Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start • Hacker News Board

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

#531

Post by _ea1k » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 2:08 AM UTC

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As a reminder, "Premium Connectivity" package was originally included for with an unpublished end date for their vehicles, until it wasn't. All of the remote controls you talk about being free are provided over cellular connections, in addition to nav,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…

I'm not sure what you mean about the unpublished end date. The cars from back then still have it for free.

They announced the move to a fee model well in advance of actually doing it.

They've handled some things like this poorly at times, but this one they actually did right.

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

#532

Post by joebob42 » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 2:09 AM UTC

servytor wrote: post #120

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…

Unrelated, but one of my favorite quotes from PKD is this one from Now Wait for Last Year: --- “All right," Eric agreed. "If you were me, and your wife were sick, desperately so, with no hope of recovery, would you leave her? Or would you stay with her, even if you had traveled ten years into the future and knew for an absolute certainty that the damage to her brain could never be reversed? And staying with her would…

The cabbies take is bizarre to me. Surely choosing to leave is part of reality, not a rejection of it? Why should living in reality require acceding to circumstances at every opportunity?

Unless I misunderstand the context and this quote is meant to be ironic, which seems possible.

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

#533

Post by betwixthewires » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 2:10 AM UTC

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #118

paulkrush wrote: post #4

If this keeps up, some used cars will have a higher value than new ones. People will have to break EULAs to drive cars in mines or buildings with no radio access. "Error: please tow your car to an RF access area to enable movement..."

I for one will never buy a new car again unless there is a massive move back away from these "features" - even the ones that don't require a monthly charge. I don't want a car that phones home (much less that has components that phone home) to send information that has been harvested from my activities. I don't want a car that beeps or flashes when people pass me or the car thinks I have driven to close to something.…

Unfortunately, a lot of these features are being mandated in newer cars. Rear view cameras are the prominent example here.

I'm with you. I drive a 20 year old vehicle, and my next vehicle will probably be a 30 year old rebuilt truck. I'm sure I could find someone to do all the work and source all the parts for a rebuild on something for much cheaper than the cost of a new car.

This bullshit is getting out of hand.

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

#534

Post by ClumsyPilot » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 2:14 AM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #205

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.

> Police believe that when James Rogers got into the vehicle, a cable became loose and cut off the power to the operate the horn and locks. Rogers did not know how to manually unlock the vehicle and became trapped inside > the 2007 Corvette has a manual release located on the floorboard by the driver's seat Having random cables cut doesn't help the situation, but the issue was not knowing how to manually release the…

"manual release located on the floorboard by the driver's seat"

I am willing to bet my house that half the people who built that car would not find the lever if it suddenly caught fire (or any other emergency) while they are in it

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

#535

Post by type0 » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 2:15 AM UTC

bushbaba wrote: post #60

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…

And yet it opens the door for new competition to enter. If China is smart they’ll start selling cars that “just work”. Much like the appeal apple originally had against the crapware loaded windows laptops of the early 2000s

A car that just works without any modern features is Lada Niva 4x4, those are really old school but some people like it that way.

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

#536

Post by ClumsyPilot » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 2:19 AM UTC

betwixthewires wrote: post #468

seanp2k2 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree; it's like all the rollaway accidents that happen now because of electronic shifters: https://www.safetyresearch.net/the-persistence-of-rollaway/ Design matters, and bad designs can literally be deadly. Why auto mfgs feel the need to "innovate" with shifter designs is beyond me. The worst part is how every mfg seems to be implementing a different design of bad electronic shifters, from wheels and touchscreens…

It's not just auto manufacturers. It seems literally everything is being designed with a philosophy of "fuck the user" in mind. I cannot think of a single thing more complicated than a concrete block that functions better now than previous versions did 10 years ago, and I'm sure there are some things that work at least as good, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.

My building had a dialing system replaced with one that uses a phone line to call a mobile of each resident. It can also only assing one number. Now I get the call at work if my wife orders pizza, or if i am out of the country.

It also doesnt work at all if i am in tube, or when my building forgets to pay phone bill, or movike network craps out

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

#537

Post by selfhoster11 » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 2:22 AM UTC

s1artibartfast wrote: post #353

selfhoster11 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vote with your wallet never worked, and is never going to work if your wallet is empty in the first place. Why do you think people don't all buy free range eggs and organic produce? Because it's out of their reach, even if they care.

They don't vote with their wallet because they don't care.

Read my comment again. A lot of them don't have anything in their wallet, so they have nothing to vote with. They buy the cheapest food because that's the only option. And yes, food poverty is still around despite food banks.

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

#538

Post by selfhoster11 » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 2:24 AM UTC

donmcronald wrote: post #156

selfhoster11 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sooner or later, we won't even remember how it was before. Who even remembers the internet before advertising morphed it into something completely different? How long was that period? 5 years? That's what worries me. After a long stint of playing entirely only smartphone games, going back to play some older titles on PC was... really weird. None of the usual pay to play friction or engagement traps that are so ubiq…

Most kids don't even know what it's like to play a game that's not riddled with ads and designed around microtransactions. There are a lot of things that require a generation (of people) to change. For example, the latency of game streaming services is awful if you're used to a local experience, but if you ask a 12 year old that's never experienced low latency, local gaming, they don't even realize it could be differ…

Based on your comment, the already-bad state of latency across the software stack will get even worse. I really don't want that.

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

#539

Post by ClumsyPilot » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 2:27 AM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #406

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.

> 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...

Nah, personal responsebilityb is for loosers and plebs, when a massive company craps out or causes hundreds to die, its an unforeseeable accident

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

#540

Post by ClumsyPilot » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 2:29 AM UTC

manquer wrote: post #446

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…

I have seen the this happen in real life with housing startups many of them use mobile apps for unlocking doors in India - nestaway [1] or Zolo[2] and others, including unscrewing the lock Doors won't unlock if rent is not paid on time, sometimes it is not even delayed rent payments, the company will charge you frivolously for something and you will be locked out unless you resolve the payment dispute i.e. talk to su…

"Doors won't unlock if rent is not paid on time"

Need to bring back public floggibg for whoever came up with this