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)
---
“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.”
Perseverance and Endurance are a rarity in today's society.
Unless I misunderstand the context and this quote is meant to be ironic, which seems possible.
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
Please just stop.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2015/06/11/te...
If your car door uses electricity to open, you best know what to do when that system fails. Death should not occur due to failure to RTFM for a door.
If your 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...
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.
Curious how this is possible or was this just misreported?
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.)
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).
Subaru's subscription is for remote start via app.
Which is Volvo's service?
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.
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.
Look at the ways software is making the world a better place…
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.)
Joe clearly doesn't have an Apple door.
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.
Need to bring back public floggibg for whoever came up with this
-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"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.
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
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.
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.
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.
I'm happy they did this, so normal people might realize how much the frog is already boiled. This is absolute bullshit, fuck Toyota.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
And it probably applies even more broadly as things that were historically just hardware have an increasingly large software component.
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?
Luckily no required monthly services. I have no interest in a car with that.
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 .
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?
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
Don’t buy a TV, let that market die already.
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
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.)
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.
I'm sick of this new "subscription lifestyle" thats going on. I loathe subscription services.
Its death (of your income) by a thousand papercuts.
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.
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'
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
So in a way, we already pay a subscription charge for flushing the toilet.
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.
- 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")!
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?
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.
$210 after shipping for navigation updates in a GM vehicle. Welcome to the future!
https://gmnavdisc.navigation.com/product/Catalog/Catalog_Che...
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....
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.
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.
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".
> Public will buy into it because the cost of the car is significantly less than their competition
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.
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).
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...
* $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.
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.
the other stuff is fairly gizmo
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
We need lawmakers who actually care about privacy and ownership rights.
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.
“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...
- 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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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...
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...
Looking forward to paying up for a 1975 era 4x4 when my current car gives out.
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.
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.
$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).
Etc etc etc.... I'm sure it's coming because it can.
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.
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.
https://linustechtips.com/topic/1335312-safety-as-dlc-motorc...
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.
scribbling out Toyota
(heading out to the delearships, non-Toyota, that is.)
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.
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.
(I'm a Toyota owner, but not effected by this.)
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.
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.
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.
Nope.
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?
https://jalopnik.com/a-carmaker-s-23-billion-plan-to-keep-yo...
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.
> 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.
I hate them so much. They all cost a boatload of cash to replace and give me absolutely no benefit over a regular key.
[0] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/70481/used-model-has-autopilo...
Pun intended; what the heck is happening under the hood there?
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).
we now now need an Open Source Car.
$8/month for 3-4 years sounds absurd if you consider other fees such as repair fee, annual checkups, insurance, parking fees, tickets etc.
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.
All I can think of is the waste of fuel and unnecessary GHG.
this is why SaaS sucks
EDIT: Snark removal.
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).
> 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.