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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

#611

Post by calsy »

jmiserez wrote: post #185
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.

Regardless of model it's a good idea to put a emergency hammer / glass breaker in your car. (addendum: also to rescue someone else, not blaming the driver)

Can also come in handy when road raging.

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

#612

Post by kylehotchkiss »

The real joke is the Toyota app. It feels sloppy and rushed. Is there any protection or opt out from location collection? I wish I could wrap a faraday cage type thing over the 4g chip but I have no idea where it is or how to find it. They probably added it to the same fuse as the ECU so you can’t get rid of it.

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

#613

Post by tqi »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #562
tqi wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$8 is a lot but to be fair, Disney+ is almost certainly losing money per subscriber. $8 in this case also has to cover the cost of the 4G connection, which likely is in the $1 to $2 range.

> $8 in this case also has to cover the cost of the 4G connection, which likely is in the $1 to $2 range. I could get a suitable data line myself for $1, at quantity one. I doubt Toyota has to pay anywhere near that much.

Hmm at a previous company we paid about $1.25/mo/device to connect to T-mobile's 2G network. Knowing how "Enterprise" pricing often works in other sectors, I actually wouldn't be surprised if larger companies pay more per connection than consumers (ostensibly because of "Enterprise" features like dedicated support or uptime guarantees, but really because they are motivated enough to bear the higher cost).

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

#614

Post by boppo1 »

mauvehaus wrote: post #431
brokenmachine wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too late now for her of course, but you can take the headrest off the seat and use the metal prongs to smash the windows to get out.

Having watched a burly firefighter take three good swings with an axe to bust out a window (to get to the hood release of an unattended car fire), I am extremely skeptical of this claim. Somebody on YouTube tested those emergency hammers and concluded they're basically useless. If you really want to break a tempered glass car window (I.e., any of them but the windshield), their recommendation was an automatic center…

I have heard keeping a shattered sparkplug inyour car can help. Something about them auto-shatters glass.

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

#615

Post by lh7777 »

brokenmachine wrote: post #593
wlesieutre wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iCloud's free storage tier still being stuck at 5 GB as the base phone storage has grown to 128 GB is the main thing I'd criticize. You realistically can't use iCloud for photo storage or backups with that plan. I bet most people can blow through that just with Messages history if they have anyone sending them videos. I think the upgrade prices are reasonable, $1/month for 50GB and $3/month for 200GB, but I can see c…

Don't forget disallowing local backups for no reason other than moneygrubbing. $3/month for 200Gb is reasonable in your opinion, but people who don't buy Apple can buy a 2T drive for $50.

When did Apple start disallowing local backups? I'll admit I haven't tried recently -- there's no data worth backing up on my iPhone anyway -- but it definitely worked just fine a few years ago. Apple's "Back up iPhone" support page[1] agrees with me.

[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/back-up-iphone-iph3ec...

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

#616

Post by boppo1 »

mywittyname wrote: post #576
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards have a lot to say on the strength, composition, and properties of glass in passenger vehicles. In addition to being very difficult to break, it must also be resistant to shattering and remain in place while experiencing some pretty extreme forces. Automotive glass is not even glass really, it's more of a composite made up of layers of various transparent materials all design…

are these specs public somewhere? Sounds cool.

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

#617

Post by penteract »

gonehome wrote: post #566
mdorazio wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,'…

I thought the movie implied this as well? I include Arrival alongside Children of Men as an example of a case where the movie is better than the book (and I'm a big Ted Chiang fan) - changing the daughter's death from a climbing accident to a disease was much better imo.

In the book, it's impossible to act on information from the future, whereas in the film that clearly happens in the phone call near the end.

This means that if the daughter had died in a climbing accident in the film, the mother would have to have chosen to let that happen/not warn her, whereas to avoid the disease, the only option would have been not to have the child. In the book, that wasn't an option; learning the language changed her subjective experience of time, but did not give a superpower.

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

#618

Post by wirthjason »

Is this happening to Toyotas in Japan? Feels like the “un-Japanese” thing to do. I remember getting a cell phone as a college student. I had AU but my Japanese friends had Docomo. Docomo was way more than AU for the first year but the longer you were a customer the cheaper it was. It felt like real loyalty. I was trained on the US system that the fort year was the cheapest me then they increased the rates. The complete opposite.

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

#619

Post by indigo945 »

betwixthewires wrote: post #543
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm glad to say I don't have any shit like this that I have to deal with. I've got a phone and a laptop and that's it. My car basically has a fuel controller and ABS controller in it. Aftermarket MP3 playing head unit with an aux jack. Whatever benefits the tech firms and salespeople sold you (not literally you, anyone reading) on all this shit, if you have this stuff in your life I guarantee you your life is more st…

But in ten years, all the used stuff will also be fully-electronic vendor-locked garbage, just older and with the cloud services down, and hence unusable.

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

#620

Post by edanm »

gonehome wrote: post #566
mdorazio wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,'…

I thought the movie implied this as well? I include Arrival alongside Children of Men as an example of a case where the movie is better than the book (and I'm a big Ted Chiang fan) - changing the daughter's death from a climbing accident to a disease was much better imo.

Funny how taste works - I feel the opposite.

In the case of a disease, there's really nothing she can do, and iirc the film implies the hard choice here was to decide to have a child even knowing that will die.

In the car of an accident, there is the feeling that she could literally have prevented her daughter's death by preventing the accident, but "chooses" not to. The free will implications of that are much more interesting imo.

(To be clear, it's one of my favorite stories and also one of my favorite movies.)

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