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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

#511

Post by ravel-bar-foo »

charcircuit wrote: post #474
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…

There are two main strategies in pricing something. Bottom up pricing is where you take the price to create / run the product / service and then add a profit margin. Top down pricing is where you find a price based off the value it provides independent of what it costs to actually make. Right now you are looking at it from a bottom up pricing perspective when Toyota priced it using a top down strategy. The price isn'…

Here the owners have had the car for three years. They are locked into this market, have no negotiating power, and cannot leave the contract (without a loss) because the price of the key fob subscription is going to be subtracted from the resale value of their car.

Legally, Toyota cars are now like timeshares: you "own" it, but usage fees may increase arbitrairly over time. It's probably legal, but it's a shitty move to charge the consumer the price the market will bear when the consumer has no negotiating power.

I wonder if it is even possible to add aftermarket remote start features.

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

#512

Post by elzbardico »

LanceH wrote: post #308
ribosometronome wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What features like that does Apple hide behind paywalls today? That doesn't sound at all like their strategy with iOS or Mac OS. I guess there's stuff like the Apple Developer Program, which I know a lot of folk have complaints about. But that's hardly a feature most folk would desire -- whereas all of those things you listed for a perspective car are. That said, if Apple did bring some of these features to market at…

It wouldn't really be the monthly subscriptions. The engine wouldn't be bolted in, everything would be welded into place. Parts to repair it would not be accessible, except at Apple dealerships. If it doesn't start, you could expect to replace the Main Driving Unit at a price roughly 90% of buying a new one.* The entire car would have tamper sensors. Also, they would make the car one inch shorter every year. I can't…

This is the same for any other flagship notebook sold in the marketing, manufacturing has changed, most people want thinner and lighter machines with great battery life and good reliability. We are not in the 90s anymore.

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

#513

Post by adrr »

josephcsible wrote: post #359
adrr wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they also push ads in their app like Tesla? Like referrals or upgrades? Seems to me like they are fleecing the owners.

You're using a different definition of "ads" than most people do.

A notice or announcement that promotes a service or feature. Standard definition.

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

#514

Post by sizzle »

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…

Don’t all cars have the trunk pull release by law?

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

#515

Post by bumby »

mauvehaus wrote: post #434
bumby wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’m not sure this is a given. My previous Ford would unlock the front door when the indoor handle was pulled, regardless of lock state. It seems like it’s depends on manufacturer, model, and options package.

https://mechanics.stackexchange.com/questions/52480/is-the-d...

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

#516

Post by betwixthewires »

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 security preventing unlocking of devices is pretty sturdy these days. You can't root a lot of phones these days without signing keys that are kept very secure by the manufacturers, similar things are starting to happen with all these other machines that don't really need all these electronics.

Voting with your wallet only works when they're not behaving like a cartel. Every major phone manufacturer dropped the headphone jack all at once. Every TV manufacturer is including "smart" dumb shit in their TVs. Every car manufacturer makes a car that requires the factory entertainment head unit just to run.

At this point, voting with your wallet is almost synonymous with building your own stuff. The reality is, most people are trapped in this distopia.

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

#518

Post by nexuist »

MAGZine wrote: post #423
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla has a mobile app that can remotely turn on the climate controls, lock the car, open/close/crack open the windows, enable sentry mode, show the exact GPS location of your car, and more. In the car, you get GPS that is constantly updated. And you pay $0/month for any of that. They DO offer a $10/month "Premium Connectivity" package. That adds music streaming via Slacker Radio, Tidal, and Spotify, enables satellit…

As a reminder, "Premium Connectivity" package was originally included for with an unpublished end date for their vehicles, until it wasn't. All of the remote controls you talk about being free are provided over cellular connections, in addition to nav, voice support, and telemetry being sent back to tesla. as such, tesla is subject to the same economics as toyota, they have just decided to hide it in the price of the…

Tesla probably makes back all the money they spend on AT&T bandwidth through the Supercharger network. As long as the math continues to work out there's no need to introduce any new fees.

I will say it is kind of strange that Premium Connectivity has no data limit. If I could just figure out how to launch a personal hotspot from my Model 3, I could cut the cord with Comcast...

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

#519

Post by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS »

djmips wrote: post #496
kingcharles wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watch this... this made me realize how tough car windows really are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L91_K-s4pMM

Windshield even more so.

I believe your windshield is an integral part of your car's rollover protection

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

#520

Post by geenew »

heavyset_go wrote: post #439
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

'In the land of internet-connected devices, the man with the soldering iron is king.'
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