle for profits from just selling the car when you can also get owners to pay you a recurring fee every month!

[0] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/70481/used-model-has-autopilo...

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

#400

Post by phkahler »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #236
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.

> the front doors both open when the handle is pulled, locked or not The fact that the front doors both unlock when a single handle is pulled is because there's an electronic sensor and solenoid that unlocks everything when one handle is opened. I had a Pontiac Vibe (really a Toyota Matrix) that had a cable in the door unlock assembly fail. You could open the door from the outside - the external door handle was physi…

You could also climb over and exit the other door.
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