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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

#61

Post by selfhoster11 »

pradn wrote: post #24
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…

You're right to point out that these problems arise across entire industries. You can't vote with your money if all otherwise good TVs have crap built into them. And it's not easy for a new entrant to gain a foothold in such a high-tech market. And even if they do, there's plenty of temptation to go down the same route of milking customers who already bought your product. Sooner or later, we won't even remember how i…

> 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 ubiquitous.

I did not feel happy that the lack of these things that I actually hated was making me uneasy.

Is the memory hole effect really that strong?

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

#62

Post by Syonyk »

donmcronald wrote: post #40
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…

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 conveniently just so happen to do things that are the opposite of what they claim to support. When called on it, you mutter "unintended consequences," "nobody could have foreseen that," and shut the mic off for anyone who predicted exactly what just happened.

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

#63

Post by robertoandred »

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…

But don't you see, Apple bad.

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

#64

Post by mavhc »

zeroflow wrote: post #43
pradn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right to point out that these problems arise across entire industries. You can't vote with your money if all otherwise good TVs have crap built into them. And it's not easy for a new entrant to gain a foothold in such a high-tech market. And even if they do, there's plenty of temptation to go down the same route of milking customers who already bought your product. Sooner or later, we won't even remember how i…

The topic with the TVs is going to be a problem for me in a few years. My current TV is from 2013 - it may have some years to go, but at some point, it will fail. I've had a short look at the market, and all the "good" brands (Samsung, LG, Sony) show horrific ads. It looks like the cheap brands simply sell your data. Then there are some local brands, which sell non-TV TV's (no tuner, there's a tax on that). They don'…

Just don't connect them to the internet, now you have a TV that's cheaper than it should be because they expect to show you ads, but they can't

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

#65

Post by luma »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #11
Karsteski wrote: post #2

Sigh... While I look forward to having an electric car someday, the trend in new cars does not look promising. Far too many instances of car companies having too much control, because of the advent of internet-connected vehicles. Is there a solution to this? I don't know. Especially because I can see legislation cementing these sorts of practices in very much convoluted ways. One can only hope competing car brands em…

I have both a new electric Audi and new Tesla. In either car I can just remove the sim and it'll completely disable all of the internet based features. A lot of the FUD around new cars is spread by grumpy old automotive journalists.

Does this impact your access to Tesla services or charging infrastructure? Can you still supercharge?

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

#66

Post by jen20 »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #11
Karsteski wrote: post #2

Sigh... While I look forward to having an electric car someday, the trend in new cars does not look promising. Far too many instances of car companies having too much control, because of the advent of internet-connected vehicles. Is there a solution to this? I don't know. Especially because I can see legislation cementing these sorts of practices in very much convoluted ways. One can only hope competing car brands em…

I have both a new electric Audi and new Tesla. In either car I can just remove the sim and it'll completely disable all of the internet based features. A lot of the FUD around new cars is spread by grumpy old automotive journalists.

What happens when they (inevitably) move to eSIM?

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

#67

Post by Syonyk »

black_puppydog wrote: post #28
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…

Actually it isn't. There are tons of examples of whole industries just switching to user-/customer-hostile practices/products, meaning there's simply no more way to vote with your wallet. Happened like that with even trivial things like the milk market in Germany. Within a year or two, fresh milk had suddenly all but vanished from the shelves. Once pay-for-fob becomes the norm, good luck trying to enter that market w…

> Seems like a market gap, no?

The problem is that the backend analytics they're collecting are worth so much that they would either have to lose a ton of money with subscriptions, or admit just how much they're making from your "free" eyeballs.

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

#68

Post by selfhoster11 »

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…

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.

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

#69

Post by ribosometronome »

xyst wrote: post #35
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…

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 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 that price, they'd be doing considerably better than some of their competition. Tesla's Full Self Driving is locked behind a $10,000 cost or a $199 monthly subscription. You'd have to subscribe to your speculated service for 42 years before it cost more than that getting the upgrade on Tesla you had 4 decades ago.

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

#70

Post by daxuak »

black_puppydog wrote: post #28
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…

Actually it isn't. There are tons of examples of whole industries just switching to user-/customer-hostile practices/products, meaning there's simply no more way to vote with your wallet. Happened like that with even trivial things like the milk market in Germany. Within a year or two, fresh milk had suddenly all but vanished from the shelves. Once pay-for-fob becomes the norm, good luck trying to enter that market w…

I digress but what happend to the milk market? Could you post a reference?
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