In the end, the KIA car company made its cars into subscription models, I really hate this because in the end the car we buy with our own money doesn’t feel like it belongs to us. Should we finally buy an old school car ? so as not to be affected by this subscription models or is there a way to crack the software installed in it ?
I love all the comments saying “yeah well that stuff isn’t free someone has to maintain it”
YOU’RE PAYING 100K FOR A FUCKING CAR
That’s the payment. That’s what they get their money from.
Wanting more in perpetuity is fucking stupid no matter what the excuse is.
There’s also the fact that remote start, while shorter range, has existed on key fobs for like 20 years. My ex wife’s 2022 Hyundai has remote start, but only through the app, while my 2013 Focus has it on the key fob.
That’s honestly the only feature that’s bundled in those subscriptions that I really want, though the alarm notification is a nice to have.
I have a 22 kia with remote start. I also have the app (that costs the same as this post so I don’t pay either). The remote start sets the car to 72 with nothing else on. No way to change it via settings. Paying for the app remote start is the only way to do the defroster, heated seats, steering wheel, etc. It’s so fucking lame.
Not only that, but if you have no choice but to buy a car with internet connectivity, these are supposed to be the kind of bells and whistles they give to at least make it SEEM like you’re not being completely taken advantage of. It’s like a double-dip. “We’re giving your car connectivity so we can sell your telemetry, AND we get to charge you for all the useful features, too!”
If it costs SO much to maintain these services, cool. I’d be happy to save the poor little car manufacturers money by buying a model that uses no connectivity whatsoever. But, for some reason, they don’t seem to want to offer that. Gee, I wonder why.
Demand more out of them, because they’ll always be looking to get more out of you.
This reminds me of the video game industry. Make a complete game, then choose to remove pieces to sell later as add-on content. Lol. The only thing I see costing them money is if they have to pay for an LTE subscription to maintain that internet connectivity so you can start your car from an app.
The only problem with services as a subscription is THE FUCKING IDIOTS THAT PAY FOR THEM
If nobody fell for shit like that, manufacturers would drop it like boiling diarrhea
Worth noting that these features appear to require your car to be connected to a cellular network. This isn’t the same as BMW charging a fee for heated seats.
They could have just put a SIM card in your car and required you to pay your cell phone provider for a connection.
I have something similar for my Subaru but it’s only 4 dollars a month.
It’s a fee I gladly pay to be able to start my car and set the interior climate from my phone. I imagine there’s some cost the access a network to have that functionality and I don’t see a problem paying for it.
The old style that started from a key fob required you to be a lot closer to the vehicle to start it. Right now I start it a few minutes before I leave my building a quarter of a mile away. I could start it from a different country if I wanted to. Needing to be within a few hundred feet would be pretty useless to me.
And then you can’t use it when the temp is 0F because they decide to do some maintenance
Imagine your car need an updates or you don’t paying subscription fee or but the server are offline & you’re in emergency situation, and the worst of it your car won’t start without it OMG… that’s scarred me the hell out of it
The crazy thing is that at the price you are paying for a friggin telluride they could easily raise the price by a few hundred (ie several years worth of subscription) and it would be unlikely to shift sales by much at all but would not piss off the buyers like this. You can’t put this crap on your car loan either. I really get the sense there is a conspiracy level concerted effort to try to indoctrinate generation Z into allowing every corporation they deal with to stick an IV into their bank accounts.
They intentionally didn’t roll the subscription into the sale price. That’s the goal. They want that sweet, predictable, monthly income that they sell their investors on.
They also figured that if you’ve found your car, you’re less likely to walk away for what is essentially a fraction of the car’s price.
I honestly hope the next car I buy has shit like this. Because boy am I going to make it my mission to jailbreak it and release my code open source.
you should absolutely choose a vehicle without subscriptions, and make a point of stating it at time of purchase
this is your one moment to make a difference
Not until my 2007 Tundra literally collapses into a pile of rust and plastic. Hopefully it’s not too late by then.
LOL how does one go about that, exactly?
Do you walk into the dealer and state affirmatively “I am not buying a car here because I don’t want a subscription!” and then turn around and walk out?
Won’t matter. The company knows you don’t want this. They also know that enough other people will pay for it that it won’t matter. These subscriptions are not new. If people put their foot down and refused to pay for them they would go away, but the opposite it happening.
Sorry.
No, you should choose a vehicle with but steal it and pirat the subscription software.
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Then maybe don’t make them rely on external servers? Your car has a computer, put the server there.
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Beside all that, with how absolutely terrible car companies are at providing software updates and writing code, I’d rather have a pull based cloud API thing than a server implementation full of security holes.
But you have that, except on one central server.
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Remote lock & unlock? It’s literally been a feature of dumb cars since the 90s.
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$59 is still too much to ask for what amounts to just a few API calls to some cloud service.
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You realize that maintaining a server that would allow that costs pennies?
You wouldn’t pay $150 for a lollipop, but somehow people think this is ok.
This problem exists exactly because of people like you, thinking it’s OK to pay for the features you already paid for.
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looking through that list fully half are internal only , or tied to the remote that comes with the vehicle. no 3rd party required.
i understand all the cellular-required bits… ‘find my car’… but remote start? my brand new vehicle has remote start with no subscription.
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They’ll make you pay for it, while simultaneously collecting usage data via the app, and further turning a profit off you.
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For $120 a year the Kia boys can total your car anyway!
or… we just need more FOSS alternatives to the car manufacturers proprietary OS.
I already see GH issues like: “breaks stop working when going above 200mph.”
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Don’t think about the one actual subscription service here. Think about all of the features that are technologically built into the car that you can’t access without paying a subscription fee.
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I own a Kia. I don’t enjoy the subscription anymore than the next guy but I’m calling bullshit.
The only features behind a pay wall are the ones the app provides. The ones that require an always on internet connection and server infrastructure to maintain.
None of the in-car features are limited. The remote start on my key fob, seat heaters, onboard nav, all work fine without a subscription.
This isn’t like the crap bmw was pulling with the seat heaters.
The cost to maintain the servers to send extremely small packets of data to instruct the car for the entire fleet of cars they sold could be less than $100/m.
They will just keep adding stuff to this and removing it feom the “free” tear
Soon, auto manufacturers will learn what happens when buying isn’t owning.
People will definitely download a car, or the crack for all its features.
Good luck trying to do that
Auto manufacturers are notorious for having terrible security. It’ll be a cakewalk for innovators.
Sure, start sharing what car has been hacked. Any? No? But autos have had computers for years, why havent they been hacked?
Are you just posting incorrect information to get someone to list all of the current vulnerabilities?Here you go.
Jeep Cherokee: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/
Volkswagen Group Cars: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-17738/Volkswagen.html?page=1&order=1&trc=2&sha=0a9d8cfebb47ff684cd74be5616ee6ca4ec210f6
SiriusXM (Connected Vehicle Service) (9 different brands): https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/3/23491259/sirius-xm-hack-remotely-unlock-start-cars
Thanks for the good laugh.
Lol, someone “hacked” a car so they can turn it off is not the same as building a whole OS for a car. Or are you exited about connecting to SirusXM ??
There is not one single new car on the market that I would take possession of if you gave it to me for free. I like having a manual transmission and a radio with buttons.
I don’t even have a licence. I’d take it. Those gave pretty okay resale value. ^_-
Game console manufacturing companies used to use people for modding a console that the person owned fair and square. And they won.
You wouldn’t download [the basic features of an item you already purchased.]
How is unlocking your car over the internet a basic feature?
Why do I need to unlock my car over the internet? What is the use case over a FOB?
Nice strawman.
Dont get the subscription if youre fine with a fob.How is asking you a follow-up question a strawman exactly? What do you think a strawman is?
Because the question was answered in my original question. You don’t. That’s why it’s an additional subscription feature.
My question was why the guy claimed it was a basic feature when it never was.
And then you came along and asked “well hurr durr why do i need to unlock my car from my phone”
You don’t. So you don’t need the subscription. Done.That’s why it’s an additional subscription feature.
So why is it worth a subscription? You’re defending it as something that is not a basic feature that validates the subscription, but asking what the feature actually provides is somehow a strawman?
Oh you were seriously asking? It allows me to unlock the car from my couch when my wife wants to get something out the car real quick. Or i don’t wanna carry my keys around.
I can also start the A/C 30 minutes before i leave so i dont have to freeze to death in winter.
Your oxygen subscription expires in 2 weeks. Please take note that absence of oxygen leads to hypoxia. Due to the detrimental effects of the war in Ukraine we have been forced to increase prices by 420%. Would you like to extend your subscription?
How is that related to unlocking your car from your phone?
Both are, or at least should be, ridiculous.
Yes, an app costs money. Yes, servers do cost money. But do they need to use servers? No. For example, self-hosting. Or just connecting the car to the cellular network (which they already do, mind you) and just let the phone talk to it directly, no manufacturer server required. Just pay an ISP for cell service and you’re set. Are there problems with such a solution security-wise? Yes. And while I’m not an expert in cybersecurity I think the risks are about the same for this and a server model.
Hell, they might not even use servers for anything other than checking if you’ve paid your subscription in order to lower costs already (as if a few thousand unlock requests a minute couldn’t be managed without a problem on a Raspberry Pi). They don’t need some huge, expensive and power-hungr supercomputer for that, so I don’t see a need for such a steep price.
Are the features useful? Absolutely. Would someone be willing to pay this price? Also absolutely. But the festures objectively don’t cost that much to maintain and competition should and could put an end to it.
It’s just corporate greed, and it feels to me as if we’re getting closer and closer to the fabled oxygen subscription, and we have to call manufacturers out on their bullshit while we still have air to breathe.
Just don’t buy their cars or at least their subscriptions. Get your car ‘jailbreaked’. What will they do, remote disable it? I think we’re still not that far down the dystopia plotline that a boycott couldn’t work.
You want to selfhost your own server that communicates with your car so you can ulock your car from your phone? Are you dumb? Do you want to lose your car in a week?
Delusional.
Because the cost of the app to do that isn’t $60 a year.
No the cost of the Servers and the maintenance and the work required to have all that kept online and secure is.
Do you think admins and security guys work for free?I’ll refer you to unexpctedkeg’s comment
will refer to my already posted answer to that comment
