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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

#551

Post by yumraj »

dylan604 wrote: post #541
notJim wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, the law requires the latch to be removed if the car is in a movie ;)

The only person in the movies I'm aware of that went to jail for breaking the laws for removing tags was Pee-wee Herman. However, I'm truly shocked that someone asked "how come in a movie...".

> However, I'm truly shocked that someone asked "how come in a movie...".

I know it sounds stupid to even ask that, but my question/concern came from that for someone who is not aware of such a thing, after watching movies I would have never even thought to look for it had I ever been in such a situation. Referring to also the story above about the women who was stuck in the car.

So, if all is true, then the movies in this case are doing a serious disservice. I know sounds naive and stupid to even ask that but most things function mostly as they do in real life, this to me seemed an odd exception.

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

#552

Post by quesera »

selimthegrim wrote: post #471
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…

The horn depending on the battery is frightening

I'm having trouble envisioning an alternative power source for the horn.

Compressed air maybe, recharged by electric motor when available. Sounds like a reliability problem to me though.

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

#553

Post by brokenmachine »

ceejayoz wrote: post #49
xyst wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the Apple Car actually materializes, I fear this will become the new standard. All cars come with all bells and whistles, but you have to pay monthly fees in order for them to function. - Want heated seats? $1/month - Want remote lock/unlock? $2/month - Want to remove rate limiting? $5/month - Want GPS in your car? $10/month - Want to use your "frunk"? $10/month - Want Apple CarPlay? $15/month - Want to activate h…

What monthly fees of this nature are required to use other Apple products? OS updates are free. The basic version of iCloud is free. "Find My iPhone" is free. Apple Maps is free. The App Store is free. Hell, CarPlay is free on the Apple end of things; it's some car manufacturers who've been charging for it. "Public will buy into it because the cost of the car is significantly less than their competition." Are we talk…

>What monthly fees of this nature are required to use other Apple products?

Apple conveniently disallows people from making local backups encrypted with your own key, which means in reality you need to pay a monthly fee to store them on iCloud.

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

#554

Post by garmaine »

mdorazio wrote: post #466
Thaxll wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very similar to the great movie Arrival. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life

Note that the meaning in the book was almost wholly changed for the film. A big part of the book was that by learning to think 4-dimensionally (via the alien language), the scientists found that free will did not exist. The narrator had no choice in how to act with her child - she was simply acting out a predefined narrative... "I suddenly remembered that a morphological relative of 'performative' was 'performance,'…

That was the conclusion of the movie. I remember because I hated it so much. It destroyed the story imho.

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

#555

Post by fionaellie »

outworlder wrote: post #368
gambiting wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On most(all?) Modern cars you can't unlock the door from the inside if the door got locked from the outside. I think it was made law to work like this? In order to prevent thefts where someone just runs a tiny rod through an opening and pulls a handle - that doesn't work anymore. If you get locked in the car while inside there is no way to open the door, you'd have to break a window to get out.

> On most(all?) Modern cars you can't unlock the door from the inside if the door got locked from the outside. Teslas have an (emergency?) mechanical release on their doors. At least the Model 3 does. Given that you can't 'lock from the outside' in the ordinary sense, if this law exists, there must be some leeway.

From this video, I learned that it's quite hard to find, and if you're in the back seat, there's no emergency mechanism at all. https://youtu.be/QCIo8e12sBM?t=239

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

#556

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

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.

Quite a lot of electronics test & measurement equipment. Notably modern spectrum analyzers & network analyzers. Also modern arbitrary waveform generators & RF generators are vastly better than a decade ago. Other bits haven't improved nearly as much, eg the HP 3458A is still one of the best meters in the world. The Fluke 5720A Calibrator is likewise an old workhorse.

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

#558

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

Yeah yeah yeah profits are not what the conversation thread was about.

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

#559

Post by edmundsauto »

Fezzik wrote: post #152
winternett wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many other car makers do this too. My Volvo has a remote start feature installed (that I paid for in buying the car) that is not accessible without enrollment in a (pretty much useless otherwise) monthly subscription service. It's flat out criminal considering that I could have just bought the device with a remote at Auto Zone for 1/4 of the price (that also doesn't allow the auto maker to track/log each time I use i…

Subaru has the same thing on their new cars - subscribe annually to Starlink or no remote start for you! I live in a winter wonderland where remote start would be a dream but no way I am paying a cent for this feature. I’ll have to look in to the after market options.

You’re not interested in paying for something that provides you with very clear value? So instead you wil go pay money for a different system to bolt on?

I don’t mean to criticize, but I have to admit that I cannot empathize.

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

#560

Post by speed_spread »

noahtallen wrote: post #203
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…

Even worse, D+ streams 4k HDR at no extra cost. And, subjectively, seems to have a higher bitrate or better compression than other popular services. (Looking at you and your garbage compression, Netflix!)

Disney can deliver high bandwidth HD because their content is semantically compressed upstream, at the production level.
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