Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start
arstechnica.comwas 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 bought this conapt." In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. "You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt's money-gulping door. "I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."
(Philip K. Dick: Ubik)
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 mean-"
"I can see what it would mean, sir," the cab broke in. "It would mean no other life for you beyond caring for her."
"That's right," Eric said. "I'd stay with her," the cab decided. "Why?" "Because," the cab said, "life is composed of reality configurations so constituted. To abandon her would be to say, I can't endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely special easier conditions."
"I think I agree," Eric said after a time. "I think I will stay with her." "God bless you, sir," the cab said. "I can see that you're a good man.”
Very similar to the great movie Arrival.
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,' which could describe the sensation of conversing when you knew what would be said: it was like performing in a play."
...
"Before I learned how to think in Heptapod B, my memories grew like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesimal sliver of combustion that was my consciousness, marking the sequential present. After I learned Heptapod B, new memories fell into place like gigantic blocks, each one measuring years in duration, and though they didn't arrive in order or land contiguously, they soon composed a period of five decades. It is the period during which I know Heptapod B well enough to think in it, starting during my interviews with Flapper and Raspberry and ending with my death."
The movie left this key message out almost entirely.
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.
"...impossible to act on information from the future..."
Might want to read:
Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect Daryl J. Bem Cornell University
https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/psp-a0021524.pdf
This work has been replicated many times by others because no one believed it.
Also look up Decision Augmentation Theory.
That paper was an interesting read :) I googled a bit about it and found possible explanation https://replicationindex.com/2018/01/05/bem-retraction/
There is also:
"Feeling the future: A meta-analysis of 90 experiments on the anomalous anticipation of random future events"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC4706048/
The book 'Real Magic' is related:
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.)
> the hard choice here was to decide to have a child even knowing that [they] will die
Knowing that my children will suffer and die is the main reason why I didn't want to have any. Now I have two.
Funnily, it's the same reason my own mother didn't want to have kids either. Yet, here we are. I suspect it is a pretty common feeling.
I logged in just to tell you thank you for sharing, sometimes the right comment at the right time means a lot, and this is my case now it appears, so thank you.
I still think it's the right decision not to have kids.
I myself would prefer not to been born (while my life is relatively easy)
In dune there is a story part were the ruler knows what he needs to do but also realizes that he is not strong enough and knows that his son has to fullfil it (I forgot what it is about) but I feel as soon as we achieve the ability to self determine things like if we want to make kids, we should stop doing it as we might not have the right to create new life.
Don't get me wrong, this is not black and white thinking: have kids if you want.
Evolutionary everything and everyone is programed to stay alive and procreate. Fighting against it is hard.
It's easier to make this life easier, better etc than staying your ground and not making kids.
We tried actually and it didn't work out after 3 month. That made it much easier to not try again. But as you see, thinking about it and what you do is not black and white.
I think this reasoning doesn't hold up imo.
The vast majority of people are happy to exist, even people that experience a lot of suffering. Even if you ignore everything else, just that metric suggests on net it's better to have kids.
> "We should stop doing it as we might not have the right to create new life."
You can't get consent before hand so the best we can do is look at results after. By that it seems choosing to not have kids would be the less ethical position (though I don't personally hold that view - people should do what they want).
In addition to just being a fundamental part of humanity, a spark of intellectual curiosity in an otherwise indifferent universe, and a way to have companionship when you're old.
That's the problem: evolution drives life otherwise Evolution wouldn't exist.
Now we circumvent already things evolution purports like the strongest survivies. We also compensate for errors or flaws like eye sight, mental illness etc. We question eating meat. We cook meat. We self control and we evolved evolution by inventing the internet (highspeed human interconnect) and computers. Potentially the internet itself with all it's inputs (blogs, comments, news), processing power in-between and outputs will become a new thing.
We also do not support not lifing. If I would tell my parents that I want to stop/end my life I would not be allowed.
Why? Because of course the only true answer can be that lifing is good.
Now let's question this: we have no impact (universe will disintegrate), we have a lot of pain in the world, we can't guarantee to anyone that they will ha e a good life and there is no purpose in life either besides the purpose you create for yourself.
We can't ask someone if they want to be a life before they get born either.
In my logic the most social thing would be to be aware of everything around you and stop creating new brains to entertain yours.
How many brains in agony are okay? What is the perfect ratio? 1:10000? 1:100?
Making kids is not a logical answer it's an evolutionary one.
Lucky enough for our society my type of thinking will not propagate much anyway. ----
People are doing what they want anyway. It's just a discussion :)
Moral and ethics is a construct of a self-sufficient, sustainable and fair society. Nothing else.
> In dune there is a story part were the ruler knows what he needs to do but also realizes that he is not strong enough and knows that his son has to fullfil it (I forgot what it is about)
I think you're referring to the Golden Path [0]
That was the conclusion of the movie. I remember because I hated it so much. It destroyed the story imho.
I thought in the movie it was cast as her choosing to accept it and cherishing the time they'd have left together? Maybe I missed the predestination theme (or maybe it was just implied... although you could say it's implied for any story involving travel or communication between different times.)
We’ll I certainly walked away with an understanding that it was all predestined, which annoyed me to no end because it felt like a ridiculous and meaningless cop out. But maybe I misread something that was actually more ambiguous?
Based on the incredible work of Ted Chiang
Thank you for sharing this. I've often wondered how some folks deal with misfortune, take it in stride and work through them than abandon all hope for an easier route.
Perseverance and Endurance are a rarity in today's society.
> Perseverance and Endurance are a rarity in today's society.
No, they're just quiet.
This comment needs to be internalized by everyone who has ever worked in a collaborative environment, or God forbid manage a team of people.
For all the hard charging, 10x programer, I am a builder let me work folks out there...Empathy is hard to learn, but you'll be a better person for it. I promise.
How are you measuring perseverance and endurance? I find that such claims tend to be completely made up, based on some "sense" you get from hearing a couple of viral stories.
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.
I lived that in he Real World, for nearly 30 years. The saga of my late wife is now part of the documentary Pain Warriors. It can be watched for free on Amazon Prime and TubiTV.
What has become known as Karen's Journal is required reading at Duke school of Medicine to educate doctors about the reality of Chronic Pain. In the end the Medical Establishment failed her and she killed herself to stop the pain.
Details on that here: https://www.kpaddock.com/pw
You may enjoy this recent article about Stephen Glass (infamous news fabulist) whose wife suffered from early-onset Alzheimer’s.
walled
Put in foo@example.net (or whatever) as your email address and you can read it.
I think I'd like to unsubscribe from all the "Unrelated, but ..." distraction top-level replies to top comments.
Please just stop.
Opposite reaction.
Something that pings a neuron in another brain may be the second step in a chain to me which leads me to interesting and unexpected lines of thought.
If it bothers you, depending on your client, theres a "collapse" button at the bottom of posts so you can personally skip on entire threads as soon as you know it's not for you.
Other people have different values so I, without rancour, say "carry on" to grandparent.
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 petite) and get a tyre lever and smash a side-window so she could call out to a neighbour for help.
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 punch.
You’re supposed to do it like this: https://youtu.be/tZTa8Nh0VlE
This reminds me of the spark plug ceramic demos. Little ceramic tip on a spark plug (isolated from the rest of the plug) make an effective car window smashing projectile. No idea if it would work from inside the car / if you could get enough speed on it sitting right next to the window!
https://www.reddit.com/r/mythbusters/comments/130js6/breakin...
Technically it's not the tip of a spark plug, but a shard of the ceramic insulator when shattered- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninja_rocks
So they crush a spark plug to get the "rocks"? How?
Right. As a firefighter, I carried a spring-loaded center-punch in the pocket of my bunker coat. No muss, no fuss. Just put the tip on a side window and press until it fires.
Watch this... this made me realize how tough car windows really are:
He's hitting the base of the window with a blunt object. You don't want a blunt object.
Windshield even more so.
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 designed to counter balance the weaknesses of the other layers. And windshields are bonded into the body of the vehicle with a very strong plastic adhesive.
I'll admit not keeping up with the standards, but back around ~2003 it was pretty common for arrestees in police cars to escape custody by kicking the rear window out from inside the car. It's held on by glue or something and pops right off the frame in one solid piece.
Cruisers now tend to have cages to prevent this.
(This is not a solution if the car is underwater.)
are these specs public somewhere? Sounds cool.
Sadly, no. Unlike some better fields, the auto industry is incredibly tight-lipped about safety and crash structures. If these in-formal standards were to get out... and if the public were to know how well the industry has cornered the regulators, creating pseudo-standards that technically conform to the safety protocols but functionally make zero difference to consumer/passenger safety... there'd be riots.
Depends if you are trying to break the window from the inside or the outside. It's very difficult from the outside, and much easier from the inside (I cracked my windscreen and needed a replacement, because I was carrying a long piece of wood and it moved a little and contacted the windscreen).
Two things:
1) Are you me? I've done exactly this because I knew that my car fit a 10' board. Turns out when you're buying rough lumber 10' sometimes means 10' 2".
2) The windshield is laminated glass instead of tempered. It'll crack much more easily, but it'll (more or less) stay in one piece in the frame instead of shattering out into a million tiny bits.
> 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.
Wrong window. You're talking about the windshield which is a completely different type of glass than other windows.
He was trying to break the side window. Tempered glass is super tough, until you damage the outer layer. Presumably the pick end of his fire axe wasn't sharp or hard enough to scratch that outer layer without a hell of a swing behind it.
I have heard keeping a shattered sparkplug inyour car can help. Something about them auto-shatters glass.
I've carried a hatchet in my car for years for this reason.
breaking the windshield is the cheapest option to replace
Also in the "too late" vein, at least in the US, I believe cars are still required to have a latch to open the trunk from the inside. Not sure if other countries have these.
Serious question: So why are all the people who are trapped/kidnapped in the cars in the movies not able to come out and have to yell to have someone come and rescue them?
That implies that there is no way to open the latch from inside and people, including me, may take that as the truth and not even try to find the latch. I for sure didn't know that there was a way.
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.
>So, if all is true, then the movies in this case are doing a serious disservice.
Yes, modern cars have these pull tags in them. I don't know how new, but the first car that I bought new with a trunk was a 2007 model. It had them. They are even glow in the dark for easier locating in a closed/dark environment.
However, if you are ever in a real life situation trying to decide that the "movies" didn't do it this way is just a really bad way to be. Maybe the illusion/magic of Hollywood still holds for those not working in and around it, but nothing on a screen is real. Every thing presented on screen to you is there for a reason (even if what is on screen is omitting things). I've been in/around/through it for 30 years, so I could be jaded too.
I understand and not disagreeing with any of that.
Since I don’t make the point of putting myself in a trunk normally nor do I RTFM :(, my point, put in another way, was that if I had seen it in a movie I would have known that something like that exists. That is all.
Honestly, the only reason I knew about mine was the salesperson at the dealership pointed them out to me. Maybe I had an exceptional sales rep?
I've seen cars flip and roll over and continue driving in a movie, yet I wouldn't expect my car to do that. I've seen modern cars get hot wired in a movie, yet I wouldn't be able to do to a modern car. I'm just saying you're putting way too much faith in movies my friend ;-)
> I'm just saying you're putting way too much faith in movies my friend ;-)
Wait you’re telling me I can’t dodge bullets like they did in the Matrix… ;D
Thanks for the chuckle .. have a good one ..
While we're on the subject, silencers don't turn handguns silent, gas tanks don't explode when shot, and you can die from being buried chest-deep in sand
It's too dark to search for it, so you'd have to already know where the latch is at. I didn't know about keyless trunks until my ex-wife needed a jump and the battery was in the trunk, which could only be opened electronically or with the 'latch.' Google to the rescue!
All of the inner latches I’ve seen are made of glow in the dark material.
Most of the vehicles I've seen used for this purpose in movies are Oldsmobiles and such from the 70s-- long before the latches were a requirement. Modern car trunks are also way smaller than older sedans, which don't lend themselves to human transport.
If you're ever in the trunk of a moving vehicle, do what you can to sabotage the brake lights-- the wires are usually accessible and it increases the chances of attracting police attention.
I don't know about US, but in my country many cars (most?) are equipped with child safety switches for back doors. It's accessible when door is open (it's on door's inner edge) and if it's locked, you can't open door inside. It's needed to prevent children from accidentally opening doors, but you can use this feature for kidnapping purposes.
Of course you can always open front doors.
because their hands are tied.
Not in all cases..
As far as I know this is widely disseminated across the world.
Front windshield is easy to brake from the inside. A gentle push with your feet will crack it. Some harder kicks will remove it for sure.
Yep, not much more than moulding holding it in.
Have you actually tried this?
Some cars (including mine) have a seat that’s just one unified unit. No way to remove it.
if you can get inside the boot you can open it, no need to break the windows. It is a shame this is not more widely know.
That happens here in Florida. Older person drives into a canal and the window motors short out they are trapped.
Don’t all cars have the trunk pull release by law?
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.
Why? I've only used my horn for telling people to get off their phone and go because the light turned green. I can't remember it ever being a necessity.
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.
> the front doors both open when the handle is pulled, locked or not
The fact that the front doors both unlock when a single handle is pulled is because there's an electronic sensor and solenoid that unlocks everything when one handle is opened.
I had a Pontiac Vibe (really a Toyota Matrix) that had a cable in the door unlock assembly fail. You could open the door from the outside - the external door handle was physically the same part as the latch mechanism - but the external handle was back by your shoulder, while the internal handle was forward by the mirror and connected to the latch by a steel cable swaged to some aluminum pins; that connection eventually failed and the internal door handle flapped impotently.
I spent an embarrassing amount of time ignoring the problem and instead rolling down the window to open the door...
Regardless, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine that an automotive engineer might decide to replace cable actuator with a wire and solenoid.
> Regardless, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine that an automotive engineer might decide to replace cable actuator with a wire and solenoid.
Or with a bunch of CANBUS electromechanical hardware and some shittily written software running on the entertainment unit (with insecure cellular network connectivity).
I wonder how long before someone sets up unlockyourtoyota.ru where you can send them 0.01BTC to unlock the car you're stuck inside?
This made my day. You're 100% spot on. I laughed loudly at the absurd truth you painted for me.
Low effort comment I know, but I had to let you know.
> unlockyourtoyota.ru
The fact that it's a russian site made my day. Russian hackers man...
I think what GP might mean is that whether you are on the driver's or passenger's side, when you pull the handle that door opens even if it is locked.
I've noticed that on both our 1995 and 2014 Fords, when you pull the door handle it mechanically unlocks that door and opens it. (On the 2014 the other doors may additionally be triggered to unlock. However, in a no-power situation pulling the handle will still mechanically unlock just that one door.)
Chevy Express vans and trucks didn't unlock the door when you pulled the handle. You had to manually slide the unlock toggle or hit the electronic unlock button before opening the door.
I've only noticed this feature on Fords. My SAAB requires the occupant to pull up on the lock knob on the windowsill, and my Saturn requires one to turn the lock knob on the inside door handle to the unlocked position. While both require additional action besides just pulling the handle, neither relies on the car's electrical system to open or unlock the doors (and indeed, neither car has any electrical locking component in any of the doors).
To be clear, the vehicles I was referring to all had manual lock controls. The button unlocked all of the doors
That's a fairly common failure for many older cars. I had a 1997 Jaguar do the same thing.
You could also climb over and exit the other door.
They have a button that you hit with your thumb, not a mechanical handle. The manual door open lever is down by the driver's left foot (passenger's right foot) https://www.edmunds.com/chevrolet/corvette-stingray/2014/lon...
Sure enough, Corvettes since the mid-00s (at least) have electronic doors.
Here's a video describing how to use the manual overrides (none are in plain sight)... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLDqmGQU6L0
Here's a photo of thee door interior (with no mechanical door pull)... https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/7I8AAOSwF-tgN5U1/s-l300.jpg
A long time ago, a friend bought a kit for one of these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purvis_Eureka
I spent a lot of time helping build it.
He got the "electric roof" version, which had this awful hodgepodge for pneumatic rams, high pressure air hoses and couplings, and a seriously underpowered hydraulic pump - with instructions to fill the system with auto transmission fluid.
It was _not_ a well designed and reliable system, and some of the failure modes left the roof/door clamped down. He kept a pocket knife in th4e glovebox so you could stab the hoses to release the hydraulic fluid and manually push the roof open.
It wasn't until it failed closed while he was taking his girlfriend to the high school formal/dance, then ruined her dress by getting red auto trans fluid on it that he bit the bullet and threw all the supplied parts away and replaced it all with electric liner actuators...
For those who haven't clicked the link: The roof/doors are all one big assembly that hinges up and away, like Lambo doors for the entire top of the car.
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...
> the front doors both open when the handle is pulled, locked or not
Unfortunately, this is not anymore warranted. Already in models of ten years ago, there do exist "full lock non mechanically overridable" and "lock which is unlocked through the handles". Disabling the "feature" requires intervention from the manufacturer - if it can be disabled at all.
Look, I am informed that in at least many of the current cars with RFID based keys, it is impossible to lock yourself in the car... (And the idea seems to have spawned from manufacturers coming from the territories in the world most notorious for carjacking.)
That hasn't always been the case. For example, our 1991 Saturn station wagon (with mechanical locks) would only open if you unlocked the door first with the lock lever.
> 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 latch and not having an emergency window breaker.
This is absurd victim blaming.
The problem is there is a door handle that is designed with a failure mode such that pulling the handle DOES NOT OPEN THE DOOR.
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 to one-click-at-a-time joysticks to single-function pushbuttons for some gears with others on a scroll wheel. They've taken something and made it worse with no benefit to the user. At least with those auto-flushing toilets, the intention was good, even if the implementation is still somehow so awful decades later.
I drove a rental with a rotary-dial shifter. That is the single most braindead UX thing I've seen in a car that doesn't involve a touch-screen. We've had PRND(L) levers as the standard for shifting in automatics for over 50 years now, and the dial offers no advantages that I can see.
Probably it is a few dolars cheaper. Not enough to change the bottom line, but as always, any short term cost cutting is enough to give brain-dead Harvard MBAs multiple orgasms.
Dollars? I've worked with car manufacturers and they would sell their soul to save pennies. OTOH they tend to be very conservative with anything that actually impacts the driving part of the car.
My Ford Fusion has one of those rotary dials. Didn't like it at first, but it is nice having that air space free (not able to accidentally knock it out of gear, more room for an extra cup holder). Also the cars with a physical gear shift lever still work by activating switches, there hasn't been mechanical linkage for years in a lot of models.
>> We've had PRND(L) levers as the standard for shifting in automatics for over 50 years now, and the dial offers no advantages that I can see.
My guess is that the dial costs less, so it is done for the company not the customer. Many cases of bad design come from prioritizing the manufacturer over the customer.
Pray tell what make and model this was so I can run as fast as my legs can take me in the opposite direction if Hertz tries to palm one off on me
I rented a Ford Edge two months ago that had one. It was quite distracting. At the end of a week, I still hadn't internalized how it worked. I had to think about it every time.
On my old Chevrolet Tahoe, I can tell what gear I just shifted into by feel (shifting into D, it has a slight tendency to overshoot the normal overdrive mode and end up locked into 3rd). And of course, this is essentially a nonissue on manual transmissions.
Most cars have a stop at D; e.g. for the ones where you pull the stem towards to to leave park, you can let the stem spring back at neutral and push it down until it stops at D, and for the ones with a button you can release the button at neutral.
[edit]
Honestly if the rotary dial had similar tactile feedback, it would probably be fine. No worse than when they moved it off of the tree as bench seats were retired for safety reasons.
Like I said - it has such a stop, it's just old and a bit worn.
It's column shift despite bucket seats.
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.
>> I cannot think of a single thing more complicated than a concrete block that functions better now than previous versions did 10 years ago...
I've got news for you. My uncle worked in construction most his life. He told me the concrete isn't as good today as it used to be. He said in some places for shipping they "blow it around". Meaning you don't put it on a ship using a conveyor, you do something similar to blowing dust through a pipe? I never asked for more detail. He thought the handling was exposing it to humidity or in some way degrading the concrete. This would be another case of prioritizing cost/efficiency over the customer.
So even your humble concrete block might not be as good as they used to make em'
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.
I forgot about engineering hardware. I've used some of that stuff, lots of it is good but tons of it is vendor lock in stuff as well, NI comes to mind.
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 stressful than mine because of it.
I'm to the point where I only buy used stuff period. Basically food and underwear have to be new. I don't think I've bought a brand new anything in over 5 years. I don't know if I ever will if this trend continues, proprietary single serve coffee pouches, internet connected stovetops, TVs that show ads separate from the broadcast, cars that track your movements and sell them to data brokers, touch screen everything, how many screens does a single person need?
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.
I think it's more like as things get more complex, there are many more edge cases to check and most are very unlikely to happen statistically/practically so manufacturers don't put enough thinkin/design effort in those "details".
Until, of course, it does.
I don't buy it.
They're literally engineering shit people don't need now. In virtually every product. And doing UI redesigns on things that change the user friendly UX, often breaking it.
I remember looking forward to browser updates, OS updates, the next generation hardware whatever. Things used to actually get better. I actually got a new phone the other day with a newer android version, never mind that there's a fucking hole in the screen, when I changed my screen brightness there was a deliberate animated delay to the brightness changing with the slider. Seriously, who the fuck is making decisions like this?
90% of things don't need to get more complex. A touch screen on a fridge, speakers in your car that get louder as you accelerate, Bluetooth speakers that need software updates, these are not improvements to the products in any real way whatsoever.
I agree. My theory is that this is all 'busy' work. For some reason or another, there's just nothing else for the employees to do.
Exactly. Couldn't they just have some system where the door handles have a magnetic dead-switch, that reverts to manual operation when no power is applied?
The battery might not have enough juice to unlock the doors, but still not be completely dead. Of course with good design that shouldn't be a problem.
But the handle DOES open the door. It’s just at your feet, quite clearly marked, instead of physically on the door. It’s specifically there so that if you are in an accident you can still release the door. It’s designed With the idea the car will see a road course and is far superior to a handle on the door.
It’s sad he died but I found that handle in the first 5 minutes of owning my first corvette. It has a giant red picture of the door opening.
When you're half dazed from a collision and the car is on fire, will your scared but unhurt 11 year old son know where this hidden lever is?
I did, on a 1980s car, since it was the normal door handle.
Hidden? It’s directly below where the “oh shit” handle is on the door, you need to move your hand less than 6” to pull it. Calling it hidden is completely misrepresenting reality. If my 7 year old knows where it is and insists on using it to open the door, I hope your 11 year old can figure it out.
From [1], I see it's a discreet, black lever with a small picture of a door opening. It perhaps is about 6" away, but in a space almost always obscured by ones legs.
Emergency controls in vehicles with proper regulation look like this [2], so they can still be used in the dark, with smoke, etc.
[1] https://hhcorvettenewsletter.wordpress.com/2016/08/03/dont-l...
[2] https://railgallery.wongm.com/gold-coast-light-rail/F122_929...
Principe of least surprise.
Humans expect tools to be at arm height. Do not work against natural assumptions. If you increase cognitive load, that's that much more attention diverted in a state where attention is already maxed out or otherwise in shortage.
It can be the difference between life and death.
The elements you're referring to are procedural mitigations to a poor design from a human factors standpoint. Those mitigations are always less preferred than managing those risks from an engineering perspective.
OSHA actually outlines the preference:
1) Eliminate the hazard outright (not possible here, you need the door to lock sometimes)
2) Engineer out the risk (they tried to do...poorly...with the manual unlock)
3) Administrative controls (e.g., the manual)
4) Personal protective equipment
> not having an emergency window breaker.
Tip for readers: if your car has removable headrests, they can serve effectively as emergency window breakers.
I’ve seen this tip pop up a few times, but it is worth noting that the way to break a window isn’t to hit it with the metal bits.
You have to insert the metal rod between the bottom of the window and the door card and use leverage to pry at the window until it cracks
"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
> Having random cables cut doesn't help the situation, but the issue was not knowing how to manually release the latch and not having an emergency window breaker.
Is it, is that really the issue?
It was certainly an issue. If you have a bright red override lever on the door, then they would have known and not had a problem.
>> Having random cables cut doesn't help the situation
It was the battery cable or similar, which cut power to all the electronic means of getting out - including the other door. It was not "cut" in the sense of someone using a knife, it just came loose or similarly broke contact. This is a design failure, not a RTFM failure.
>> Wait what, do Corvettes not just unlock and open when you pull the handle?
Nope, not that model.
I had the chance to take one of the Fisker Karma development vehicles home from work. Everyone said it drove great. I got in and realized the door latch was a button. The whole car way prototype and development parts. The window was kinda small to crawl through. I said no thanks. There was a loop of string in the bottom of the door pocket to manually open it. Still nope.
In my 2021 Honda CR-V this is a configurable option - you can decide which behavior you want.
For example, you don't want your kids to open the doors while you're driving. Or you don't want a car-jacker to reach through the window and open your door.
Child locks are usually different. Also, there is typically no child lock option for the driver's side front door.
These are not child locks. Child locks prevent opening the door regardless of its locked state.
This is about whether pulling the door latch auto-unlocks the door, or if you have to unlock the door first before pulling the door latch.
How is it configured? Electronically or through a switch on on the door jamb?
Electronically, through the settings in the touchscreen panel on the dash. These are not child locks, but rather set the behavior of the door latch when the door is locked.
Does it have a fail-safe configuration if electricity is lost like in the examples above? If not, the ability to change configuration may not actually mitigate the failure mode
Yes, there is a manual door lock button-thing on the door next to the door latch. Though honestly I don't know if that works when the power is dead. As cars move to "fly by wire" this becomes a larger concern - less mechanical linkages, more buttons/switches + wires.
For example to open the back you push a button on tailgate and then pull to open. That button is definitely not a mechanical latch, so if the battery is dead then you're not opening the tailgate.
This would be an interesting experience - go to an auto dealer and ask them to disconnect the battery, then see what still functions.
Anything that's mechanically supposed to happen is irrelevant after the mechanism, with 2 tons of metal behind it moving at high speed, slams into something significantly more substantial than the thin layer of decorative sheet metal protecting it. You can not design things to be invincible, no matter how robust something is, with sufficient force applied in a certain way, it will fail. It's honestly an engineering marvel that people consistently are able to get out of their cars after an accident.
There was no accident here, unless I missed something. The guy just lost power to his door locks after he got in.
I'm talking more generally about cars not always unlocking after an accident.
In this specific scenario, you still have a component failure. Something that was supposed to be connected wasn't. It would be nice if they designed a better fail safe but it's not a case of "corvette handles aren't designed to unlock."
It's not about locked or unlocked. Pulling the handle is supposed to open the door. Locking prevents that. In this case, the handle doesn't mechanically unlatch the door, it does so electronically. With no power it is not possible for it to unlatch. Since locking is then a software feature, we might say those doors are locked by default and require software and electronics to make them open. Because of that there is a mechanical thing you can pull, but nobody knows where that is or that it exists unless they are told.
"You're holding it wrong"
This is why I carry a safety hammer utility tool in my cars for breaking glass and cutting seatbelts.
I always thought this was the case until I owned a 2004 Nissan and accidentally locked my brother in.
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.
What do you mean by modern?
My 2013 car has a physical lock pull, which the door lever is connected to, so the lock opens when you pull the lever to open the door.
> 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.
Ironically enough, Tesla Model 3 emergency mechanical release on doors is positioned so technically “well”, passengers not familiar with how the door opens in a standard way from the inside (by pressing a glowing button on the door) tend to pull on the emergency release first (which is located on the door right next to the standard release button).
Happened to my friends at least a couple of times when giving them a ride. Imo, not a bad situation, because the worst case scenario here is that they will accidentally use an emergency release instead of the standard one on their first try, which will only trigger tesla to make a warning sound that the emergency release was used. Definitely works out better in a real emergency situation too, compared to cars with difficult to find emergency release handles, given people not familiar with Tesla doors tend to reach for the emergency handles in those by default at times.
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
> 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
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)
If your headrests can be removed, the metal poles in them work well for this too. You jab one of the poles into the window seal, then pry like a crowbar. If done in the corner of the window it will break easily.
I looked it up on YouTube since I wasn't sure how that would work. Here is a video I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZTa8Nh0VlE
That was helpful - thanks. Hopefully will never have to use it.
Be careful with those. Plenty of cheap ones have metal hammers that will simply bounce off the window like the window was rubber (I assume the cause is wrong metal used, or point not sharp enough). And this is assuming tempered glass.
When AAA tested 3 different hammers, only 1 of the three successfully broke tempered glass. All three punch style tools broke the tempered glass.
But a lot of car windows now have laminated glass. While the tools may be able to shatter the glass for those, they still stay in one sheet, (just like shattered windshields in most car, since those are laminated glass too). And it is really hard to break through that shattered but still intact sheet, with neither style of escape tool really being much help.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=rescue+hammer
A quality rolling ballpoint pen would also work (given enough force) because it contains a small ball of tungsten carbide.
My knife also has a tungsten carbide window breaker on the base of it.
I have the one with the seat belt cutting blade in the handle hanging on a loop on my truck dashboard. Separately I think all cars should be required to have manual door locks (as well as electric locks if it's a luxury car). I also think all BEVS should have a manual battery ungang lever for trapped energy emergencies.
Can also come in handy when road raging.
> Death should not occur due to failure to RTFM for a door.
Death should not occur due to failure to design a door that can be opened from the inside in all situations without reading any manual.
I assume that if my battery was flat, pulling the handle on the inside would open it. I'm not at all sure though, it's been nearly over a decade since the last time I had a lock which you pushed up and down.
I have a emergency hammer/seatbelt cutter near the gearstick just in case.
> Isabel Moreno told reporters he owned a 2006 Corvette and was trapped inside when the battery went out. Fortunately, he said eventually the battery started recharging itself enough to be able to roll the window down, and he was able to get out safely.
Curious how this is possible or was this just misreported?
Googled it for you: https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/everyday-tech/question...
Yikes! Makes me think twice about being in a newer Corvette.
The DeLorean (DMC-12) is known for having the lock solenoids that get stuck energized when a relay fails. Fortunately you can pull the relay to de-energize the solenoids. (Climbing out of a window on a DeLorean isn't an option for normal-sized people.)
I realized my key fob battery was dying. I had no idea how to open the doors without it. I figured I'd better google it.
Honorary mention also of Cory Doctorow's Unauthorized Bread short story: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...
And of course the 4chan greentext "Please drink a verification can": https://imgur.com/r/4chan/dgGvgKF
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 it and where I am when I use it).
Toyota is being lambasted for forcing a subscription on a function between the key fob and the car (RF signal). There is no app to port to various device OSes. There is no server infrastructure to maintain.
Subaru's subscription is for remote start via app.
Which is Volvo's service?
Volvo has a subscription called Volvo On Call, and it's app based. You can't remotely start the car from just the fob. So yes, you are paying basically for the server upkeep + the sim card installed in your car that enables all those services.
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.
VW diesel cars can be equipped with Webasto (auxiliary heater which burns diesel). One gets a remote (in my experience reaching up to 500 meters) which can be used to start this heater along with car's climate control. The advantage is that it consumes 1/3-1/5 of what an idling engine does, while heating interior and engine coolant much faster. The disadvantage is that it consumes battery charge, but to counteract that the car is equiped with 30-50% bigger battery. Though this was never a problem for me, from my experience on 94Ah battery it can run for hours without any effect on engine starting, while heating the car in some 10-15 minutes when it is below freezing outside.
So in my Volvo XC60 T8, the car just came with a Webasto preinstalled from factory, it was standard fit on all models(in 2020 in UK anyway). But you can only start it from the app, they don't give you a separate fob like the one you can buy from Webasto, so you have to pay Volvo's subscription to use it.
and, in the models that use the engine coolant as a working fluid, your engine is heated up to a cozy operating temperature right from the start, so you end up about even on fuel.
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.
If I put a gun to your head and then sell you a service of not shooting, that's a clear value too right?
In this narrow of a scope, yes - it is absolutely valuable for me to be able to pay to not die. The alternative is to be killed.
But of course the world is larger than this made up example. Context matters, and this context isn’t really relevant except to say that there are different contexts that necessitate different decisions.
But you knew that, even as you posted such a ridiculous comparison. I think your point would have been much more effective and less reactionary if you had actually made your point, instead of resorting to absurdism.
Said service is called “taxation”
Would you find it appropriate for automakers to charge a monthly fee to be able to simply start an automobile you bought? If no, then why are you okay with a monthly fee to do so remotely? It’s rather straightforward - you’re either for usury or against it, I guess. This is usury.
(usury is not exactly the right word, but it’s the best I could think of at the moment).
It’s nuanced - I don’t approve when someone changes the terms of a deal that we already agreed upon. At the same time, I think there is a reasonable expectation that companies don’t have to support something into eternity (not that is what happened here, but in general I think support for a feature that requires maintenance is okay to have an expected lifespan).
Another nuance is that starting the car is core to the functionality, remote start is not.
If they were doing this only moving forward, for new sales, I think it would be totally fine. I wouldn’t buy that car if I cared about the feature, but I totally think it’s valid to have premium subscription addons.
In the situation where they have altered the previous deal and the service does not require maintenance by the company, it’s pretty fucked up and i would love to see a class action happen for existing owners.
Yeah - not sure why Toyota is getting hammered for this.
Subaru does this as well. You can get app enabled remote start from your phone, if you buy their subscription service.
I love Subaru, but that is a trash system.
That feels like apples-and-oranges to me if you're talking about a smartphone app feature. A smartphone app has to be regularly upgraded to pay nice with new OS versions, has to have back-end servers, etc. Toyota is disabling remote start functionality between the key fob and the vehicle if the vehicle doesn't have a subscription. I'm not surprised a smartphone app requires a subscription but I am surprised and disappointed that a feature on a car's key fob does.
I too am highly disappointed in Toyota here. A remote start is something you can buy at any auto store and have installed by a mechanic for a couple hundred bucks. Will they block people from going that route now? They charge such a premium for their cars and this just seems petty.
The logical next step would be to ensure that you can't do that in the name of security or if you CAN do it then the "partner" that sells that service has to pay more than you would for the privilege of being allowed on the "platform".
I have remote start on my Subaru and I think it's essentially this:
https://www.subarupartspros.com/sku/h001sfl300.html
On that page it says:
> This Genuine Subaru Accessory is an alternative for customers who do not enroll in STARLINK Safety and Security Plus.
Subaru at this point is a sub brand of Toyota. (they're part of the "Toyota Group" as of last year)
Toyota owns 20% of Subaru, and Subaru is also invested in Toyota. From what I understand being an affiliate in the Toyota Group is not remotely the same as them being a sub brand of Toyota.
> I could have just bought the device with a remote at Auto Zone for 1/4 of the price
But you didn't? I hope your realize at least half of the responsibility is on you as a consumer. You pay for and enable these idiotic ideas.
Incorrect, all of their cars come without the option. Buying an alternate car just because of one corrupt feature is not reasonable nor effective as a protest, many new cars now leverage this tactic and there is no real choice because they get away with it based on leverage.
The responsibility is on regulators, not me as a consumer.
When the regulators have failed, the only option is to vote with your wallet.
I'm sticking to older cars without this nonsense.
I think some of the reasoning behind the fee is that there's a simcard in the car that needs to be payed for and if you opt out then they don't have to pay for it. I have the same service and I can't live without the remotly started heating so for me it's worth every krona.
According to the article, the remote start feature from the remote does not use the cell connection.
A remote RF device could do that without the Sim card, the same key that unlocks the car... My problem is that I paid for a device (the starter device already installed on my car) that I can't use without a membership. People have had remote start on cars for decades without needing a bloatware subscription to XM radio.... sigh
Ok so your device is not supplied by volvo?
No, not the issue at all. The problem is that I refuse to pay a fee and use a tracking app just so I can use remote start features already installed on my car that don't need to be part of any paid monthly service.
My car should not require a cell phone with the maker's app installed on it, or even an Internet connection to fully operate... It's insane to think it should from a reliability standpoint.
If only it were insanity. It might be curible.
That might very well justify some fee, but $8/month is excessive if one only cares about remote start.
Yeah I pay less than 40€ per year(390 sek) and with it I also get emergency services with towing etc. There's a button in the ceiling.
Btw I also own a Volvo and at least here in UK you get emergency services regardless of whether you pay for the Volvo On Call subscription or not. Breakdown cover is provided for every new Volvo as long as you do the service at a Volvo garage, nothing to do with On Call subscription either.
Finished reading Ubik just the other night - the paying for every little thing was haunting, almost claustrophobic with this passage about the door (amongst other things - fantastic book though)
Its brilliant!
My wife and I need a new car sometime soon. Is there a company that makes cars that are reasonably reliable but that are without anti features like tracking, electronic everything, bs parts replacement costs due to ip, features you are locked out of via software, subscriptions, software preventing you from working on the car without a special license, ads, etc?
Look at the ways software is making the world a better place…
I'm not suggesting that they're perfect in any regard, but Hyundai/Kia do tend to implement electronics and software well enough that they're not going to infuriate you for the next five to ten years. Except even they're falling prey to over-electronicification — their absolute latest models are following an industry trend of replacing some physical buttons with touch-haptic panels. Yeesh.
Mazda are still fairly sane and their cars are quite lovely.
In the luxury German segment, BMW are the least worst. (This definitely wasn't the case 15+ years ago, but from 2010 onwards they have been quite good.)
Did BMW follow through with their plan to make you 'subscribe' to your heated seats?
According to plenty of preppers, the 12V Cummins Diesel trucks were the last great EMP-resistant vehicles https://dieselresource.com/diesel-resources/2nd-generation-5...
Dacia cars are pretty much as barebones as it gets. You get a fully functional car for a low price, with very few electronic gadgets(I think the peak of sophistication is having bluetooth integrated with the radio).
This is like buying a dumb TV, and is probably close to impossible.
Here you go, there are more, search on the website.
https://www.cdw.com/product/samsung-678u-series-55-4k-uhd-le...
"This item was discontinued on June 17, 2021"
What's wrong with 2017 Kia Optimas?
Older cars to be honest.
> Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly
Joe clearly doesn't have an Apple door.
It's either micro-transactions, or mandatory ads: https://old.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rcka8s/new_c...
I think I would prefer lootboxes. With lootboxes once you get the fob it's yours to keep, rather than having to keep paying for it.
Or do without.
In terms of the remote start, yes, you can do without.
But how long until BASIC functions become subscription service? Like electronically locking doors, or some other such nonsense?
Once money finds a path, my belief is that the path gets widened.
> Once money finds a path, my belief is that the path gets widened
Maybe, but it does go the other way too... I used to pay per sms :)
Disruption can happen... with cars it'll probably happen when all cars are self driving, rented per trip, and yes, maybe we'll still spend more money on cars -- but we'll probably also use transportation more.
Exactly; as well, in some situations (cold Canadian Winter with an infant etc), remote start is higher priority than remote doors, or electric windows, etc. "Basic" function vs "Luxury" can get awfully relative awfully fast...
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 support to waive/rescind the charge or pay for it, and that goes as well as talking to any support to revert a charge.
"Doors won't unlock if rent is not paid on time"
Need to bring back public floggibg for whoever came up with this
Nestaway's website is a real window into the dystopia. It's kind of refreshing to have a panopticonic nightmare conveyed by an aesthetic other than alegria for once.
Reminds me of "drink a verification can" greentext https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/1ggg4u/please_drink_...
We can do better than a link to a Reddit thread with a screenshot of some text. I found this on GameFAQs slightly modified from the original and posted the day after, on 2013-06-16.
-2018 -wake up feeling sick after a late night of playing vidya -excited to play some halo 2k19 -"xbox on" -... -"XBOX ON" -"Please verify that you are "annon332" by saying "Doritos™ Dew™ it right!" -"Doritos™ Dew™ it right" -"ERROR! Please drink a verification can" -reach into my Doritos™ Mountain Dew™ Halo 2k19™ War Chest -only a few cans left, needed to verify 14 times last night -still feeling sick from the 14 -force it down and grumble out "mmmm that really hit the spot" -xbox does nothing -i attempt to smile -"Connecting to verification server" -... -"Verification complete!" -finally -boot up halo 2k19 -finding multiplayer match... -"ERROR! User attempting to steal online gameplay!" -my mother just walked in the room -"Adding another user to your pass, this will be charged to your credit card. Do you accept?" -"NO!" -"Console entering lock state!" -"to unlock drink verification can" -last can -"WARNING, OUT OF VERIFICATION CANS, an order has been shipped and charged to your credit card" -drink half the can, oh god im going to be sick -pour the last half out the window -"PIRACY DETECTED! PLEASE COMPLETE THIS ADVERTISEMENT TO CONTINUE" -the mountain dew ad plays -i have to dance for it -feeling so sick -makes me sing along -dancing and singing -"mountain dew is for me and you" -throw up on my self -throw up on my tv and entertainment system -router shorts -"ERROR NO CONNECTION! XBOX SHUTTING OFF" -"PLEASE DRINK VERIFICATION CAN TO CONTINUE"Greentext, as the most relevant form of art.
Well, it's not a greentext without the green text.
Does this content really have a place on here?
Honestly. This is quite pointed satire at the current state of things.
If you showed someone from the 70s how things are today, they would view these two things as not as dissimilar as we do.
I was going to say! Since quite a large number of HN's readership is hard at work actually building these paywalls, digital restrictions and gatekeepers, unnecessarily Internet-connected devices, and other corporate-mediated dystopias, I'd say Please Drink Verification Can is exceedingly appropriate here.
Well said!
They're not so different from the old bash.org quotes (as in hunter2) or the old b3ta ones. It's just classic internet culture.
I think this particular one satirizes a patent Microsoft filed showing how to detect how many people are watching a TV (via the Kinect).
There's also some inspiration taken from Sony's patent "System for converting television commercials into interactive networked video games":
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8246454B2/en
(Note in particular "SAY MCDONALDS TO END COMMERCIAL" in Figure 9.)
Humor is an effective medium for exchanging ideas and concepts. I would say satire in small doses is perfect for HN.
It was the first HN comment to give me a good laugh in a while
Humor?? In _my_ gated community??
This reminds me of the Charlie card for using the subway in Boston:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kacASNARakQ
It has fun history, apparently they were going to introduce a nickel tax to get off the subway, so the legend is that Charlie never got off, because he didn’t have a nickel.
Nearly happened to me on the Tokyo subway. Train from Narita to Tokyo, couldn't find a way to get out of the system in Shibuya.
There is a Soviet children's book with the same topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunno_on_the_Moon#Lunar_capita...
Highly recommend Ubik; I read it in part because I saw this quote, which isn't necessarily a good reflection of the actual content of the story. A little surprised nobody's adapted it as a movie yet.
Similar: Libertarian Police Department
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
Also, Private Police by Fry and Laurie
In the sketch, the "client" states that he called the police and all he could get was on-hold music.
I am afraid one can inform the international public: in some countries, this is exactly what happens, since years.
There are two cops were I live. I guess they don't always pick up. Or do you mean 911?
Yes I meant the equivalent of 911.
In 2021 the real government funded police would have zero interest in hearing about that kind of crime - assuming UK police are anything like police here.
So this seems like a bit of an improvement :)
I saw this as a greentext macro a while back. I wonder where it came from originally.
This wouldn't be a problem if it just charged your credit card. I do think it should be a cheaper. $0.005 would be a more reasonable price. I would definitely pay $0.1 a day to use all my doors. Maybe like my front door since its more heavy duty would be a $0.05 / use door.
This sort of stuff used to be the nightmarish imaginations of cyberpunk authors. Now it's reality. Extremely disturbing. It's getting to the point I'm starting to think technology is detrimental to human dignity.
Reading Ubik was a real trip for me. Highly recommend.
This feature does not prevent you from unlocking the car. Just pointing your key at your car outside your building and turning it on in the cold.
Just had a conversation about this exact idea. Such a brilliant book
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 evil-bullshit-corp ranking homepage.
$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, consider that Disney+ charges $8/mo for a system that streams gigabytes of HD video, and they still have money left over to pay actual movie stars.
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 satellite images for the GPS, and allows video streaming (I don't recall the entire list of supported services, but it's pretty comprehensive, and I know includes Netflix, YouTube, Disney+, and Twitch, might also include Hulu and HBO).
Of course, if you're connected to WiFi (ie, using a hotspot on your phone, or parked at a location with WiFi), you can get all that streaming without paying the $10/month. Even if you don't pay for the premium connectivity package, you can play Spotify from your phone over Bluetooth.
The fact that Toyota would charge $8/month just for remote start is just evil. It's a charge designed purely to extract as much money from their customers as possible that does not at all reflect the actual cost to them.
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 vehicles or on the backs of their investors. They pay AT&T to connect their vehicles to the internet.
Perhaps starlink will allow them to keep hiding the cost, perhaps not, especially if Tesla tries to turn the revenue knobs.
Honestly, though, I'd rather they have a revenue stream than not. Premium connectivity doesn't add any kind of necessary features; it's all just sort of nice to have.
The main experience is free and the premium connectivity fee helps pay for that infrastructure.
I had premium connectivity for a few months and didn't miss it one bit when it expired. navigation still works great and THIS really is a killer feature for Teslas as it makes roadtripping a breeze, since it's well-connected to the Supercharger network's status. The non-premium connectivity also helps facilitate payment for the Supercharger network, so it's not just a pure burden for Tesla.
I'm pretty satisfied with the service fee structure for Tesla. I'd rather have reasonable fees for things that make sense (like Premium connectivity, which has to pay royalties to geospatial mapping companies, artists, and a non-trivial data usage, or Supercharger which uses electricity and requires the chargers to be maintained by technicians) and a long-term sustainable financial situation than free, but crappy and declining, service. And certainly am glad it's not requiring me to pay for super simple things that should be free.
(So the AT&T fee for non-premium connectivity can partially be paid for by Supercharger fees since that's what it helps facilitate. ...supercharging ALSO being reasonably priced, less than equivalent gasoline for a comparable ICE car)
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...
> 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...
I think you just highlighted why they will likely never allow a personal hotspot from the car.
How many people would gladly drop their home internet connection if they could just tether to the car which is only $10/month for unlimited data? It would cost Tesla a fortune unless they charged a hefty premium for hotspotting.
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.
I have a 2014 model S and I’ve never paid for any of these features, yet have them all. Is this a model 3 thing?
I believe older cars got this for free forever, similar to unlimited supercharging.
> It's a charge designed purely to extract as much money from their customers as possible
I don't think that it is. I think that it is a charge designed purely to normalize the idea of paying for everything as a subscription.
The next generation of car buyers might not realize that this is ridiculous because by then _everything_ is a subscription, from their shoes to their haircuts.
There's literally zero infrastructure needed for this, it's only a connection between the fob and the car.
I'm happy they did this, so normal people might realize how much the frog is already boiled. This is absolute bullshit, fuck Toyota.
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't from being able to do those two queries, but from the value of being able to remote start your car or whatever.
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.
The infrastructure is completely paid for. Automotive companies extensively monetize telematics data even for cars which do not have telematics purchased. Where you go and when - and things like air temperature, whether the wipers are on, etc - is all sold. It wouldn't surprise me if they pass along data from the infotainment system as well.
Ford offers a bunch of free telematics services for fleet operators. You can pay them and get more functionality, but they'll track your fuel economy, odometers, fault codes, etc - with a really slick web UI.
I recently got a letter from VW informing me that my 2017 vehicle's connection to AT&T will end in early 2022 due to the 2G sunset. I never subscribed to the service anyway, so I just get to chuckle about how they can't spy on me anymore. The fact that they equipped their vehicles thusly without the network operator agreeing to support it for at least a decade or so blows my mind.
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.
I don’t understand why, though. I’ve noticed some really ugly compression in brand new Amazon and Netflix original shows, which should have the same benefit of being produced “in-house”
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 lot of money if you consider your monthly expenses to use your vehicle.
Yes, I understand that people will charge what the market will bear, and in this case Toyota has decided they can charge a lot -- because you bought the car and now they have you at their mercy. I was responding to the GP poster who explicitly justified it by the cost of operating the service.
This might not be a big deal if Toyota was the only company contemplating this business model (what's $8/mo, after all?) but I doubt they will be. If every product in your life adds a "small" subscription fee (calculated at 50-1000x actual service costs), things are going to get painful very quickly.
People are already getting normalized to this.
I paid a few dollars for a better dialer, because the Samsung dialer is garbage. Another few dollars for a good calendar app, again because the Samsung dialer is garbage. Hell, I'd gladly pay for a decent web browser. And I say that as a happy Ubuntu user who has been coding for over two decades in VIM, I know my way around FOSS software.
> And $8/mo is not a whole lot of money if you consider your monthly expenses to use your vehicle.
$8/mo may not be a lot of money only because it's just your car doing that. Then you will have your TV charging $8/mo so that you can your a remote controller, $8/mo for the remote of your air conditioner...
To conserve energy and help the planet your phone has now stopped using the lower half of the screen. To unlock whole screen functionality please pay $0.2 for each instance.
Yeah yeah yeah profits are not what the conversation thread was about.
$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.
Where does 4G connection come into play here?
"Key fob remote start has nothing to do with an app, nor does the car or the fob communicate with any servers managed by Toyota."
It sounds like this $8/month charge is for the allowing you to use remote start locally presumably over RF.
The $8 fee is the remote connect bundle, which is a collection of app connected features (ie lock/start/monitor status of windows and doors) that connect via cell network.
The fob start is a feature they decided to bundle with the others.
> $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).
Do they also push ads in their app like Tesla? Like referrals or upgrades? Seems to me like they are fleecing the owners.
Tesla app does not have ads. There's a sub-menu where you can buy upgrades, but those are not promoted or anyhow popping up.
You're using a different definition of "ads" than most people do.
A notice or announcement that promotes a service or feature. Standard definition.
Sure, but it's for Tesla stuff (often for stuff consumed on the app itself, so where else would they put it?) and it's not intrusive. You're right that it fits the standard definition, but this isn't the kind of annoying internet ads for 3rd party stuff that people associate with app ads.
"Seems to me like they are fleecing the owners."
They are the owners, the 'owners' are the owned, captive market.
Kia wants $15 a month for the same app-based signal. It's straight highway robbery.
I suspect what you aren't accounting for is the 4G modem in the car that the manufacturer puts in largely to collect data from you, but would love to offset the cost of with upcharges.
Disney is still in the lose-your-ass phase. The price will go up soon enough.
yup, this is absurd
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 really, really need legislation that says advertised features can't require an ongoing subscription. The whole scheme of giving the original buyer a "free trial" that lasts long enough that they'll sell the vehicle is just a tactic to seek rent in the secondhand market. The thing is, there are a lot of people buying second hand because they don't have money to waste.
How do you pull yourself up by the bootstraps if the bootstraps require a subscription you can't afford?
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 joke tweet from a decade ago, I feel like it's just a matter of years before all the couches on the market are wifi connected.
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 just went through this, buying a car to replace the one I'd had for 13 years. Oh man, I had no idea how terrible the car industry had gotten; it was every bit as bad as you're fearing.
I had a slight preference for an automatic transmission but ended up looking mostly at manuals since those often lack a few of the "modern" anti-features. I wish I had better advice to give, the experience honestly bummed me out quite a bit.
Yeah, I hear this. I like driving a manual because I find it almost meditative. I've done some rally clinics so not to brag but I know what I'm doing with it and double clutch, heel toe, routinely. It's like a little mini game to be as smooth and precise as possible at it every time I drive, and I like that.
The dual clutch automatics that are in better cars today are legit pretty amazing tech, but, it just doesn't fit my vibe so to speak. In any case, I'm quite sure my next car is going to be pure electric so it may not even have a transmission, or if it does it'll be a two speed automatic you don't control. Meh.
I too dread this.
My current car's getting to about the number of kms that I usually sell at.
With covid making secondhand cars expensive for some weird reason, and all these terrible modern car trends, I just haven't been able to bring myself to "upgrade".
Honestly, take the money you'd spend to upgrade and instead overhaul the car. Need new front seat upholstery? Some new plastic end pieces? Maybe an engine rebuild? It probably won't cost more than a new(ish) car, maybe even cheaper.
Good idea, it's looking very much like I might end up going that way.
There's nothing compelling me to get a newer car, except for engine wear.
> 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.
"Error: cannot start (no connectivity). Please call a licensed repair technician to service your vehicle."
In case you're not aware, this is a thing that's happened (well, without the error message, I assume)
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/zipcar-int...
Too helpful. More like "Failed with error 0xC0000005".
That's a real error Windows 11 gave me this week. I know, never install a Windows version less than two years old. It's been so long I forgot.
As if any Windows or in general Microsoft product gives useful error messages.
Hex error codes, or generic "Something went wrong" errors are the norm at Microsoft.
Not quite as bad, but when I tried out a car in 2008 with Ford/Microsoft's SYNC system (voice interface), there were cases where pressing an unconfigured button would disable the sound system until you restarted the engine. See number 8:
http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2008/07/setting-sync-strai...
Also, whenever the power goes out, I always express thanks that the toilets still work, and they didn't introduce some npm-style pointless dependency.
'In the land of internet-connected devices, the man with the soldering iron is king.'
> 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.
Who would have thought the revolution won't be sponsored by Toyota or Pepsi? The corporate SJW movement is all marketing, it's really depressing to see it work on people.
It was started by gates and buffett "the giving pledge" they are now a decade into giving their fortune away and are comicallty richer than when they started. That kind of hipocracy tends to flow top down and now we are seeing the results.
We really, really need legislation that says advertised features can't require an ongoing subscription.
All that is needed is for the advertising to be required to make it clear which features require an ongoing subscription.
I don't see the problem for the used car market - if anything, the fact some features won't be functional without a subscription ought to depress the used price of the car. If you take it to an extreme - say, a car that requires a daily payment to run at all - you'd find that the market price of such a vehicle wouldn't be far above the scrap value.
I fully expect that, assuming we get to autonomous driving someday, either the system or the entire car will only be available as subscription services. It just won't work any other way given the manufacturer will be on the hook for the proper maintenance and updating of a safety critical system.
And it probably applies even more broadly as things that were historically just hardware have an increasingly large software component.
> We really, really need legislation that says advertised features can't require an ongoing subscription
I recently bought a new car. All of the things on the window sticker that required a subscription said "(subscription required)". Is this not enough?
Or are you talking about things like TV/Internet/Radio advertising?
I'm totally on the same page. After my millionaire frugal friend told me he managed $88/mo TCO, I've been chasing that target nonstop
10 year old Toyota Prius is going to be roughly $45/mo TCO for registration, insurance, and minimal maintenance. Depreciation is probably another $40/mth. I'm pretty sure that and a Chevy Volt or Nissan Leaf (for low range reqs) is the best you can do.
Time will tell, but in theory the Volts should last a really long time also. The generator only directly powers the drivetrain at highway speeds, and in the gen-1 they were really conservative with allowed pure electric range on the battery.
I'm planning to drive mine until it dies, and suspect that salty winter Midwestern roads will render it unsafe/broken before anything else does.
That’s impressive. We’re around $100/mo for everything excluding fuel on our 2005 CR-V, bought by us in 2011. It’s going to have to last several more years to get down under $90/mo. (If your friend said that 10 years ago, I guess I’m under that already.)
I ponder the same thing. On My Jeep all that nonsense is tied explicitly to the radio. If you yank the 4G modem out, it's all as good as gone - though then the GPS map feature doesn't work either. If I replace the radio entirely I gain control, but lose the auto emergency braking system. That's unfortunate lol.
Luckily no required monthly services. I have no interest in a car with that.
It seems there is a market there for people like you and your family: removing/disabling/hacking the DRM on those used cars.
The market is already there. I have a 2010 Mercedes C180 and the car suddenly wouldn't start. Turns out it has an coded electronic steering lock which talks to the electronic ignition and won't enable the car if the lock doesn't disengage. Of course the steering lock itself failed - turns out this is a design flaw. Would have cost way too much money to transport the car to the Mercedes dealer at the only time the dealer would accept it for repair and then have them replace it. Turns out there's a thriving market in folks who will come to your house, completely remove the steering lock, and replace it with an emulator that just pretends to unlock when its told to.
Not defending Toyota, their model is abusive, however your comparison is not accurate/fair. The TCO is just parts/raw material costs, your time and skill are very expensive!.
For me, even if I had to pop the hood of the car I need a mechanic, that is probably a couple of hundred to start with, and add anything he says I need to buy whether I actually I need to or not, it can quickly add up.
It is like me saying why pay for managed email or website hosting, when I can run those myself for much cheaper, even if my time was not a factor, I cannot compare those costs I would have to costs for someone without the skills needed .
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 it was before. Who even remembers the internet before advertising morphed it into something completely different? How long was that period? 5 years?
> 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?
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 different. They'll happily play high latency streamed games.
So when you see things like the investment that's going into things like game streaming and it seems stupid, you have to consider there may not be any expectation of capturing the current market. They're after the market that's in elementary school right now.
I don't know -- when I was a kid, in the arcade, the machines constantly prompted me to insert another quarter to continue playing.
The nice thing about those games is the cost could be offset by skill. FTP games now offset the cost using time, when you can offset it at all.
Yeah, but we solved that problem, and now it's back.
> 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 different. They'll happily play high latency streamed games.
That's subjective and dependent on the service and the game. I have Stadia, GeForce Now, and local games ( with some overlap). Latency is minimal and barely visible ( invisible for grand strategy games).
>the latency of game streaming services is awful
Latency is not a problem with game streaming. I'd say quality is more of a problem. With streaming you are only going to get the image a few frames late which is not bad at all.
Based on your comment, the already-bad state of latency across the software stack will get even worse. I really don't want that.
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't have any smarts at all, but the one I've seen had terrible picture quality
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
Won’t be long before they have 5G chips in and that isn’t your choice anymore. Kindles have done that since 3G, cars have started doing that, Tesla trains AI on all owner driving data, VW new electric (ID3?) will be their first with a mandatory perma HQ connection, IIRC.
Kindle with 3G was great, free internet globally. Never once showed me an ad, and most Kindles didn't have it.
When that day comes buy a monitor, or hack the firmware.
You can always break off the aerial.
Cell phone connections don't need to use aerials anymore. The antennas in smartphones are often planar arrays or square-ish fractal antennas. From the outside they literally look like little boxes or squares. The casual mechanic might have a hard time distinguishing them from a chip.
> Won’t be long before they have 5G chips in and that isn’t your choice anymore. Kindles have done that since 3G
How do these things work? Do they have a contract with a phone service operator in each country in the world for unlimited data, or what?
The device company usually has a bulk data contract with a large telecom. It isn't unusual for IoT device companies to end up as minor telecom providers themselves, buying bandwidth in bulk and reselling it to consumers.
I don't think you can buy a kindle with a cellphone radio anymore, and the ones that had them cost extra.
My Sony would pop up a nag screen in the middle of a movie or show to remind me that it wasn't connected to the internet. Eventually, I caved and connected it.
This is an option until they require internet.
Also the other side is that these cheap TVs are slow as hell. My Vizio has a 15 second startup time before it responds to commands, while it's "Smart"Cast stuff does what it does. This is before it responds to other commands, ex volume. And this is at each session, not cold boot only.
This remains true for now, but expect the ubiquity of things like Amazon Sidewalk, Helium network, and embedded cellular modules in devices to make it hard to avoid a device that phones home.
What you are looking for are generally sold as "large format displays". Basically tvs for commercial purposes that do not have any of that crap. Most projector manufacturers, even the consumer ones, have also been good about avoiding "smart" features.
They cost inordinately more than what profit they are getting from ads & spying, and are often missing things like multiple HDMI inputs. It's not a real solution, but a bad workaround.
And more of these displays are getting these kinds of smart features added, anyway. It's going to become increasingly difficult to get a dumb panel at all.
Dell sells a 55” conference room monitor at a decent price. That - or something like it - will be my next “TV”
Best Buy still sells a dumb TV. Sadly the Insignia N10 only goes as far as 43" and 1080p. I bought a set of the 32" model for my brothers.
Annoyingly, it STILL takes a few seconds to start up.
My living room TV is a 39" Panasonic from 7 years ago. It's dumb as a brick.. but I almost never watch TV so this is fine!
It'd be nice if you could buy a brand new 55" OLED or whatever and not have to deal with smart TV software. I guess there's the gigabyte, LG, and alienware monitors.
My TV is from 2012 and I'm not all that worried about it failing. Modern TVs don't draw much power, nothing inside them gets very hot, no moving parts, etc. I would be surprised if I don't get ten more years out of it.
Look into the cheap Sceptre displays. They make non-smart panels with decent resolution and performance, so long as you have external speakers and use the optical audio output instead of the output from their garbage DAC.
You can vote with your wallet.
Don’t buy a TV, let that market die already.
What's the reason to buy a TV over a monitor? At least so far, monitors don't have anti-features.
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.
Subscription pricing for things which aren’t subscriptions is bullshit.
I call it "property as a service". Wherein you have to pay recurrent rent on things you "own" to keep using them.
As a side note I feel rent isn’t a good comparison, as these new types of subscription have no bonafide scarcity or cost. While rental properties have real costs: taxes, maintenance, acquisition costs, advertising/agent costs and so on. Charging rent is appropriate because the owner deprives themselves of part or whole of the property (but not its costs) for the renter. This isn’t comparable with a subscription for a keyfob - especially as it’s a feature which has worked just fine without such arrangements.
The subscription approach also doesn’t fix any problems - for example, the Adobe subscription solved the common agency/design headache of receiving files for a more recent version of the software. Whereby one couldn’t drop $20-40k to upgrade their software just to get access to one set of files. A situation made worse if the source of the files is unable to back save them. This allowed big agencies to squeeze out smaller competitors which couldn’t update their versions right away. The subscription solved this problem and is generally viewed as a win/win for adobe and their customers.
All companies try to get in on it, too.
When I contemplate buying something, I care about the value it delivers to me, not the cost required to provide it.
If I get $8 of value from something, it doesn't reduce my willingness to pay if I suddenly learned that it cost $0 or $1 to provide it rather than $5 or $6. Likewise, if I learned that it cost $10 to provide it, that doesn't make me suddenly willing to trade away $10 or $11 for something that's worth $8 to me. (In a negotiation, I might negotiate differently if I knew the other side's cost structure, but in a "take it or leave it" sale, I decide based on the value to me not the cost to the other party.)
If you derive more than $8 of value from something, then buying the $8 thing is not explicitly off the table. But if you can get the exact same thing for free, or even just for $7 elsewhere, it would be really dumb to buy it for $8.
The cost that it takes to provide a good or service is useful for estimating the cheapest available offering. No one is actually going to sell something at cost, but in an efficient market with lots of competition the margin should be whittled away to something very low. If someone is charging significantly more for something than it costs to make, it means they are abusing their market position. Monopolies still need to price their offerings at a point where people don't rage quit and not buy at all, but their goal is to get as close to that number as possible while staying below it for the optimally large section of their customers.
Just because things could be worse doesn't mean they're good and you should be happy with the situation.
$8 a month is a LOT.
I'm sick of this new "subscription lifestyle" thats going on. I loathe subscription services.
Its death (of your income) by a thousand papercuts.
Please go to their facebook page or other contact location and write them exactly that. I wrote them and told them how disappointed I was and how it seems so petty. I also said that when I buy a new car I would now have to consider my second favorite company as a move like this though only $8 is enough to turn me off of a company completely. They are a premium brand and people pay a premium for their cars there is no need for this. Especially when any car can add remote start from a local mechanic are they going to block people from doing that? What a sham
https://ouraring.com/product/heritage-silver
This is a health monitor ring. It is a service, though: You pay $400 for the hardware, then $6 for the privilege of accessing the data it collects, locally, to your device.
I was going to buy it until I saw they were looking for such a predatory revenue stream.
>"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?"
You own nothing, you think you bought those products but its not you property, its still their's. You are just a serf for sale on the 'free market'
They are simply copying software industry. Tableau, Jetbrains... none of these need to be subscription based, but they are. They weren't, until a few years ago.
I wonder whats next? My toilet won't flush unless I pay $5 for it, in addition to the water bill? It would be hilarious if every single item at home was subscription based, lol
Jetbrains is only kind of a subscription. If you end your subscription, you retain permanent access to whatever version was current when you last paid. That doesn't seem drastically different from how software worked before and their prices are pretty reasonable for an IDE.
You mentioned Jetbrains but not worse actors like Adobe, or Microsoft. Seems disingenuous.
The OP has probably managed to eliminate Adobe and MS from their lives, so they didn't come to mind.
Jetbrains can be used without a subscription, unless if you want the most recent software updates.
It does seem like a disingenuous comparison. I feel like JetBrains has a pretty fair revenue model.
Our water rates include a supply charge, a disposal charge, and a usage charge. Only the last one is dependent on the volume of water consumed.
So in a way, we already pay a subscription charge for flushing the toilet.
>none of these need to be subscription based
But I use Jetbrain's software everyday so it makes sense that I should pay them for everyday that I get value out of it. They also are continuely releasing updates for free.
You use your car every day too...
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 heads up display (windshield)? $5/month
- Want autonomous driving? $20/month
- Want to update your car's computer? $199 per update
- ...
- Want all the features in your car? "low cost" of $49.99 per month (bundled)
Apple will be seen as a visionary for optimizing the car manufacturing process (no more designing for multiple types of configuration types, can buy all parts in bulk, ...). Public will buy into it because the cost of the car is significantly less than their competition. But the true cost of ownership (will all features activated) is actually equivalent to the cost of their competition.
Don't forget to buy an Apple Car Care+ warranty ("only $4999.99, will be included if you finance with Apple Card")!
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 talking about a different Apple entirely?
Also, their entire office suite, GarageBand, iMovie, XCode... these are all things that you would have been shelling out serious $$ for back in the MSFT days.
Excellent point. There has been arguments that subscriptions are mandatory for self-driven cars to keep them updated. But Apple manages to make complex devices without subscriptions with many years of updates.
>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.
I'm backing up my iPhone to a Mac and these backups are encrypted with a password. And then I'm backing up that Mac to a hard drive, and those backups are encrypted with a password as well. All using standard Apple software.
If I wanted to back up into iCloud I would have to pay, which is fair. Instead, I'm using my own hard drive.
That’s just an outright lie, though.
There’s Time Machine:
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/keep-your-time-mach...
Or you can run any number of third party backup software.
Obviously I'm not an Apple customer, but from reading hackernews comments when the M1 came out, I was reading people discussing that you couldn't do that. Or maybe I misunderstood the details but they were definitely complaining about backup methods for encrypted laptops.
I would not trust Apple with all my data, which is essentially what you're doing if they have the key.
Can you do a full-disk encrypted backup of your drive using only your own keys and not sending any data back to Apple?
If you can, then I'm wrong. But "outright lie" is an uncharitable interpretation of my error.
Lol, downvoted with no answers. Apple victims are a thin-skinned bunch.
They could be referring to iPhone, couldn't they? Which to my knowledge doesn't have Time Machine, a macOS feature.
I think it's best not to say something is a "lie" unless you have a strong basis for it, let alone asserting it is a "outright lie".
A lie is an intentionally false statement. It involves an intention to deceive. It's highly unlikely that someone on Hacker News would set out to intentionally mislead people who are familiar with the subject-matter and who know how to fact check.
At best they are "wrong", "misinformed" or "mistaken". Although, as said in the first paragraph, I suspect you're actually at cross-purposes with each other.
Others in the thread have shown the corresponding iOS local backup options.
I don’t see much difference between “confidently stated but provably wrong in seconds via Google” and a lie.
That's not what you said. You claimed it was a lie referring to Time Machine, not local backup options on iOS. macOS backup solutions are pretty much irrelevant, because it's obvious you can backup macOS using any tool you like, it's a desktop operating system where the user can run binaries with administrator privileges, unlike iOS. The compelling inference is they were talking about iOS, making Time Machine irrelevant to the discussion.
And there is a significant difference between offering an ill-informed opinion and lying. One can be reckless or negligent, but not a liar. To be a liar, they need to positively know they are wrong but post it anyway.
I was hoping you'd say it was simply used for rhetorical effect. I must say, I'm a little disappointed you're maintaining your position. Sometimes, it's best just to assume good faith.
> You claimed it was a lie referring to Time Machine, not local backup options on iOS.
Like I said, others had already covered the iOS side of things.
There are no Apple devices for which the statement is true, and the certainty of "Apple conveniently disallows people from making local backups encrypted with your own key" makes me quite comfortable considering it to be a dishonest statement rather than merely ignorant.
Similar to "vaccines don't work"; whether it's out of ignorance or maliciousness, it's a lie.
(Further complicating matters: telling lies even results in believing them to be truthful over time; it's still a lie! https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2018/november/lying-old-gutches...)
Is Apple Maps really free, or do they monetize your attention and collect fees from the (suspiciously few, outside major US metros) businesses?
Serious question, I don’t know, I only use Apple Maps for satellite since it doesn’t do transit where I live. But the quality level definitely feels like an “eat what you kill” product without much food, as opposed to a loss leader for the Apple brand.
I don't understand why non-apple customers feel that apple is this way. I have a Mac and an iphone and haven't paid Apple a penny since the purchase of the devices.
The seriously overpriced accessories they sell is probably part of the reasons non-apple customers tend to assume this. Like they have a few accessories that cost about 10x more than pretty good quality third party alternatives, and often more than double what it costs for literally better build quality third party alternatives.
And I'm not talking about the accessories that have enough active electronics to possibly justify it (pencil, or airpods), but things like cases, wheels, stands, dongles, etc.
Apple accessories very much are trying to nickel and dime people (on top of hardware that is already quite expensive), so it is unsurprising that people would (mistakenly) assume that Apple would try to do the same with digital subscriptions.
In the car analogy that would be more like all the trim levels and hardware addons being hugely overpriced... but that's definitely not a new thing in the car world.
The wheels and stand on the mac pro stuff is weird but they are kind of in line with the pricing of the competing products. If you look at the cases for the iphone, all of the cases they sell in the Apple Store are pretty expensive, but all of them are quite good. If you go to a 3rd party store and look for things of the same quality, they cost the same. Good cases just cost a bit of money.
Now the lightning adapters I agree on. Those were absurd. But now they have USB-C on most of their products and they have dropped the cost of adapters quite a lot. The USB-C to AUX adapter contains a full DAC which is tested to be one of the best you can get, and it costs $9.
People are paying for the branding, not the item. It's the same reason a rolex is substantially more expensive than a watch that tells time just as well - people spend money on more expensive versions of things that provide no additional practical benefit explicitly to demonstrate that they have money to burn. If you don't care about the brand, you can still buy third party options and they work just fine at a fraction of the cost. Indeed if you had to pay for the expensive apple version, it wouldn't mean anything that you spent so much, and then it would ironically be significantly less valuable.
Seems a stretch to readily assume Apple would mimic digital subscriptions with their high priced accessories strategy where they presumably don’t even have dominance, and don’t even have stuff like a popular or well liked monitor any more vs 2009’s Thunderbolt. If this was true. It would also mean there is little press and casual discussion on how much more expensive Apple’s equivalent digital services are.
Add on people across the spectrum may buy expensive-ish or expensive hardware, but cheap out on [any] digital purchases or subscriptions.
All of this makes the reason to assume appear to be because of bias and disliking of the brand.
>The seriously overpriced accessories they sell is probably part of the reasons non-apple customers tend to assume this.
That's not it at all. At least not for me.
I'm a "free as in freedom" rather than "free as in beer" kinda guy.
And that's why I won't touch Apple gear. Heck, I don't even like beer.
Yeah, I will definitely admit that I was guilty of this right up until I bought a Macbook Air in 2014. I had just assumed that Apple was a nickel-and-diming corporation, and just worked to extract cash from its customers.
But I really didn't experience that at all. Outside of Apple Music and Apple Arcade (both of which are optional and neither of which I use/pay for) what exactly are the ongoing costs for most Apple hardware? Yes you have to buy some of the software, but that's true of basically every operating system; my 2014 Macbook still gets free updates as of about 8 months ago (I haven't checked since then since I gave it to my sister in law).
In fact I actually have found that Apple-centric apps seem to give me more options in which to pay for them outright instead of ongoing costs. Most of the the Omnigroup's software has a "just buy it once and you're done" feature, unlike something like, for example Microsoft Office.
The only things Apple charges subscriptions on are actual content services or server usage charges which are inline with literally every other business. Many people, even on HN it seems, have a completely distorted idea on what the products Apple sells actually are.
Yeah, I can't really blame them for charging a fee for Apple Music or Apple Arcade. Presumably they have to pay a recurring fee to the record labels for the rights to the songs or to the game publishers for the rights to the games, even if we pretended that the server costs were free (which of course they are not) and since they are, you know, a business and not a charity, of course they have to charge a subscription fee for it, just like Spotify (ad free), Youtube Music, Deezer, etc.
People like simple good guy vs bad guy stories, and some people designate Apple a bad guy.
I agree it's possible, but their services offerings are all paid, and there are enough of them now that a discount bundle exists[1]. And then there's the App Store / iTunes / iTunes Match. Even checking out to buy hardware tries to upsell you AppleCare+ service.
There are many reasons it's done this way, but I can see the reasons people might compare it to being turned upside down and shaken for loose change like a piggy bank.
> but I can see the reasons people might compare it to being turned upside down and shaken for loose change like a piggy bank.
How?
Licensing music requires ongoing payments from Apple to music owners.
iCloud requires Apple to maintain data centers and bandwidth.
TV+ requires ongoing investment into creation of new video productions.
News+ is similar to music, Apple has ongoing costs to pay the owner of the journalism.
Games also gets new games all the time, so presumably there are ongoing expenses there also.
And fitness+ might be one where there is less need for ongoing expenses, but they do seem to be adding content regularly.
I'm not saying there aren't costs associated with building or running these services that need to be paid for. But owning the OS and pushing subs in the default apps is just as annoying when Apple does it as when Youtube does.
I had never noticed the upselling of Arcade or Fitness before. I opened the apps up now and see there are tabs for them. I’ve opened the fitness and app stores up for ages. Never noticed before. I barely notice the TV+ stuff in the TV app. Can’t comment on the other two services. Still, yes, this is lame to do.
However if this is an extension of the original argument for why it makes sense to assume Apple is Nickle and diming over priced digital services. It doesn’t fit.
This doesn’t make sense. Their digital services require ongoing costs that are obvious to even non technical people. IE even my non technical mom would know TV and music streaming costs regular money. Most people know storage space costs money because of the cloud sync apps.
I don’t see how people can compare this to being turned upside down like you say unless they are claiming that for every major tech company. At which point Apple has little to do with it. Otherwise I don’t see how that thinking can be for any reason other than strong to extreme bias against Apple specifically.
I don’t recall being upsold applecare+ before. Maybe it’s a pretty small part of the online checkout process and I haven’t noticed it? I’m sure it happens. A family member and a friend have asked about it because they were being unsold. Still, this isn’t like some of the infamous upselling industries and niches.
It could be argued that the icloud etc costs were included as part of the purchase price. In which case the cost was estimated over the useful life of the product and then factored into the up-front price. That or the icloud service cost is covered another way as a form of marketing. Customer retention etc.
iCloud is marketed like a loss leader.
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 characterizing that as nickel and diming. They should have bumped up the 5 GB base plan years ago.
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...
I was talking about encrypted laptop backups where only the customer has the key.
I'm not all over the details because there were so many reasons for me not to go Apple that this was just the tip of the iceberg.
Local backups still work fine, you just do it in Finder now instead of iTunes. Not sure what the situation is for Windows users.
As far as comparing prices, yes, a bare hard drive is cheaper but I'm paying for that storage with services and backups attached to it. A hard drive won't automatically sync photos between my phone and my computer, and I'm more likely to have that hard drive fail than I am to lose iCloud.
Replacing iCloud storage with a big hard drive is a bit like replacing a car with a motorcycle. Yeah you can buy way more acceleration for less money, but good luck moving your furniture.
>Replacing iCloud storage with a big hard drive is a bit like replacing a car with a motorcycle.
What you lose in convenience, you gain in privacy, since iCloud backups are not e2e encrypted.
https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/blog/post/iphone-backup-icloud...
> 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
Wow I have NO IDEA how anyone managed the jump from this story about Toyota to a totally imaginary anti-Apple rant.
Writing this on a 2013 Apple iPad Air that has not cost me a single cent to use every day for the last 8 years.
>I have NO IDEA how anyone managed the jump from this story about Toyota to a totally imaginary anti-Apple rant
Because Apple are the nickel-and-dime masters.
From removing headphone sockets in order to sell stupidly expensive wireless headphones, to stupidly overpriced soldered memory and storage upgrades, to the 30% appstore fee scam, to disallowing local backups to promote their iCloud storage racket, to unrepairable devices where you can't even replace a battery, to keyboards that need motherboard replacement to replace a key, to disallowing WebGPU so victims can't play online games instead of the games they take their 30% cut from, to proprietary connectors that they abandon a year later, to iPhone displays that can't even be replaced with another legitimate iPhone display, they do everything in their power to lock-in and bleed their victims dry.
Literally everything they do is a scam to nickel-and-dime their victims.
Every item they sell has all these arbitrary limitations just so they can take a cut.
They are usually the first to do every terrible consumer-hostile action because their victims are locked-in suckers with Stockholm syndrome whose devices don't work with any other companies devices or accessories.
And then other companies see their success and copy them.
So naturally any conversation about companies being assholes will skew towards discussing Apple, because they are the biggest and most successful assholes.
LOL, as someone that adopted/adapted to the Apple world when I moved from a Linux laptop to an Apple Mac Mini (for development), this is nonsense.
The removal of the headphone socket, from their perspective, was to move people to wireless headphones. Yes, it was a move everyone hated, but it didn't drive people across to Google/Samsung.
The 30% app store fee is a problem for the developers, not the consumers.
I can make local backups of my iPhone still. I don't have to use iCloud.
Unrepairable devices where you can't even replace a battery (I assume you mean iPhones) is to reduce their manufacturing cost and to make the device more reliable. Same nonsense about the displays. The displays include the facetime cameras and infrastructure, which is intimately tied to the security enclave. Having those two bound together makes the device more secure.
Should they offer the software to every 3rd party repairer? No. Should they make it available along with spares and an online service to bind the two elements? Yes. That way, the service can be done by a 3rd party, but the security remains with Apple. I don't want people to be able to hack the facetime/SE.
Calling disallowing WebGPU as somehow creating "victims" is nonsense.
Apple produces products that people like and pay for. I have a 2014 laptop that still gets (free) upgrades, I have a 2019 iMac that has the best display ever released in consumer desktops. It also allowed me to upgrade the memory. I have an iPhone 12 mini that is great, my iPhone SE is a great remote control and Siri interface and also still gets upgrades.
Will I be able to upgrade RAM in an Mx series Apple product? No, because the memory is built into the SOC. Will Apple overcharge on that RAM? Probably. But on the other hand, having the RAM available to both CPUs and GPUs directly is obviously more efficient in both power and performance that it's worth it.
Will I pay that "tax" to get everything else that comes with the product? Yes. It's worth it in the longer term of a 5 year life of an Apple product.
>The 30% app store fee is a problem for the developers, not the consumers.
Like Epic? No Fortnite on iOS. Tell me how all of that is not bad for consumers.
>The removal of the headphone socket, from their perspective, was to move people to wireless headphones.
Which only serves Apple's interests. There is zero reason they couldn't have a headphone socket in addition to wireless. If their wireless was so compelling people would happily switch without these artificial self-serving incentives.
Samsung S10 5G has headphone socket, is waterproof and is 7.9mm thick vs iPhone 13 which is 7.7mm. That was just the first phone I could find, there's probably thinner ones with headphone sockets. So the thickness argument is ridiculous.
>Unrepairable devices where you can't even replace a battery (I assume you mean iPhones) is to reduce their manufacturing cost and to make the device more reliable.
5c for a connector on such an expensive phone? And no, it's their laptops as well, because Apple. Only serves Apple's interests, of course.
> Same nonsense about the displays. The displays include the facetime cameras and infrastructure, which is intimately tied to the security enclave. Having those two bound together makes the device more secure.
Untrue and only serves Apple's interests. Security theater and, you guessed it, only serves Apple's interests.
>Calling disallowing WebGPU as somehow creating "victims" is nonsense.
Untrue and only serves Apple's interests. Apple products are crippled and have so many arbitrary limitations that always conveniently serve Apple's interests.
You have drunk gallons of the kool aid.
> Want to update your car's computer? $199 per update
$210 after shipping for navigation updates in a GM vehicle. Welcome to the future!
https://gmnavdisc.navigation.com/product/Catalog/Catalog_Che...
My car's running on a 12 year old set of navigation data... And I can't say I've ever felt the need to drop $199 on updating it.
We just don't build new roads in North America.
You obviously don't live in a rapidly growing suburb. Half of my town's roads either didn't exist 12 years ago or have been reconfigured to handle the additional traffic flows.
A 3-year old phone has a way better navigation system than a brand-new automobile OEM nav system. Plus it auto-updates and will usually tell you where the cops are as well.
And vice-versa.
Sure, but we fuck with one way systems all the time.
The android based software randomly updates itself all the time. But it likes crashing and stuff too.
I think it will be more like this, as parts of what you say seem very unApple like:
The Apple car is electric, with two charging point, the batteries last a long time but the special Apple charge connection hub costs $1199, there is a part of it that is really smartly designed but somehow also more fragile than you would expect and as a consequence you replace these one per year because it breaks beyond repair.
The first year you replace it fine, and the cost is actually down to $1099.
The second year the old model is no longer available but the new model that will work with your car and the newer Apple cars both also will work to charge any apple device if you lay it on the Apple car dashboard while charging with the new model charger. It's some sort of clever design innovation that you're not sure why it couldn't work without the new charger but ok, anyway the new charger costs $1330.
You have 3 forms of heated seat pads, these are the simple at 199, the integrated at 499 that has a dedicated app to monitor optimal healthy sitting posture and maintain vitals connection to your Apple Watch, and the Pro at 1100 that allows you handle racing speed Gs.
You need to have the Pro to unlock the Racing Speed Gs because of safety features that would kick in without the Pro helping to handle that speed.
In the end of year 3 the next level Pro brings in massage capabilities at 1400, but you find that it uses up too much battery requiring more and longer charging unless you update to the new Charger Pro which costs also 1400.
Want Apple debug data for your car, you get extra data on your Apple iCloud, but not enough to actually make it usable in fact basically the car uses up the data you had so quickly that you have to pay for iCloud+ Andretti, which gives you a basic 3 TB storage, and a revolving time series data for car usage that can be used for diagnostics etc. $15 a month.
The Car camera array is really sweet but you find that road trip you made to the keys maxed out your iCloud, so you opt in for the iCloud+ Trixie account $20 dollars a month but with 7 TB, you figure that will probably last.
Most of the apps for the car are free, if you call advertising supported apps free, but there are a few ones you find essential that you pay for of course.
One of them is the top notch autonomous driving app AutoDRave which costs a basic $120 but if you want the continually updated road conditions and newest ML edge case determination routines you should really pay for the $25 a month subscription.
I think we all get the picture here....
You're describing actual cars from BMW and Tesla with an "Apple Car" straw man. I mean come on.
> Apple will be seen as a visionary for optimizing the car manufacturing process (no more designing for multiple types of configuration types, can buy all parts in bulk, ...).
There are two types of product in the computing world: shameless ripoffs of Apple products and rough prototypes for some future Apple product.
Guess this would make the Model T the "rough prototype" for the Apple Car...
Ford even used to make Apple-like demands of his supply chain. He insisted that parts be shipped in crates conforming to specific, peculiar dimensions. The suppliers were baffled by the request -- why those dimensions? Until a supplier representative looked down at the floor of a Model T one day... the crates had been broken down to form floorboards for the car.
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.
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 imagine Apple as a car company.
* Seriously, the main logic board seems to always be the culprit and the replacement cost is up there with a new item.
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.
You picked out the tongue in cheek part of my comment, but sure, people like thinner computers. Not sure what battery life has to do with that sense the overall lifetime of the batter is probably worse with everything packed in and the battery experiencing more heat.
Some other problems from their obsession with thin. Broken keyboards for multiple years. And that's moving from already bad chiclet keyboards into broken keyboards.
There was also a couple year period when ethernet ports were on the corners and it seemed everyone had their macbook dented right at the ethernet port. It could have been reinforced at that point along the edge, but they have to aggressively bevel those edges for the marketing glamour shots that make them look impossibly thin.
Oh, speaking of the beveled edges, the early airs and ipads were rounded so far toward the center that if you placed them on a table, and pressed near the edge with any force at all it would flip the far side of the device off the table. A real problem for an ipad which is a touchscreen and for anyone who touches their palms to their keyboard while typing.
Those are problems from making things minimally thin, or worse, making them appear thinner than they are. I don't expect them to actually make cars one inch shorter every year. I do expect them to have some weird obsession that they will tout as the best thing ever and min/max it to death.
"most people want thinner and lighter machines"
Not at the cost of repairability and reliability they don't.
In my dell XPS, friends lebovo, etc. I can replace battery, ssd, or any other part with just a screwdriver.
"You'd have to subscribe to your speculated service for 42 years"
Surely you meant 4.2 years? 10000/199/12 = 4.18760469012 (years).
> Public will buy into it because the cost of the car is significantly less than their competition.
That's not the Apple Way. Cost will be significantly higher than the competition, but it comes with a shiny, large apple on the engine hatch, and celebrities will make it a lifestyle choice product. Having an AppleCar will be the economically and technologically inferior, but socially "more acceptable" option.
And by then, people will have conveniently forgot normal gas stations/electric chargers won't work - gotta get to the premium-priced Apple fuel stations with the proprietary gas pumps/electric connectors. Users will eventually believe those are better quality, too, and when Apple finally is forced to adapt back to standards by legislative bodies, they will sell this as a "huge innovation".
Except that the EU, which is taking up EVs at a faster rate than US, has consumer protections and is starting to plan for and enforce EV charging networks.
The people that currently have "Apple fuel stations" is Tesla. So I'm not sure why you're blaming Apple for something that already exists.
I don't think that this is a problem if it's marketed clearly upfront. The violation here is for Toyota to add this fee on without informing the user of this when they bought it.
I can't believe I had to read this far down to find someone making this point. Exactly! There's nothing wrong with a subscription-based feature at all. Lots of people would love the ability to price-discriminate ("Do we actually need remote start? Is it worth $8/mo?").
The ethics problem here isn't the subscription at all, it's with the clear and good faith communication of what the product is to which the user is subscribing.
In this particular case, it seems like the Toyota Remote Connect service was sold and marketed as a phone app, but when terminated it also removes the capability of remote starting the car over local radio (probably bluetooth I guess) from the key fob, which no one seems to have known was part of the product in the first place. That's bad, if so.
(But to be fair, a better article would track down some Toyota owners for quotes about what they were told, and maybe a copy of the original license agreement. This coverage from Ars is IMHO a little weak.)
So like Tesla with FSD, though not monthly(yet)
> though not monthly(yet)
It's already available monthly ($199/mo), thankfully there's the one time purchase option still though ($10,000).
I was with you until:
> Public will buy into it because the cost of the car is significantly less than their competition
Do you have to pay for the car itself?
>... TVs with built in ads?...
Hah, I have an Amazon Fire TV, not the stick, the actual TV. So...built in ads...huzzah... the UI on the TV has gotten progressively worse.
Just what we need, 300 million people locked out of their coffee machines. Thank God that didn't happen during Covid lock-downs! :)
Yeah. We consumers are going to have to band together to defend ourselves and take back our power. (Funny, and true -- I did not start with socialism in mind when I said that).
I don't know of any flavor of socialism that, historically, has solved this class of problem in a way that most of us would prefer.
And the toxic trend of corporate short-term-ism continues...
This is clearly set up as a gotcha with a 3 year/10 year "trial" included, then suddenly $80(!) a year. The irony is that both periods are right around the time different demographics start to consider a new vehicle, and Toyota has just pulled this nonsense.
You may be thinking $80/year isn't so bad if it includes breakdown coverage/SOS button, but you'd be mistaken. The $80/year is ONLY for their "Remote Connect" service (app stuff, remote lock/unlock/start and notifications), you also need to pay another $80/year for "Safety Connect" (breakdown, SOS, stolen vehicle location), "Wi-Fi Connect" starting at $420/year for 2GB, and "Destination Assist" for $80/year.
So you could be paying $660 per year OR MORE for your Toyota vehicle subscriptions alone.
edited/fixed: "per year" now, instead of a confusing mix of per month and per year. Also, originally miscalculated the per year total and mislabelled it on top (was "$275 per month" which is double-wrong).
Surely its $51/month (8 + 8 + 35)? Not that that isn't outrageous, but it's not 275/month outrageous
I fixed the above and added an edited note.
I originally erroneously calculated $80 + $80 + $80 + $35 mixing up "per year" on the first three with "per month" on the last. It should be $80 + $80 + $80 + $420 or $660 per year.
Toyota charges $8 per month or $80 for an annual subscription[0].
[0] PDF warning: https://www.toyota.com/content/dam/toyota/connected-services...
I think it's 8 + 8 + 8 + 35. OP just worded things a little strangely. They're saying it's:
* $8 remote connect * $8 safety connect * $8 destination assist * $35 wifi connect
So $59/mo unless op has multiple Toyotas, I guess? I'm probably missing something.
Yeah - it's infuriating. I think you meant to be 240/yr for services, plus 35/mo for data, but the point still stands.
Keyfob remote start should not be gated on cell-related packages. Additionally, $8/mo should cover remote connect + safety connect. Honestly, all these features should be "free", provided you can provide a data connection, IMHO. The hosting cost must be negligible compared to the other costs Toyota has.
Toss in a IoT sim of your choice, and that's that. I don't use Google Fi, but they provide free data-only SIMs on their unlimited plans. Could pop one in the car, and then have the vehicle-based hotspot enabled anytime you drive. Presumably the car has a slightly better antenna (though likely outdated) than a phone.
I pay for the Safety Connect. It is in the nature of insurance.
the other stuff is fairly gizmo
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 tractors. Then people might face legal action or maybe even jail just to drive their cars as intended. Fun future.
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 with the pitch "well we give you the fob for free". It's hard enough for a venture like Tesla, which has some serious technological upside. This? Not so much.
Edit: another nice example would be news. Good luck finding a news outlet that's willing to let you pay a moderate fee in exchange for a truly ad & tracking free experience that actually covers your reading needs. Seems like a market gap, no?
My local news used to offer an ad-free experience for about $10/mo. I happily paid it. One day they updated their site and starting nagging me to turn off my ad blocker. Wouldn't let me read anything. I canceled that day and told them why.
Now they get $0 a month from me. They keep begging me back with $5/mo offers. Nope. That bridge has been burned.
Similar experience with my local newspaper also. They don't get it. We don't want ads and their content is not worth the slap in the face of paying for and then getting shown ads in return.
> 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.
It is the solution, just the consumers don't have the guts to go through with not buying. The average buyer now seems to have little self control. The companies as you pointed out take advantage of it and work together to screw everyone.
I do recall the non-fresh milk in Germany. Shelf stable ultra pasteurized milk tastes terrible. In the US you can still get even raw milk.
Where in the US are you referring to? I know it's available, but I can't say I've ever seen it for sale in a large grocery store. I've only seen it at farmers markets or similar small farm ventures.
It's only legal in 13 states that way. It's actually illegal in 20 states to sell raw milk at all (as of 2017, I don't think this has changed recently).
https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/rawmilk/nonpasteurized-outbre...
Your example was true in the 2010s, but I don’t think it’s true in all industries anymore. For example, when the Denver post and other newspapers were gutted by private equity and turned to crazy bad tracking, it took a couple years but a local alternative with a subscription only/ad free model popped up.
True. Sometimes you gotta vote with the pen (legislation).
Can you explain what you mean with the German milk market? You can't buy fresh milk anymore?
Actually, are technica does offer an ad and tracking free subscription option
I digress but what happend to the milk market? Could you post a reference?
I can't find a good reference for the German market specifically, but in some countries/regions most milk is ultra-pasteurised and unrefridgerated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-temperature_process...
Wild.
Here I am thankful that Montana recently reduced regulations and made it so small dairies can supply raw milk directly to customers without any inspection from a state or federal agency, so now my family drinks local, fresh, raw milk for the same price as organic UHT crap.
Germans can't get anything but this UHT stuff?
Non-UHT is widely available.
What has become a lot more common (and is often not clearly labeled) are stronger pasteurization levels that make unopened milk stable for a few weeks refrigerated (it's also sometimes micro-filtrated).
Before, softer pasteurization was the more common variant, which then has unopened ~1 week of refrigerated stability. Less offered now, although a good supermarket has it.
(These two categories are not fixed standards, so within them there's also variations in how processing is done exactly)
Raw milk (i.e. never heated >40°C, unfiltered) is also available, but with stronger requirements on how it's handled before sale and thus often hard to get, especially if you're not local to a farm producing it - obviously transport has to be quick.
WaPo has an ad-free version for a reasonable fee.
WaPo is also toilet paper, which is useless if it's digital.
What do you mean fresh milk has vanished?
It’s now all hyper-pasteurized and shelf stable. Not even refrigerated.
The two glass liter bottles of fresh milk min my fridge beg to differ - though they are proudly branded “Frankenmilch”… which just means that it’s produced in Franken (Franconia), the region I live in.
Sure, but try finding that in Berlin. I think the point here is that availability has dropped for many/most people.
Good lord, this is true dystopia. I drink fresh milk every damn day.
It's also not true at all. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29548136 for what the original complaint is probably about.
It is true. It’s very hard to find now, and it was not hard to find in the past.
> Not even refrigerated.
That was the point where you lost me. Even ALDI doesn't just have non-refrigerated milk.
I find the shift annoying too, but it's not as bad as that.
The Aldi next to me only had room temp last time I looked. I’m going in the morning, maybe I’m wrong! I’ll look and report back.
>"The solution is to vote with your wallet."
I don't think it is. I sense this might play out the same way it did with all the intrusive spyware on SmartTV's. Sure, I could try to vote with my wallet and find a TV that doesn't have all that bloat, but they are becoming vanishingly rare. The market has 'decided' that this is a standard feature now.
Get a RokuTV. There's ONE ad on part of the home screen, and it's not animated. The OS doesn't feel bloated or slow at all. It ain't perfect, of course, but I'd never get a Vizio, Samsung, or LG anymore.
“I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it further”
A single ad now on a network connected device is no guarantee that it will remain that way. Especially as it becomes "optimized" for revenue from all possible sources.
It is unfortunate that the rest of this stuff is so infested that a single ad (for now) seems reasonable.
Yes and Roku used to have zero ads, so...
Like in politics, voting with your wallet only works if alternatives are available.
It also implies that money is worth more above all else. What happens when every car company decides to follow this model because it looks great on the short term? Am I suppose to vote with my wallet and start a new car company single handedly? Well no.
This is why we need to legislate these issues and concerns. Saying vote with your wallet is already a losing position, the corporations already have a much larger wallet better to act collectively and enforce legislation.
> Am I suppose to vote with my wallet and start a new car company single handedly? Well no.
That's exactly what you're supposed to do, except probably not single-handedly. You're supposed to find investors with cash to burn, engineers who are frustrated with their big corp wage-slave jobs, and frustrated consumers and bring them together.
There's about 4300 EV startups funded in the last 15 years [1], and 27 have gone public or are in the process of going public via SPAC in the last year [2]. Some of them (eg. Nikola) don't even have the "hire qualified engineers" and "build a working product" part down and still managed to raise billions.
[1] https://tracxn.com/d/emerging-startups/electric-vehicles-sta...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-07-06/hyperd...
And, a lot of these consumer hostile moves are death by a thousand cuts rather than line-in-the-sand deal breakers. There are plenty of people who will not buy a Toyota specifically because of this, but I assume most people would be upset but still make the purchase, knowing they're getting a Toyota and all that comes with it.
Are you suggesting there are no car makers without monthly key fees?
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.
My point isn't that everyone in the country is in a position where they can afford luxury eggs, but that that very few care to.
The idea of voting with your wallet does not mean that there are no costs to doing so. Eggs are a good example because the cost is very small to upgrade. Yet, the vast majority of consumers, who could easily spend $1 more per carton, do not.
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.
> Eventually people fed up with it will "jailbreak" their cars like the farmers did with John Deere tractors
This wouldn't be new. People have been "jailbreaking" their cars since the 80s. We had a BMW in 1990 that we replaced the transmission chip on with a 3rd party chip so that we could unlock extra functionality that they only had in Europe.
Even if this is fully legitimate everywhere else, in Texas it might trigger support for refunds on purchases according to the Deceptive Trade Practices Act
You would need a lawyer but you would not have to be defrauded, merely "deceived".
And it might make a difference when you realized you were deceived.
I'm not so sure about the whole "conscious capitalism" approach these days. Subscription economies have basically killed that complicated form of activism.... https://bobdoto.computer/Conscious-Capitalism
>The solution is to vote with your wallet.
Right on. In 99% of cases, your choice of vehicle brand is fungible. Corolla's are good, cheap cars, but so are Accords, Mazda 3s, Focus', Altimas, Imprezas...
Buy something else.
>"your choice of vehicle brand is fungible"
I disagree wholeheartedly. One of the things Toyota has done is to establish itself as a reliable automaker of quality. People specifically think of Toyota/Honda as the vehicle makes which are most likely to last a long time and put up with abuse. Contrast this to the reputation of GM or Daewoo.
You also have the human element, where people are attracted to brand marketing and how certain models make them feel.
Yeah, brand absolutely matters unless you're in the cycle of never ending car leases. Then I suppose it doesn't really matter since you're likely to get a new car again before longterm maintenance ever becomes a problem.
For those who buy CPO's or with cash, longevity and maintenance are the prime factors for budget car purchasers.
> One of the things Toyota has done is to establish itself as a reliable automaker of quality. People specifically think of Toyota/Honda as the vehicle makes which are most likely to last a long time and put up with abuse.
I find these and Apple "apologies" funny: "Fucking Apple and their monopolistic practices!!! ... but they are so pretty, there's nothing as pretty in the market". Well, having bad market practices is part of the product feature, so you can vote with your wallet for a product with less bells and whistles but better business practices. People using Open Source have done it for a long time.
>"I find these and Apple "apologies" funny"
In what way is it an apology? People will continue to buy [product] despite the producer utilizing some bad market practices if they feel like they are still getting something valuable from the exchange. I am still angry about losing the audio jack on my iPhone but not enough switch platforms.
>"Well, having bad market practices is part of the product feature, so you can vote with your wallet for a product with less bells and whistles but better business practices."
Of course, I wasn't claiming otherwise. And, I wasn't talking about bells and whistles, I was talking about build quality and reliability. It's not a stretch to say that a Toyota will probably hold up better to wear and tear than a Ford would. That's a big factor in many people's choice of vehicles. I can easily see a person grudgingly accepting an $8/mo keyfob because they think the Corolla won't suffer from transmission issues the same way a Fiesta would.
consumers aren't 'weak-willed' there are simply not the vast amount of choices that capitalism promised, instead we have huge conglomerates that care more about continuous leeching off your wallet.
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 emerge whose competitive advantage is along the lines of "Your car, you can do whatever the fuck you want with it".
I'd like to get a Tesla, but I won't, because you can't own a Tesla. You can only pay licensing fees to be the user, and Tesla can modify or disable the car at their whim, while also tracking and recording your every motion.
We need lawmakers who actually care about privacy and ownership rights.
When I worked in mortgages in a previous career, we had a presenter talk to us about Private Mortgage Insurance (PMI). Back in the day, banks by default would just tack it on as an extra insurance for them in case you were to default. You're basically paying insurance against yourself to cover the banks losses. Once it was added, it was basically permanent for the life of the loan.
Then one day, a senator I think from Utah was asking about his his costs after signing. The bank explained to him that it was PMI and he couldn't remove it.
Thanks to that situation, PMI cannot be enforced if the loan to value ratio is below a specified threshold and the banks cannot force it on you if you meet that threshold prior to closing or after you reach it.
In a nutshell, this is what needs to happen before a lawmaker bothers.
This is why it’s important for many of the software engineers from hackernews to consider a career in politics after reaching a certain level of wealth and seniority in their career. If some of the greatest minds in the tech industry can rise to positions of power in government we can build a better world the way we know it should be, rather than hoping decrepit politicians come around to good ideas eventually.
Unfortunately, most businesses will only react to three things; stuff that makes them money, stuff that costs them money, and laws that are enforced effectively. Look how hard Apple is fighting against allowing alternative payment systems for apps. And against Right to Repair. Yet they start to budge a bit when lawmakers make them feel uncomfortable, or even pass laws (though most of Congress isn't really interested in the legislative side of the job.)
There are many electric cars on the market that are just plain "old" cars: hyundai ioniq, renault zoe, peugeot e-208, etc... No subscription and they work quite well.
But they are practically useless outside of cities. No range so they are not an option.
Plug in hybrids are the best of both worlds. You can have a small battery for use over normal day to day driving which keeps costs down, but when you do need to drive a substantial distance you can take advantage of the high energy density and quick refueling of fossil fuels. I got one recently and it's great, I have a long commute so I drive 400 miles per week, but I can charge at home and at work so I'm paying the equivalent of $1/gallon for 90% of my driving, and I only need to get gas like once a month. The monthly fuel savings compared to my last car are like half of my monthly car payment.
They're not great for long roadtrips, but they would be fine for weekend or short trips to places with charging. For example, from where I live to the coast is about 80 miles, and many of the coastal cities have at least L2 and some L3 charging. This would be fine with many of these cars. You might not need to charge at all with some of them.
My scenario might be a bit extreme, but closest food store is 40 miles away. Closest charger is 200 miles away. (Talking from Europe) Visiting my parents take 300 miles trip (one direction), and requires charging stop. And this is considered here as relatively normal driving trip.
And in winter, the range drops significantly. It is 7 month winter here.
Why would I buy a car which is useful only for short weekend trips when there are better options available?
"It's not useful in my specific scenario, which I acknowledge is extreme, therefore the cars are useless outside cities." Not everything has to work for everyone in every situation to be useful. These cars are perfectly useful for many people, including outside cities.
Your comment violates the site guidelines [0]. Please edit it and remove the personal insult.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
This applies almost my whole country, including many others, maybe less extreme. It is a bit different outside of US, what I’m trying to say.
It's usually the exact opposite way round – distances between things in the US are usually larger, not smaller, than in other countries. You only need to look at a world atlas to see that's the case, with a few obvious exceptions. What in Europe would be seen as an extreme road trip across a whole country (because it would take a whole day) would seem quaintly short by US standards (because it could be done in just one day). Hearing it said the other way round sounds very odd to me (and I'm not from the States, as my user name suggests).
You are right, my mind was set for coastline which is very populated. This is not the case when getting more into the middle. But main concern was on charger locations. I don’t know what is their status in inland.
It sounds like the charging infrastructure isn't there yet where you live. Doesn't mean the cars are useless for many many people, including people in rural areas. In the US, I don't think most rural people are 40 miles from the nearest food store, and I'd be surprised to learn that's true in most European countries either.
For you maybe. I live in a city, so something useless outside of a city is just fine by me. If they're "practically useless" and "not an option" then who's buying them all?
I had an impression that parent commenter implied it being as global solution. Instead, the others would need to still go for expensive long-range vehicles with subscriptions.
I've been driving a 2014 BMW i3 ev for 7+ years; it works great, but has about 100mile range, since it's using smaller batteries.
I wish it WERE internet connected: for BMW to update the maps of the nav system can (supposedly) only be done at the BMW dealer, costs something like $180 for the map updates (North America), and requires a two day stay at the dealer, with associated labor-time fees.
BMW is just a laughable Big Money Waste.
I own a BMW also. Will never own one again after the maintenance nightmare they are.
Does this apply to their EVs as well?
The idea that a car would automatically download an update that changes how something on the car works is insanity. I'm not buying a car with that "feature."
That ship is departing as we speak [1] - that article was from 3 years ago. I'm sure it's worse now.
BMW was definitely ahead of it's time charging a service fee for enabling AndroidAuto/CarPlay (among other car features).
https://www.consumerreports.org/automotive-technology/automa...
The idea that a computer would automatically download an update that changes how something on the computer works is insanity. I'm not buying a computer with that "feature."
I love and work every day in computers, but I like my consumer electronics as dumb as they can be. I just need to complete a joke of "I like my electronics as my XXXX: dumb as a rock"
Yeah. We've had the same hopes for mobile phones and at best you can hope for makes that do not overload their models with their own sh1tware on top of Android.
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.
> In either car I can just remove the sim
For now!
Does this impact your access to Tesla services or charging infrastructure? Can you still supercharge?
As far as I know yes you can still supercharge. The only thing I lose is the ability to remote control the car when out of bluetooth range as well as all the map & streaming features.
Should be able to supercharge. It communicates with the charger over the charging cable to tell it what account to charge.
You might lose access once you're on old enough software though.
What happens when they (inevitably) move to eSIM?
Remove the antenna, or break the wire trace antenna.
"Just void your warranty with this simple trick!"
The Audi has a "cellular off" option in the MMI. I'd have to dig into the Tesla to verify.
Wait until they put in eSIMs. Those you can probably disable as well but with a different level of expertise. Or you can damage the antenna or just stick aluminium foil tape onto it.
If you were to remove the sim card, would that void your warranty with either of those manufacturers? If so, that is not a long term solution, unfortunately.
No. They just stop calling home to the mothership. My Audi actually had a faulty sim module for a few months until I had time to get it fixed and other than not being able to check the charge status while away from the car it didn't really bother me.
Stellantis (the current owner of Chrysler/Jeep/Dodge/etc) has announced that they hope to get $22 billion a year from their customers through post-sale service charges.[1]
“Software will improve our business model, disconnecting hardware from software ... shifting the center of gravity of our business,” Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares said Tuesday during the company’s “Software Day.” Tavares said profit margins for those services are expected to be more comparable to those of a technology company rather than a traditional automaker. The additional revenue stream could potentially double what the automaker makes today, CFO Richard Palmer said.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/07/stellantis-plans-to-generate...
This is really bothering. How many of these subscriptions actually will finally increase value for the customer? Without intentionally starting to lock features and enable them later on with payments. Some legistlation is quickly needed.
Time to start a GNU Automobile project? :)
But yes, in a future where software is the most complicated part of a car, maybe that's what we'll be paying for.
But, IMO then there should also be competition on the software side.
I would argue that software in current iPhones is not much more complicated, just different use case. Current state of the software in cars is not eligible for subscriptions when iPhones get free updates for years which is more than maintenance mode.
Yes, when cars finally reach the self-driving more, it sounds complicated but our knowledge also grows over time. We don’t charge extra for voice-assistant support in devices these days which was black magic 30 years ago. Similarly how current computers compares to pricing of first ones. Is coding so ”revolutionary” that we can start ignoring normal adjustment of pricing compared to every other type?
This is such a sleazy game to play, and it looks to be getting more popular as corporations realize the average consumer just accepts it. Zero Motorcycles, the longest-standing electric motorcycle manufacturer, has announced for their 2022 flagship models that things like battery capacity and charge rate will be gated behind one-time in-app purchases, which is mind-boggling. Having to lug around batteries you can't charge to full capacity on a bike, where space and weight are at a premium, actually makes the product worse if you don't pay the rent. Hoping this strategy blows up in their face, but all indications suggest it's going to be lucrative and the angry minority will just have to eat it.
Eh, wouldn't the extra weight just degrade the battery performance and maybe the ride handling? If you're considering a new bike, it's like (note these are made up, I have no idea about Zero motorcycles):
- Premium/unlocked Zero: 30k -- range 200km -- handling: excellent
- locked Zero: 25k -- range 150k -- handling: average
These are one physical bike but with two prices and characteristics, and can be judged accordingly. If your budget is 25k you price the locked Zero against other bikes in the same budget.
I wonder if this, too, is a symptom of near-zero interest rates.
With an interest rate of zero, future cash flows are valued equal to present cash flows. That increases the net present value of recurring payments (approaching infinity, actually). So it becomes increasingly attractive for companies to discount the initial sale price in exchange for a recurring payment.
In a higher interest rate environment, that wouldn't be the case, as recurring payments would discount the further they are in the future, converging to a much smaller sum, while revenue earned today from the initial purchase would be more highly valued.
Interesting thought. Here’s the math. Toyotas current incentive is zero down, 1.9% apr for 72 months. The typical rav4 costs $33k.
Over the life on the loan (6 years) you’d pay about $1,500 in interest. If you paid $8/mo it would take 15.6 years to have paid a total of $1,500 in monthly fees.
Likely if you pay $8, you also pay for another subscription. So say $16/mo on average makes $1,500 in only 7.3 years.
Monthly subscriptions may be comparable in revenue to what the dealership earns from financing.
This may be way off, I don’t really know how any of this works but I am currently shopping for a Toyota :)
The total value captured isn't just the initial subscription. The LTV calculation should also incorporate, just off the top of my head: sale of valuable customer data, improved targeting of ads for new cars based on that telemetry, upsells to additional subscription services, increases in subscription price, affiliate commissions from other subscription services that get bundled in, etc.
They don't have these things yet necessarily, but hard not to justify it once Pandora's box is opened.
Auto related data is already huge thing, but dealerships don’t do much in the way of collection and sale. Someone who is shopping for a car is super valuable to advertise to, but after that purchase they lose all their value.
Telemetry data straight from a cars location is not sold, if it even exists. It would be extremely valuable but seems potentially illegal.
Heh. No. You really don't need macroeconomics to explain Toyota's decision making here... not everything is a nail, and that's one hell of a hammer you're holding.
I wouldn't, if it were just Toyota. But it's not. A lot of businesses are transitioning away from one-time sales to recurring revenue / subscription models.
What works for big tech will work for big X. The MBAs are learning. Non-tech industries have been talking about how to move to subscription models for 10+ years. Again, interest rate theory seems like the wrong tool here.
Maybe.
But, I think it's more likely that the downstream revenue from car sales has changed dramatically, and they need to find clever ways to fix that.
Historically, cars needed a ton of work and maintenance and dealers got significant revenue from their mechanic's shops. Now cars are far more reliable, go far longer between standard service calls and oil changes, and there's just far less money being spent at the dealer after you drive away with your initial purchase.
Ok, that’s actually scary. Philip K Dick dystopia came from an unexpected angle.
Wouldn't future inflation increases drive down the value of those recurring revenue streams?
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..."
> If this keeps up, some used cars will have a higher value than new ones.
That's already the case with construction equipment and farm equipment[0].
Right now, used cars often have a higher or near-new value because you can get one today - a new car, at MSRP, may be 6+ months wait, which doesn't help if your car just got totaled.
But, yes, everything is doubling down on toxic dystopian surveillance systems, subscription systems, and it's damned near the only option left anymore. I'm not sure what I'm going to do when the current fleet of vehicles needs rotating, because in 10 years when I plan to buy something newer, I'm not sure if anything won't be simply toxic. My car doesn't need a cell connection, sorry...
[0]: https://www.thedrive.com/news/31761/enormous-costs-of-new-tr...
“The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun to Be With. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing devision of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes,”
Sometimes I wonder if anyone in the meetings that decide these things ever have the moment of realization that "We are the baddies"
It has already happened. There was a case where somebody's new Ferrari straight from a dealer brought to some store to have a baby seat installed. Some sort of anti-tamper or anti theft system apparently triggered while they were trying to see if any of the baby seats fit (nope!). And this happened down inside a concrete garage, so no signal reception.
Ferrari apparently has some means of disabling these interlocks over the air, but well, no reception. A technician gets flown out, but apparently is unable to fix it, so it will need to towed to a dealership to fix. Apparently whatever interlock tripped will try to make the car phone home, and if that fails, it locks down harder than normal such that it can only be fixed with tools found at a dealer.
To summarize: Car: I think I'm being stolen. I'll lock down, and call for help. The lines are dead?!?! I really am being stolen. Activate computer self-destruct.
Also the technician had to manually release the handbrake to allow it to be moved, since apparently it was locked down enough that doing that the normal way was not possible.
I'm as skeptical as you are about the details of the story, but it was posted second hand, and I'm not sure the poster even understood all the details. The most details exist in the comments of the third reddit post. The linked Hacker news discussion was based only on the first, and some of the discussion there occurred before OP had clarified some things.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24754662
https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/j914... https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/j9ji... https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/j9qn...
This already happens to some rideshare cars -- I've read a few stories of people who drive their Zipcar out to a hike, but can't get back in the car after their hike because there's no cell signal.
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. I don't need a camera to back up. I don't want headlights that intermittently decide to change to brights. I don't want a car that is a glorified computer that's open to contact by blue-tooth and wifi. Its all just something else that will break and need to be repaired.
Looking forward to paying up for a 1975 era 4x4 when my current car gives out.
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.
This happened to me with zipcar once. Truly sucked
When Maven car share was a thing, I rented a car from them once. It used app with Bluetooth to open/close the doors. The design was horrible. Anytime I’d step away from the car, the phone would become unpaired. Getting it to repair was nontrivial, and the easiest way I found was to reboot my phone. Eventually the car unlocking process became extra ornery & I had to spend something like 10 minutes in the freezing cold weather just trying ti get the car open. I was not pleased & never rented from them again.
When I used to be a ZipCar member, they had a keycard I kept in my wallet. That worked well enough.
Would you please share the story?
Almost exactly what the parent comment said. I went hiking with some friends in the hills by cupertino, not even far from cell range. But we didn't have service (neither did the car) so we couldn't use the app nor the fob to unlock the car. Ended up having to walk to call an uber and zipcar towed the car.
We got refunded but no other compensation
Probably similar to this - https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/zipcar-int...
Imagine when no one can drive their car because AWS is down.
I don't know how could anyone think it is a good move inside toyota. $8 falls in the range that it is irritating for consumers yet the lifetime revenue per car is probably 1% of the average car value(5 year lifetime with 2 years free means $250 lifetime revenue). Is it worth it for 1% increase in revenue.
Disclosure: I work for GM, anything here is solely my own opinion.
Different revenue to a different organization inside the OEM. When you sell a $20k car, you get maybe $1k in profit, maybe less. If you can get $8 monthly recurring revenue you get maybe $7 in profit. Also consider that the lifetime is not 5 years. The AVERAGE age of cars on the road now is over 12 years. My parents drive 20 year old cars.
Also consider the friction to cancel. Maybe you get a few more months of revenue with someone sells the car or after it gets scrapped.
To be clear, I am not arguing in favor of this kind of thing at all.
Also consider that the lifetime is not 5 years. The AVERAGE age of cars on the road now is over 12 years.
Do 2nd owners typically subscribe to optional services?
No, but my guess is Toyota is hoping that they will for this because it’s more of a core feature
It actually makes a lot of sense, unfortunately.
For the new car buyer, you pitch it as cost savings for the time you own the car. The OE Toyota Long Range remote starter is $1000 so if you go with the app, if you only own the car for 8 years then you're saving money as the new car owner.
However the overwhelming majority of car sales in the US are used, and the average age of the American car is now 12 years old. Outside of maintaining a spare parts supply chain, you don't gain any additional revenue from used car sales. With subscriptions, a 2020 model year car can still be generating revenue for a company in 2035. Plus you can adjust the subscription price year after year as desired.
I don't like it personally, but I can see method to the madness.
Right? I'm in the market for a new SUV and I just took Toyota's off my list.
Subaru is doing it as well.
Yup. Subaru offers remote start via an app at $75 for the first 3 years when you buy a new car, but it renews at $300 (prepaid for 3 years) after that.
Ridiculous
I have no idea what Toyota's margins are like at the manufacturing level but it's not uncommon for dealers to only make a few hundred dollars profit on the sale. $250 of additional lifetime revenues could be quite significant.
Where did you get the 5 year lifetime figure? Toyota's vehicles are known for their reliability and longevity.
If Toyota margins are 1%, however... they are doubling their profit.
I've been a Toyota Tacoma guy for the last 22 years (and counting). Three Tacomas and I have a son that we're deciding on a vehicle for in the coming year. This is how you take someone with massive brand affinity, someone who would even likely pass that brand affinity to the next generation, and push them to look at other options. Charging monthly for a service that isn't cloud enabled? If this is true, Toyota, you are literally dead to me.
FYI, remote start is a pretty easy aftermarket add on, especially for Toyotas.
I think OP, much like myself, is one for principles.
To me this says “we’re looking for additional revenue streams and have found a way to lock previously available functionality behind some XaaS where X is artificially paywalled”.
If this is the path they are going down then there’s no reason to suspect they will stop with that.
Sure, there are aftermarket options, but the issue (that I have, at least) is that the taste is now sour.
I was looking at a hybrid Rav4, but this makes me look elsewhere.
Imagine your garage door opener operating on this model: you have 5 free uses remaining this month, want some light? Simple IAP. What recurring value is Toyota providing by charging you per month for a fob to car signal transmission?
Absolutely none, but car makers have been ripping off people on navigation systems and other add ons for a very long time.
I do not mind taking a philosophical stand, but in this case, my preference would be to still go for Toyota due to their reliability and modifiability, and not get any fancy add on like remote start.
Well this and the 2022 dropping the v8 for an unproven v6 twin turbo.
Ownership is evaporating due to technology and a lack of viable alternatives. The idea is to make personal ownership more expensive and trouble that it's worth (monetize misery) so that manufacturers can run their own FSD car sharing fleet so they can charge you whatever they want. Rent-seeking, oligopoly FTW.
I pay a $6 yearly subscription for a frikkin’ calculator app. It has a handy feature which I use and the price was low enough I didn’t actually care that much. But I never imagined renting a calculator.
Would you mind sharing what the handy feature is? or the Calculator even?
Currency conversion. I travel internationally quite a bit and it’s easier to use than Google when you need to do some quick math in different currency amounts.
This is a classic example of price discrimination. Slowly but surely, companies such as Toyota will converge to a state where every consumer individually pays the maximum amount that the consumer is willing to pay for the product.
$8 a month may not seem like much compared to the cost of a car, but that's the point. Toyota will be able to get free extra money from a large population of people (many of whom will later barely even remember that they are incurring this regular cost).
When I found out you could pay $2000 to make your Tesla accelerate 1 second faster 0-60 it made me wonder what's next. Want to role you windows down more than half way? $500. Want your air-conditioner to run on high? $600. Want you seats to recline 15 degrees more? $550. Want the car to make sharper turns? $2500 Want the radio to remember more than 3 favorites? $150
Etc etc etc.... I'm sure it's coming because it can.
It is a common opinion in this thread that it is unethical to charge for enabling a feature that only needs the local communication between a key fob and a car. And that it is fine if there is a cloud in-between, such as remote start from a smartphone, because it has maintenance costs.
If majority of the car buyers agree with this distinction, it would simply create an incentive to route more communication through the cloud. Besides, this option makes tracking and control easier.
I would argue that the maintaining a server does not have a substantial difference that singles it out from the other work that a car maker does to support the car owners: downloads of manuals, managing recalls, parts inventory, etc. Subscription business model has no place here.
> it is fine if there is a cloud in-between
But there doesn't need to be cloud in-between for an app to talk to your car. You don't even need Internet. In fact my phone already talks to my car via the King of Denmark, so I'm told.
They need it, nobody else. That is why even your robot vacuums are controlled over cloud server, not directly from you phone app. Or why your toaster has wifi soon. Or fridge. Or bluetooth enabled kettle. That sweet sweet data and control.
Related: Safety as DLC? Motorcycle Airbag vest will not deploy if you miss a payment
https://linustechtips.com/topic/1335312-safety-as-dlc-motorc...
Toyota seems to have lost their way. They've been late to the EV game, they wasted a lot of time touting hydrogen as a solution, and now they seem to be dead set on screwing over their relationship with the customer.
Here in Norway the electrification of automobiles has come quite far, and one thing that is quite striking is that all these new brands keep popping up. Years ago I read a lot of papers on incumbents in the face of technological disruption. If you look at the last 100 or so years, only about 15% of incumbents manage to hold on to their dominant position in the face of technological disruption.
I wonder if Toyota is going to have a significant market share in 20-30 years. A lot of the decisions made by the top brass seem to indicate that they're reaching the end of the industrial life cycle.
One less car to shop for.
scribbling out Toyota
(heading out to the delearships, non-Toyota, that is.)
Toyota was never an option as they failed at electric cars
FWIW, my 2019 plug-in Prius has worked out well for me. It has a little over 25 mile electric range, and when the battery is out it switches to gas. My commute to the office is short so I can make it to work and back on a single charge, and if I happen to need to make a detour I just burn a little gas.
The caveat here is the short commute. If my commute were significantly longer the 25 mile electric range wouldn't amount to much and the weight of the empty battery would negate its benefits.
Of course none of this justifies an $8 monthly charge for basic functionality, which is frankly outrageous. I have no intention of subscribing to this service.
They invented the completely BS term Self Charging Hybrid, so they're evil by definition.
Unfortunately they are the only ones with anything decent when it comes to reliability. Even Honda doesn’t come close to Prius reliability anymore.
I love my 2020 RAV4 hybrid. Like absolutely love it.
But after an incredible horrible experience with Toyota connected services support re renewing and issues with the connected services not working, this is my last Toyota EVER.
When this lease is up, I will go shop for a new car at any vendor other than Toyoya.
SaaS is eating the world. Software, music, movies, games, books. Now the car industry and big pharma are flirting with this model.
You're not excited for your monthly Pfizer booster subscription to stay employed?
Hey, maybe we'll get a bundle deal with Disney and Pfizer+
Actually this is fantastic for someone like me - assuming there are no security holes of course.
I don't want my next car to have remote start or remote anything. If not paying the subscription allows me to make sure that that feature is not enabled, it's great news, for me.
Of course, different people have different preferences and needs.
It's definitely still there. If you're worried about hackers etc, they can surely bypass this control if they've bypassed everything else.
I fully understand, that is why I noted: assuming there are no security holes
Ideally there should be a hardware switch :)
"Im in! Wait! $8/month?! Go get mom's credit card"
The reality is that it's probably still there, you just don't have access to it.
Whether you pay or not the car will have the capability and it will dutifully ask the home server what it should do. Toyota will still be able to see exactly where you, what you're doing, and be able to unlock/start your car whenever they want. you just won't be able to.
Not with the antennas removed.
I don't know how serious you are, but the modern LTE antennas are really small and are tightly integrated. Very difficult to remove without severely damaging the system.
I assume if you dont pay the convenience fee for the fob, then you will be auto-enrolled in their legacy program which has a maintenance fee due to its legacy status.
This is bullshit. I will never own a car that does that (or a car from a company that does that). I recommend everyone here also refuses to abide such behavior. Vote with your wallet. If you don’t fight back against the dystopia you hate, you’ll get it by default.
Maybe we need some kind of "truth in owning" analogous to truth-in-lending regulations.
Does anyone have a good lead on where I should direct my outrage, where decision-makers might be listening?
(I'm a Toyota owner, but not effected by this.)
Honda charges something like US$15 for a CR2032 for the key fob.
The person who was dealing with my car was too embarrassed to charge me, so I got it for free. Still, it makes me want to rethink my relationship with Honda.
It seems that Toyota might not be the way either.
Well are they installing the CR2032 battery in the key fob for that price. If so that will probably require a 5-10 minute transaction in order to sell and install the battery. Not making much money on that. Now if it is just the battery, it is a high mark-up. Though looking at Target they charge $6.50 for a two-pack.
Honda charges $15, or your local dealership charges $15? Given cars are selling well above MSRP these days, I don't think manufacturers dictate fixed prices to dealerships.
If they were half smart they'd have used cr2016 instead. Slimmer!
If this was pitched to me at the dealership I'd just laugh at the salesman's face and leave. Or get all the add-ons "forever for free" as part of the sale.
This makes (any) brand look incredibly cheap.
However, If someone wants to sell me Car as a SaaS, I'm interested.
By that, I mean as soon as there's an issue with the car, I simply flag it in the App and an employee comes to my place and swap it over for the same model/trim (transfers whatever I have in the trunk too). Then I just keep using the replacement car until either I stop using the service or it has an issue or is due for maintenance.
>Or get all the add-ons "forever for free" as part of the sale.
This all the way. People seems to be intimidated of car shopping, but if you have financing in place (or cash), you are in such a position of power you can pretty much get anything thrown in. Try it. By the time they say no it'll be because you're eaten all their margins; they are a business after all.
My limited experience and what I've heard on the internet: it's better not to let on that you are paying cash or outside financing as the dealers make money on the financing and will sometimes give a lower sales price due to that. Pull the cash out after the deal is agreed upon.
Assuming the manufacturer creates such a mechanism for dealers to offer at all.
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.
I've always liked and bought Toyota brand cars for the past 13 years, but not anymore. Good job, Toyota, because I am currently in the market for a car and between this type of thing, telemetry crap, and no electric cars that are decent, you've lost a loyal customer. I hope one of your marketing/sales/exec employees see this and realize you're not doing the right thing.
BMW tried to add a subscription for iOS CarPlay. Seems they had enough backlash that they canceled it. Total bullshit they would even try that.
BMW wants something like $180 to update the maps in my 2014 i3, and a couple days stay in the service shop to be sure blah blah blah.
Nope.
I decided that day to never consider BMW. If they can do it once they can do it again
That's ridiculous. For a fixed cost feature you can charge $8k once if you want. Even if that's more than what I'd pay over the cars entire lifetime in $8/mo fees, I can choose whether or not to purchase the fixed cost fee. I don't mind that the fob costs $5 or that the disabled fob is shipped to customers that didn't get the $8k fob option.
Meanwhile my Ford allows me to use the app, and connected services without a subscription. Included in the cost of the car.
Interesting that if you purchased upgraded audio, you get this remote unlock feature free for the first 10 years instead of the first 3.
Perhaps in the future they'll sell all the vehicles with the same audio system, but just disable certain speakers or add noise to the signal if you've not paid your monthly premium audio fee?
A Carmaker’s $23 Billion Plan To Keep You Paying Long After You’ve Bought Your Car
https://jalopnik.com/a-carmaker-s-23-billion-plan-to-keep-yo...
Subaru charges $12.50/month I wish it was $8 a year. https://www.subaru.com/engineering/starlink/safety-security....
Guys this is remote start. Not a key fob entry/start service.
Sometimes this can be done via cell phone app. And there is always a monthly subscription for this option.
But no it is not a monthly subscription for starting your car with your key fob in the pocket.
Starting the car using the key fob in your pocket is literally what the whole article is about.
> Key fob remote start has nothing to do with an app, nor does the car or the fob communicate with any servers managed by Toyota.
That’s not what I read. Starting the car with the key fob or previously known as “remote start” which you had to pay like 800$ for, is what the subscription is about.
You can still open the car with key fob in hand. And sit in and start the car with key fob in pocket.
You can not use the key fob to remote start 2018 or later Toyota vehicles without a Remote Connect membership: https://www.toyota.com/content/dam/toyota/brochures/pdf/conn...
Ummm, no.
The whole smart keys trend is the worst case of taking a perfectly functional thing and ruining it with unnecessary features.
I hate them so much. They all cost a boatload of cash to replace and give me absolutely no benefit over a regular key.
Reminds me of the mountain dew drink verification can greentext. The most comical of dystopias
Only a matter of time before this happened. When Tesla OTA updates breaks autopilot or they remotely disable it [0], I thought to myself surely this isn't setting a good precedence for the rest of the industry. Why settle for profits from just selling the car when you can also get owners to pay you a recurring fee every month!
[0] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/70481/used-model-has-autopilo...
A.R.S.E. Automated Remote Start Enrollment
The joy of AAAS! (Automobiles as a Service)
Bullshit like this is why I had to go against my normal no-consumer-credit rules and just cop a loan to buy a (6 year old) "forever car" this year while they could still be had with reasonable mileage. I can't imagine any features that would tempt me into the malware, short-termism, and invasive surveillance that's going into cars these days. Leaving aside the fact that almost every new car is a boring SUV or imitation SUV and they're all a flat wide sea of generic blandness.
I'll never buy Toyota after seeing this anti-customer behavior. They were high on my buy list too. Like seriously, forever in my avoid at all costs list now.
If it's buried in the fine print, I wonder how long it'll be until a major class action suite forces Toyota to enable the fob.
My Volvo has a remote start option, but it costs $200/year to subscribe to the Volvo On-Call service to be able to use it.
I added an app-enabled remote start to a car years back. First few years were included. Then $80 or $10 / year after that. The fob still worked after I canceled though, super wack that Toyota would burn a feature that clearly doesn’t rely on the web.
I think they lowered it quite substantially, at least now mine is around $40, which is much more reasonable.
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.
Uh oh. Putting off their original plans to shift to EV production, increasing their contract & temp worker pool only to then lay them off in certain "down" quarters to maintain their "no layoff" of FTEs policy, and now this.
Pun intended; what the heck is happening under the hood there?
Coming to Smart TV remote controls soon!
It's only half a joke though. I have a Roku TV where they didn't bother putting some of the advanced picture controls in the OSD. You have to use an app instead. Guess what? The app doesn't work on my Android phone and I wouldn't be able to adjust picture settings on my TV if I didn't have an iPad to use instead.
What happens if they turn that app into a subscription service because they don't like the cost of maintaining it?
I'm pretty cynical and I didn't even consider the possibility of needing an app to control my TV when I bought it. Now I know to watch out for it, but device manufacturers aren't exactly going out of their way to advertise cost cutting measures that make you dependent on something you have no control of (ie: apps).
Gentlemembers, I thought that after posting about the news from Stellantis ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29469914 ) a week ago:
we now now need an Open Source Car.
This should become illegal. What if the producer of your pacemaker decides to bill you monthly? Or, in a less sinister note, what if your fridge will keep your food at 20C unless you pay a monthly sum to have 5C inside?
I personally wrote Toyota a message to their facebook page letting them know how disappointed I am in their decision to do this. Shame on them and I hope others voice their dislike for this change and force a change of mind.
I just want to point out that the overall sense of superiority in the comments here is somehow funny. I feel like we’re also the “dumb average Joe” for a lot of companies, and most often for way more than $8/mo.
What's the average duration before replacing your car? 3-4 years?
$8/month for 3-4 years sounds absurd if you consider other fees such as repair fee, annual checkups, insurance, parking fees, tickets etc.
I just bought a new Toyota truck this past year. It blows my mind that I have to pay extra for remote start in 2021. I didn’t realize it when I bought it, otherwise I would have thought twice.
To keep breathing the air on mars, please top up your Musk-ways air card. Until then please apply the asphyxiation device or expect to pay for air outside of your tariffed rate.
I simply can't understand the reasoning other than a cash grab. OEMs, like Toyota, are really showing their true colors to the consumer. They don't care about you.
Fair enough charging for the service as there are costs involved but $8 is criminal, nearly the price of a Netflix subscription.
GM charges ~$15/mo just to use the remote start from their app. I would be fine paying a fee, but $15 is just insane.
I assumed the Toyota brand still had great goodwill, so I'm surprised they'd tarnish it like this.
The author is very naive if he thinks the feature was made open in the older cars with 3G connectivity because of the sunset of 3G as a courtesy for those customers.
Given the context it is far more logical to assume they did not enhance the older cars, but instead, they decided not to cut access while they could because then they wouldn't be able to enable it remotely should the customer renew their subscription.
It's not even the money! It's the scumminess and extortionist attitudes that pisses you off!!
Wow. So Toyota are just going to burn a generation of goodwill from their customers in one swoop?
Why people remotely start their car is beyond my comprehension most of the time. Unless you're in an extreme climate and absolutely have to bring the car's interior temperature to something survivable, what's the point? We don't have to warm up the engine anymore past a few seconds either.
All I can think of is the waste of fuel and unnecessary GHG.
As someone who's lived both near the equator and in snowy climates, having a car interior thats not 110F or 10F is very nice, especially if you have leather seats/steering wheel.
It's not just interior temperature - it's about being able to defrost the windshield so you can just drive off in winter.
In colder climates you usually need to heat up the car to defrost the windows in order to drive safely. That can take 10+ minutes by the time the engine heats up. It's actually the law in some states in the US now.
Saves time. Defrost the windows while you get ready to leave the house.
Is Texas an extreme environment? Not particularly, but still, it’s nice to get the air conditioner going a minute or two before getting into a car in August.
Likewise, Midwest (ie: ND, SD, Minnesota, etc) can get down to -20 easily few weeks out of the year in January/February. Not "unsurvivable" but definitely not good to shift into drive without letting things flex from heat a bit first.
> definitely not good to shift into drive without letting things flex from heat a bit first
For how long? I heard, anything more than 10s is unnecessary.
Side note, without remote start, it is illegal to run a vehicle without an occupant in many states (** with keys in the ignition).
Open the windows maybe? Sure it's nice but I wonder if we should consider living without the luxury of having an ICE bring your car to the perfect temperature. I guess people have less GHG emission guilt as me.
The marginal amount of gas used by idling the car for a minute before driving it around rounds to zero.
You can make everything "round to zero" when in fact, it adds up.
Acura also charges an annual fee for remote start -- though it's through an app vs. fob.
That sounds like something Tesla would do... I'm a bit surprised coming from Toyota.
Does the monthly fee include free key-fob battery replacement? Or is that still $200?
My Lexus (owned by Toyota) costs more than that per month, iirc. I refuse to pay it.
I’m sorry, you don’t get to retroactively remove features like this :-/
Good reason not to shell out for remote start in the first place!
Remote start seems like a gimmick anyway, completely unnecessary.
Is there potential ways to reverse-engineer this crap?
car companies are slowly becoming phone companies. Hope we don't see days when we'll have to subscribe to a plan to use the car.
As a Tesla stock owner, I'm glad Toyota introduced this feature. If every car company keeps stepping back 20 years of technology, soon Tesla will own the entire market.
Other than a Tacoma, no reason to buy a Toyota.
I would prefer old Yaris.
That's called an Echo.
booooooooooo
this is why SaaS sucks
Would this start a class-action lawsuit?
Yep. No thanks.
I consider this a totally unnecessary thing. When they start charging to start my car, then we've got a problem. However, I do resent them inflating the base price by putting more unwanted h/w into the base model only to be activated as SaaS.
EDIT: Snark removal.
> Totally unnecessary thing only kids do.
I use remote start when it's really cold. I thought that was the whole point of the feature (When the regular gasoline heater isn't enough, it can also run itself warm for a few minutes).
Snark has been removed from original post.
But I look at it as unnecessary feature creep, just more stuff to break. It's like they mastered making cars reliable (if cared for), and now the industry giants want to undo that but tacking on tons of "hey, what about this?" gadgets. Just run out to your car and start it: costs you 30 seconds and some precipitation on your collar?
It breaks in a robust way. Like an escalator. If it breaks, it just becomes that run-out-and-start.
If it costs next to nothing then it's a good feature. It's like the remote for my TV. Sure I can get up and change channels, or I can walk and start the car. but chances are I'm gonna say "nah" and just cold start it. I'm not paying $8 month but I do pay $40/yr for the volvo version (although that has a bit more than just remote start. I use the remote heater start 100x times more than remote start though).
I mean if the heater is remote started then why wouldn't the engine be. It's just the 2nd step of the heating process.
> I mean if the heater is remote started then why wouldn't the engine be. It's just the 2nd step of the heating process.
Ok, that just registered in my brain. If it is a feature where people need to warm their cars before the cars even work, then it is pretty shitty to start charging a subscription fee for it. And if it is incremental, then I see your point. Can I still hate on touchscreens and lack of knobs, tho? :)
Thats how cars work in very low temps :) Or rather, they work anyway but it’s less friendly to the environment plus if you drive it cold you also need to spend a lot of time getting the ice off the windows, which at least comes “for free” with a 15 minute heating and a 3 minute pre-start.
The heater I think isn’t even possible to start from the car. Might be deep in some menu in that case. I only know the touchscreen way…
I read a quote once, paraphrasing:
> geek will figure out cars before car people figure out computers
Between this and similar issues (e.g. Porsche / BMW charging subscription to their updating map data), it’s clear how true that quote was.
Not only are they massively losing to Tesla, they don’t even know they’re losing, or why. This is what you get when you hire MBAs and consultants.