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Some of these make sense though, considering the car needs an LTE modem and data connection in order to make these things work. That isn't free to the car company.
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Can't stop buying if no options exist. I need a car. Toyota has done this for a while. BMW has IAP heaters in chairs. Etc. Etc. Etc.
US tariffs were put in to prevent Chinese cars from competing here too.
> However, irrespective of whether one can afford (or is willing to pay for) a subscription, the key lesson from all this is that, if automakers have their way, the car ownership experience is going to change dramatically in the near future. Yep, unless people stop buying cars that offer these features, it's just going to get worse and worse. But here's the thing: they won't.
Can't stop buying if no options exist. I need a car. Toyota has done this for a while. BMW has IAP heaters in chairs. Etc. Etc. Etc.
I'll say as clearly as possible. I will go to extraordinary expense to avoid subscriptions in cars. If I have to spend 30k making an old car run and be road worthy, I'll do it solely out of spite. I can take this quite far: there is a lifetime Spotify ban in my entire household because the early Spotify client paused advertisements if you turned the volume off.
Remote start is not needed to make the car roadworthy.
When are cars going to be jailbroken?
Will there be FLOSS-powered cars?
How does "right to repair" come into play?
Food for thought:
https://craphound.com/news/2016/11/23/car-wars-a-dystopian-s...
I would like to know when people will realize again the power of being united: a vendor start to screw it's customers? Few hours and all socials invite to boycott it. All intentions to order, reserved test drives etc got deleted "sorry, we hear the news, due to the vendor behavior we are not anymore interested not only in this specific car but in the brand altogether".
The MX-5 ND especially has no serious competition at its price, as a true sports car (manual gearbox, truly light weight, independent suspension, not FF layout, "fun" engine) with high build quality. The Yaris GR could have been it, but Euro eco taxes killed it for my wallet (and the US doesn't want small cars).
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The problem is it does work, a lot, and not enough people push back to hurt their sales, versus the number of people that just pay it, or weren't going to use the feature anyway. Same thing with all the data collection and privacy violations of many other companies as of late. They keep doing it because it's not hurting their bottom line. I think tech people often forget that we are not their target audience.
> The problem is it does work, a lot, and not enough people push back to hurt their sales All the evidence in the car industry to date I've seen appears to show charging subscriptions for hardware functions that were previously free or included from factory with no ongoing cost tends to back fire - BMW famously first tried a few years ago to make heated seats subscription based, and has fully backtracked etc. > https…
> However, irrespective of whether one can afford (or is willing to pay for) a subscription, the key lesson from all this is that, if automakers have their way, the car ownership experience is going to change dramatically in the near future. Yep, unless people stop buying cars that offer these features, it's just going to get worse and worse. But here's the thing: they won't.
BTW I think they charge for this feature because it requires the car to be connected to the Internet for it work, as it receives the remote start command from the Internet (so it works if you are far from the car). The Internet connection is certainly not free for Mazda.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The service costs orders of magnitude more than what their actual costs should be. You can have an LTE connection for probably around 10c/month/sim at the scale of Mazda with tiny amounts of data (plenty for, say, 100 remote starts/month).
Not defending subscriptions, but it's not just data. You need developers for your apps, you need servers, the service needs to be secure, etc. On the data side, as soon you have data, other services also start working, like live traffic info and so on. Again, not defending these expensive subscriptions, just pointing out that it probably costs more than 10c a month per car to keep all that stuff running.
Plus, a cellular connection provides direct customer information that Mazda or whoever now no longer have to pay for in terms of market research. They can now just know the usage of their vehicles and tie that in with whatever data sources they want to.