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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

#431

Post by mauvehaus »

brokenmachine wrote: post #392
chris1993 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having watched a burly firefighter take three good swings with an axe to bust out a window (to get to the hood release of an unattended car fire), I am extremely skeptical of this claim.

Somebody on YouTube tested those emergency hammers and concluded they're basically useless. If you really want to break a tempered glass car window (I.e., any of them but the windshield), their recommendation was an automatic center punch.

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

#432

Post by 14 »

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…

Please go to their facebook page or other contact location and write them exactly that. I wrote them and told them how disappointed I was and how it seems so petty. I also said that when I buy a new car I would now have to consider my second favorite company as a move like this though only $8 is enough to turn me off of a company completely. They are a premium brand and people pay a premium for their cars there is no need for this. Especially when any car can add remote start from a local mechanic are they going to block people from doing that? What a sham

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

#433

Post by citizenpaul »

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…

It was started by gates and buffett "the giving pledge" they are now a decade into giving their fortune away and are comicallty richer than when they started. That kind of hipocracy tends to flow top down and now we are seeing the results.

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

#434

Post by mauvehaus »

bumby wrote: post #206
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.

My Nissan Versa has manual locks that do not unlock when the door handle is pulled from the inside, to include front doors (not a child safety lever issue). Granted, they’re manual so it’s easy to just unlock but from a human factors perspective I can see people panicking and just yanking on the door handle in a critical emergency like a fire. I’ve always considered this a serious safety design flaw.

That's how pretty much all car doors worked for decades. As a kid I used to lock the back doors when riding around and pull the handle [0]. No, the child safety locks were not enabled.

[0] Why? Why do kids do anything, really?

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

#435

Post by jsrcout »

quitit wrote: post #147
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…

Subscription pricing for things which aren’t subscriptions is bullshit.

I call it "property as a service". Wherein you have to pay recurrent rent on things you "own" to keep using them.

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

#436

Post by holoduke »

brokenmachine wrote: post #392
chris1993 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Front windshield is easy to brake from the inside. A gentle push with your feet will crack it. Some harder kicks will remove it for sure.

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

#437

Post by brokenmachine »

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…

There's literally zero infrastructure needed for this, it's only a connection between the fob and the car.

I'm happy they did this, so normal people might realize how much the frog is already boiled. This is absolute bullshit, fuck Toyota.

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

#439

Post by heavyset_go »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #76
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…

I use a similar strategy of targeting 2 to 4 year old used cars in good condition, and then swapping out when they get around 10 years or 100k. It's worked quite well for me. I have no idea what I'm going to do next time I'm in the market for a car, because every trend I see in the industry is stuff I do not want. And it's not just cars. It's freakin' everything. I don't need a touch screen on my fridge. Like that jo…

> I'm just sitting over here hoping there's blowback that keeps some reasonable stuff on the market. Otherwise, I'm gonna have to become some sort of personal expert on keeping things from 1990 or older running.

I'm at the point where I'm considering physically disabling the radios in my appliances.

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

#440

Post by grangerg »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #138
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…

>"The solution is to vote with your wallet." I don't think it is. I sense this might play out the same way it did with all the intrusive spyware on SmartTV's. Sure, I could try to vote with my wallet and find a TV that doesn't have all that bloat, but they are becoming vanishingly rare. The market has 'decided' that this is a standard feature now.

Get a RokuTV. There's ONE ad on part of the home screen, and it's not animated. The OS doesn't feel bloated or slow at all. It ain't perfect, of course, but I'd never get a Vizio, Samsung, or LG anymore.
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