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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

#401

Post by megous »

duck wrote: post #317
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.

> Isabel Moreno told reporters he owned a 2006 Corvette and was trapped inside when the battery went out. Fortunately, he said eventually the battery started recharging itself enough to be able to roll the window down, and he was able to get out safely. Curious how this is possible or was this just misreported?

Googled it for you: https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/everyday-tech/question...

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

#402

Post by mrighele »

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…

> And $8/mo is not a whole lot of money if you consider your monthly expenses to use your vehicle.

$8/mo may not be a lot of money only because it's just your car doing that. Then you will have your TV charging $8/mo so that you can your a remote controller, $8/mo for the remote of your air conditioner...

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

#403

Post by skinnymuch »

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…

Seems a stretch to readily assume Apple would mimic digital subscriptions with their high priced accessories strategy where they presumably don’t even have dominance, and don’t even have stuff like a popular or well liked monitor any more vs 2009’s Thunderbolt. If this was true. It would also mean there is little press and casual discussion on how much more expensive Apple’s equivalent digital services are.

Add on people across the spectrum may buy expensive-ish or expensive hardware, but cheap out on [any] digital purchases or subscriptions.

All of this makes the reason to assume appear to be because of bias and disliking of the brand.

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

#404

Post by city41 »

zeroflow wrote: post #43
pradn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right to point out that these problems arise across entire industries. You can't vote with your money if all otherwise good TVs have crap built into them. And it's not easy for a new entrant to gain a foothold in such a high-tech market. And even if they do, there's plenty of temptation to go down the same route of milking customers who already bought your product. Sooner or later, we won't even remember how i…

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'…

My TV is from 2012 and I'm not all that worried about it failing. Modern TVs don't draw much power, nothing inside them gets very hot, no moving parts, etc. I would be surprised if I don't get ten more years out of it.

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

#405

Post by karaterobot »

charlieflowers wrote: post #326
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…

Yeah. We consumers are going to have to band together to defend ourselves and take back our power. (Funny, and true -- I did not start with socialism in mind when I said that).

I don't know of any flavor of socialism that, historically, has solved this class of problem in a way that most of us would prefer.

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

#406

Post by bigiain »

phkahler wrote: post #109
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…

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.

> If your car door uses electricity to open, you best know what to do when that system fails.

If your trillion-ish dollar advertising company masquerading as a social network has doors that use electricity and dns lookups to open, you best make sure your office staff and data centre technicians know what to do when that fails...

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

#408

Post by phkahler »

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.

>> Wait what, do Corvettes not just unlock and open when you pull the handle?

Nope, not that model.

I had the chance to take one of the Fisker Karma development vehicles home from work. Everyone said it drove great. I got in and realized the door latch was a button. The whole car way prototype and development parts. The window was kinda small to crawl through. I said no thanks. There was a loop of string in the bottom of the door pocket to manually open it. Still nope.

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