My partner recently bought a newer Subaru. It’s great, and when we looked it up we saw it had remote start. Turns out it’s behind a subscription. When I found that out I essentially wrote off Subaru as a brand for my future car purchases. Catch me driving my 2017 civic into the ground before I pay a freaking subscription for basic vehicle functionality
I took my wife's 2020 Crosstrek in for service a couple of years ago.
The service writer told me (and documented) that the car needed rear pads when I came to pick it up.
That's a little weird, I thought.
I took it to a tire place for snows two weeks later. They inspect that shit for the upsell while the wheels are off anyway. Front and rear brakes: fine.
Checked 'em myself. Sure enough, barely worn.
That was the last time that car visited the dealer.
I still have to pull the dash apart to bypass the spy box they never mentioned when selling the car.
These dicks feel they aren't making enough money just making and selling cars they have to do shady shit.
I have this[0] in my cart waiting to pull the trigger. It's supposed to allow you to pull the power from the data communication model, while preserving the functioning of the microphone and front speakers, which are routed through the DCM.
Honda dealer told me I had an oil leak. Odd, never saw oil in my driveway. Said no thanks. A friend mechanic looked at it and said there was no evidence of an oil leak.
I was thinking of the exploit back from 2023 that effected Acura, Genesis, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Infiniti, Nissan, and Porsche. I remember it being discussed on HN at the time but I can't find the relevant thread. Here is an article covering it: https://www.securityweek.com/16-car-makers-and-their-vehicle..., at the time.
Most people in my area don’t have garages and we get well below freezing in the winter. Yes we use it for defrosting and getting the car a little warmed up prior to driving to work in the morning.
Gasing your neighbours and every living beign on a 100ft radius. I can't stand drivers that idle their cars while they're gone doing other stuff. Remote start should totally be a subscription feature, before it gets banned or regulated. Why? Because it's very annoying.
I’ve never heard of remote start being used as a way to idle your car while doing other stuff. It’s most commonly used to defrost a car in the winter without having to get into it and sit in the freezing car while you’re not moving anyway.
There’s a time limit on it on my car, I think about 10 minutes or something pretty sane. If you don’t get into your car by then it turns back off automatically.
I once spent two cold nights standing on my head putting an aftermarket remote start system into an old BMW.
And sometimes I did use it to keep the car running while doing other stuff. This function was a design intent of the device.
It would work like this: Drive to a destination not so far away on a cold wintry day and put transmission in park like usual. Then, push the start button on the remote and turn the ignition switch off.
After that: Remove key, get out, lock doors, go do whatever quick errand it was that had us out to begin with, and return to a car that was finally actually warm inside. The engine and accessories would continue running uninterrupted, like nothing ever happened.
After returning: Put key in, turn it to "on", select a gear, on to the next destination. Engine stays running the whole time.
When I read about this function, I figured I'd never use it. But it did work very well and my then-wife liked it quite a lot. Also if short, cold runs are bad for things like bearing wear and oil contamination, then keeping it running and letting it get up to operating temperature was perhaps a nicer way to treat that old engine than the alternative of never letting it really get warm might have been.
(It would time out and turn off after about 10 or 15 minutes. Otherwise, the engine would cease immediately upon touching the brake pedal if the ignition switch wasn't on.)
I have a hybrid. If I remote start it, generally the engine doesn't start - and even if it does, it's extremely quiet because it's an Atkinson-cycle model. I have to be within 10 feet of the car to hear it running in a quiet parking garage, let alone on the street.
Sure, it sucks when someone idles a diesel outside your house, but new cars are QUIET.
Sure. I start the engine and then proceed to get the snow off and defrost the windows using a broom and a scraper. Good way to adjust yourself to the cold. Remote start won't help much in anything more than 2" of snow because it would take half an hour to defreeze by itself. My wife prefers the garage, though. Still, we don't live in Alberta or Alaska for the car to freeze shut.
We had a hybrid replacement Yaris. It's nice but it still turns on the engine when it's cold. I wasn't complaining abut the noise, but the fumes. Diesels are the worst, regardless of CO2 rating, but gas engines produce a lot more CO even if they stink less. There are places where idling is regulated up to 5 minutes.
Does it clear your driveway of snow? Otherwise I'm not sure why leaving a running vehicle unattended is useful. If the car is too cold when you get in, put a coat on. Too much ice on the windows? Scrape it off.
It warms the engine (and thus the interior) while I clear the driveway of snow, and it does this even if the doors are frozen shut because of a layer of ice.
By the time I get back to addressing the car itself, the snow and ice is easier to brush or scrape off and the doors might actually open without ripping the handle off (which is something that I've directly experienced twice so far in my days).
This all conspires to mean that it makes my life easier.
And it's OK if you don't like the feature and take a very dim view of it. It's also OK that some others may find merit in using it.
In the age of push-to-start cars, yeah it does feel basic to me. If I can unlock my car with my key fob, why can’t I send a signal to start it?
My 2017 Honda civic has it without a subscription so I was pretty shocked to learn that Subaru decided its customers would be cool with it being behind a pay-wall.
Are you looking to remote start from the fob, or from an app? I agree that if it's done via the fob, that shouldn't require a subscription. But I understand that something requiring a cell signal will usually be paid, one way or another. I prefer it not be baked into the cost of the car, since some people (me) will not want that feature.
This seems like a very HN-specific use case. It's not surprising that automakers don't have APIs that let customers host servers that they use to remotely start their vehicles. Security is obviously a huge issue, and almost no one cares about remote starting that much, and has the know-how to implement relay servers and such.
I'm not happy with how consumer choice is boxed in by automakers, but for sensitive systems like ignition, I don't think that their approach is unreasonable.
What do you mean HN-specific? I don't understand how cars got to require permanent cellular connections in the first place while Bluetooth would've been enough
Key fob-based has worked great for me in a variety of living configurations (apartments, single homes) in the past 7 years with my 2017 civic. It can connect surprisingly far distances, and it doesn’t need a direct line of site or anything. Just good old RF.
I get what you’re saying about app-based. My civic has that too and it’s for a cost. I’ve just never needed it since we have the free for life RF version.
At $110/yr for cell-based remote start via Honda link, I’ve saved $770 over the years. Over the life of the car for me I could be looking at doubling those savings. That’s the power of avoiding needless subscriptions.
You won't have any options for non garbage vehicles pretty soon. It's more profitable to sell you garbage and than sell you the maintenance on the above mentioned garbage while getting a steady trickle of revenue for ad impressions.
Ford pulled focus/fiesta lineup from US ignoring great sales (despite widely known DCT issues) just so they can focus on selling the garbage SUVs and pickups, highest margin cars. But hey, no CAFE regulations to follow, can pollute as much as you want.
Jeep quality is a joke - they would've been sued out of existence with trucks like that in Europe. When I first saw the Jeep Gladiator photo I through it was a joke/meme.
Corporations do truly control everything in US. They'll sell you garbage overpriced trucks, convince you to feel happy about them and laught all the way to the bank while raking cash for all "dealer maintenance" required to keep such garbage on the roads. And then they lock down all the maintenance behind encryption so you can't replace a battery without going to the dealer for the unlock code.
Please speedrun your late stage capitalism asap, it's getting harder and harder to watch
great sales yeah (7bn+) but those dsp6 recalls on the fiesta cost ford about 2 billion.
id buy another one. (in manual.)
i dont know how many other gen5 fiesta owners would walk down the aisle with that car again tho
i think the dsp’s kind of cool. still have a 2011 in a barn somewhere. its on engine #2 and transmission #2 at 124,000 and thats not even counting all the bad grounds, bad caps, electrical squirrels ive been able to track down and fix. it wasnt that bad to deal with, but i totally empathize with anyone who doesnt remember theirs fondly or want to go out and get another one just like it
Technically you are correct, practically you will get into question of "who pays for the internet in the car?" and if customer refuses to pay (like in VAG case) then you will have just a car without an internet.
I remember many years ago thinking, "if they can have a add a SIM card on a phone, why not add one in your car? Imagine an Internet connected car?"
What I didn't think about was this would be an opportunity for ads and subscriptions. And everyday you'll own less and less of your car. I'm shopping for a car right now, I may have to just put a fresh coat of paint on my old one.
Not just the ads. They are likely tracking your location, and drive events. These can be sold to your insurance company who may adjust your rates, or even drop you if they consider your driving patterns to be risky. When we got our Ford Maverick, first thing I did was disable this. Kudos to Ford for making this easy.
Downside is that we got a recall notice about the software for the backup camera needing an update. I scheduled an appointment, and it took over 3 hours. Asked the service guy why it was taking so long to flash to software, and he said our system needed an update because we had not enabled over-the-air connection with Ford which allows this to be done in the background. Evidently the download speed for this was incredibly slow according to the SG, so it took over two hours before our Mav was current, and they could apply the backup camera fix. Note: I was very suspicious about this claim. I thought it was more likely we were being purposely held captive in the service waiting area -- which has a big screen constantly running Ford ads. I guess that is OK. I had my Kindle, and was into a great book at the time, so I actually was not too put out.
I highly doubt the overworked service center employees were wasting your time, they probably were just as annoyed as you were that your car was sitting in a service bay longer than expected.
Do you really think that a dealership would tie up a service bay to keep you captive?
Service is where dealers make their money. You’re convinced that manufacturers will sell data to insurance companies yet believe that dealers will sacrifice hours of profit. That doesn’t work out.
We were not in the service bay. Our Maverick was outside. The Service Guy said they had to download the update to their servers. From there it was a quick trip to the service bay for the updates. That is the reason I had asked in the first place. I could see the Mav outside. Not blaming the SG. I am sure it as not the Dealership, but someone at Ford Corporate??? Not so sure.
Also: I made sure we were the first appointment, arriving at 7:45am for my 8am reservation. Soon another guy was behind me. One thing I have learned it to always schedule "the first time in the AM" if you do not need immediate service.
Edit: In retrospect, they had turned on the OTA system in the Mav. So maybe when the SG said it was downloading, I thought "to a server" but maybe it was directly to the Mav. As I noted, was not a big issue. Still not using the OTA features.
The dealer is paid per job for warrentee work so they still want you out quick.
even for non warrantee service they are generally paid based on how long the job is expected to take not how long it takes them. The only reason to not hurryitoo much is they warrantee their own work and so if you bring it back that costs them.
Of course I do? Across all my utilitarian devices, e.g. phone, desktop, laptop, I already find updates to be a large net negative except for the vague and nebulus 'security'. If a car 'needs' updates then it isn't doing its job.
I can't imagine the expletives that'll come out of my mouth the day I'm running late for a meeting and my car won't start because its in the middle of an update.
I consider OTA updates to be of negative value, actually. If my car needs fixing, I'll bring it in for servicing. If it's not broken, I don't want my car tampered with.
Come back to me when there's a punitive liability model for OTA updates. If the garage manages to break something during, that's on the garage, not me. It should be the same for OTA updates: the company pushing the update should be liable for any failure and for providing replacement transportation if they manage to break my car with an update.
Hence why folks should be pushing right to repair and similar legislation through to prevent this before it happens. Technical hacks are tactical solutions, good policy implementation is the strategic, long term solution.
Stellantis makes some of the most unreliable vehicles in the world and charges a small fortune for them. I predicted they'd be out of business a year ago but apparently somebody keeps buying them.
Just when you think Stellantis couldn't do anything worse...
This is the company that ran Chrysler into the ground. The only remaining Chrysler product is one mini-van.
They raised the prices on Jeeps so much that they lost their market. They went the "mild hybrid" route, with such silly things as 21 miles of electric range.
The Stellantis dealers signed a joint letter demanding that the CEO be fired. That was done. It didn't seem to help.
(I own a pre-Stellantis Jeep Wrangler, and would like to buy a replacement, but Jeep now has nothing I want.)
Passively charged in the sense that the driver cannot actively force it to be charged, either while driving or by plugging it in (it cannot be plugged in).
Vehicles with a stated electric-only range are typically PHEVs, which can be plugged in. Some non plug-in hybrids can be driven in electric-only mode for very short distances, at low speeds only.
For those unfamiliar and confused, Stellantis is the mega corporation formed from the merge of Chrysler and Fiat that owns Jeep, Dodge, Peugeot, Opel, and many other brands.
The screen doesn't have to be obnoxious like this, though. A Chevy van has a small screen embedded in the rear view mirror, which is impossible to see when not in reverse.
Oh really? My current car is over 20 years old so I'm way out of the loop. I guess I'll hope for options with smaller screens that control fewer of the functions.
My next daily will likely be something with approximately the same level of technology.
There are about ten buttons on the dashboard, of which the only ones I care about is the rotary knob that turns on the headlights and the button that switches the heater from "normal" to "EVERYTHING UP FULL ALL ON RIGHT NOW FULL BORE MAXIMUM EVERYTHING WE ARE GOING TO AIR FRY A POLAR BEAR ON THE BACK SEAT".
There's an LCD screen. It's the size of my thumb, and tells me how many miles it's done (only 190,000 - it's my low mileage one, my other has done 270 and there's a guy on my forum who's rapidly closing in on 600,000 miles in his), what gear it thinks it's probably in, and occasionally it uses this LCD to lie about the gearbox overheating because water got into the plug for the sensor when I drove through a river and it came over the bonnet.
It's not very fast or very efficient, but it does everything I need a car to do, and I have a full factory service manual for it and easy access to spares.
You could still buy some rad cars into the '10s but you generally had to go looking.
The fiesta st is a decent example. An economy car, so very simple, but with a sports package. The only "smart" features, like traction control, can be turned off.
100% manuals are the way to go if you want to feel like a driver, not a passenger. I love my manual Jetta
Thing is, people are lazy. US market is automatics only. Can't make people understand what the clutch is or why slushbox is bad for fuel efficiency. No one cares. Gas guzzlers are the national idea
My kid learned to drive a manual in 15 minutes. Too much effort for US drivers!
Automatics have been more efficient than manuals for decades. And the computer can shift a DCT faster than you can. These days a manual tranny is right up there with hand-crank starting your car: if you enjoy it, great, but don’t get smug because people don’t want to manually adjust the spark advance.
>Automatics have been more efficient than manuals for decades.
No, they haven't. At least, not ones the average consumer could actually buy.
While it's true that modern 8 or 10 speed automatic transmissions do now compete favorably with 6 speed manuals, the former didn't meaningfully exist in passenger cars or trucks until around 2017. Neither did DCTs outside of high-end brands- sure, they're starting to do that now that "torque converter loss" means they don't pass emissions, but that was an option that commanded a premium back in the mid-00s when they were introduced (and still not actually more efficient than a manual outside of shift speed).
An automatic with 4 gears is less efficient than a manual with 5, much less 6 (this was the standard until about 2010 or so); one with 6 gears is likely on par with the 5-speed manual (and loses to a 6-speed, obviously).
So no, "decades" is bullshit. It's a very recent advancement.
Only because they cheap out and don't put in manual with optimal gear ratios. Otherwise the manual is better because you can use high throttle with low rpms - try that in an auto and you get high rpms which is bad for efficiency - but great for acceleration.
When you have a small fuel efficient engine, you can tell and feel the difference. With a V6 under your hood, you probably don't care. US is mostly big engines
You will still care that you're wasting a bunch of your engine's potential, even with a V8.
Autos (not DCTs) don't generally let you rev the engine as high as manuals do, they don't really let you take advantage of engine braking, and they may ignore your command to manually shift them into a lower gear at will (DCTs can do that too).
> You will still care that you're wasting a bunch of your engine's potential, even with a V8.
You're not really, especially on a long run. If you're doing motorway speeds there is no difference in economy and performance. An auto will be a bit worse in slow driving, when it's using the torque converter which is quite lossy.
> Autos (not DCTs) don't generally let you rev the engine as high as manuals do, they don't really let you take advantage of engine braking, and they may ignore your command to manually shift them into a lower gear at will (DCTs can do that too).
They will let you rev the engine as high as you like and will engine-brake just fine if you select a lower gear. They might not shift into a lower gear if you've got a gearbox that's smart enough to stop you money-shifting the engine.
Not really, although I guess the least powerful automatic I've ever driven was a 1.7 litre naturally-aspirated diesel Citroën Xantia. It was very economical on long runs but acceleration was really something for very patient people.
Most Xantias had a 1.9 petrol making roughly 50% more power, although with appreciably less torque.
To be fair, I have a 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee. It was the first year of their then new model rollout for the GC. It was (as I understand it) the last of the Mercedes JGCs.
I love this thing, it's a "cold dead hands" kind of car for me. Only has 120k-ish miles on it.
I won't say it's my last car ever, I just have a hard time visualizing swapping it out for anything.
It starts, all the buttons work, it's cosmetically 95%. The single biggest issue is that last year it was down for a couple of months simply because of parts availability. It's not unreliable, but it's swapped a few things (water pump, radiator, A/C has had work twice, guess it's a bit notorious in the community). Purchased in 2013, it's a 12 year old car.
But waiting months for suspension components (air suspension, which I adore) was a real drag. Even with a dealer supplied rental.
That would be the thing that sends me over the edge long term, I think.
It'll be a shame when it happens, I love the car.
The dealer wants to buy it every time I take it in for routine maintenance.
You don’t know much about cars. All the work they had done on their vehicle was typical for that model generation. Air suspensions are generally problematic because of constant wear mixed with parts issues, and A/C problems are common in that model generation. This is all normal stuff to fix over twelve years.
I do most of the maintenance of cars in our garage, and I would never accept double AC repair, suspension and radiator replacement to be "normal" around 120k.
The thing is, modern jeeps are a joke even compared to this "reliable" example.
There was a post recently about over-the-air update bricking Jeeps WHILE DRIVING ON THE FUCKING HIGHWAY. And no one cares. People keep buying this trash and defend double AC repairs. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
They sell luxury goods, which people know to avoid when they care about reliability
The thing is, jeeps are even beating the BMWs when it comes to unreliability.
Yes Mercedes built that garbage for the US market because US market eats that crap. Then stellantis took it a step up and removed reliability from their vocabulary entirely - more profitable that way. I'd pick a modern VW over American garbage all day any day.
But sure, keep yourself convinced about exceptionalism of American SUVs.
My 2016 Corolla seems to be the last year without a SIM (it does have a screen but whatever it just shows me what's playing on the stereo), but despite a Corolla being bulletproof and me rarely driving anymore, i do still wonder whether i can get away with this car forever or if I'll have to buy some spyware carriage someday
What if, instead of just attempting to retreat into a shrinking world that will eventually disappear, we all collectively worked together to fix things?
Arbitration is still a pretty big money sink for them. If enough people do it then it becomes a problem for them. There have been instances of companies reinstating normal class action lawsuits back into their EULAs because it turned out that forced arbitration wasn't a magical wonderland of cost cutting for them after all. Forced arbitration and especially when they have a clause that forbids class-action arbitration can turn into a huge liability for them even if they nominally win every instance.
The fundamental financial maneuver of the modern world is to take modest risks of modest loss and financially engineer it into a smaller risk of much, much larger loss, with a higher expected loss (risk*size) in the end after the engineering than before. Forced arbitration (and especially when class arbitration is banned) is that manuever in the legal sphere. It isn't a ticket out of the risk entirely, it's shoving that risk under the rug and making it net larger. If you and a few hundred of your closest friends put their minds to it you can trigger that smaller-chance-of-larger-disaster scenario and all you have to do is file... you don't even have to win.
I won't deny it's an uphill battle but the forced arbitration clauses can be turned to consumer's advantage with relatively modest coordination, you just need to get enough annoyed people together.
(I can't help you with this one, I don't have a car with this problem. Your few hundred closest friends will need standing.)
it'd be cool if we had a more consumer-friendly admin who would ban advertising on long-term purchases like washing machines, fridges, cars or require you the seller to tell you about how the advertising works on said things (ad types, whether they are child friendly, frequency, and upfront option to permanently opt out)
Yes. This problem of in-vehicle ads definitely stems from the current president, and a different president can and will solve it for good. A multi-step config panel for these ads is exactly what we need.
The word "admin" in the above comment is short for "administration" which encompasses thousands of individuals across pretty much every branch and department of the government.
Exactly, I mean departments like the FTC, CPSC, DOT (these ads are probably displaying while driving at highway speeds, much like the jeep software updates deploy at lol)
It's an interesting phenomenon. Something like this happens every week or two, and then these threads basically just become cope, with vague advice that most people can't easily do ("oh, just desolder the eSim contacts, it'll be fine"), as though that is in any way a longterm solution to corporate overreach in our daily lives.
What if we all decided to actually work together to fix this terrible situation? Unfortunately, it will involve collective action, and holding companies accountable who are otherwise very averse to that sort of thing. But dear God, we can't keep "why don't you just"-ing forver as the world closes in around us, people.
If we want a better world, we are going to have to build a better world.
First you have to pick one thing to work on. Just one. Then you have to find all the people who agree with you that ONE thing is the most important thing to pick, and get help on crafting a message that will stick, develop a theory of change, and work backwards from that theory to actionable efforts the people you recruit can do.
It's hard work. I've done it. I am happy to help you do it. Let me know.
Imagine you will buy a house and somebody will have so much gall to slap a billboard on the side of your house. Repeatedly. Would you tolerate this behavior? Obviously not, then why companies thinks that it is OK to show ads on my fridge or in my car? This is outrageous behavior and I hope that some nasty regulation will end this nonsense so we can hear crying of companies how big government is bullying them and hampering innovation...
You're joking, right? The systems are locked up tight. I did manage to hack into my Porsche Macan's system so that I could turn Apple CarPlay on (it's disabled in the Macan, but supported by the system because the unit is shared with the VW Atlas which has CarPlay), but it involved a pretty complicated jailbreak.
What generation had CarPlay disabled? It works very nicely in 95B.2 and .3, and the pre-facelift 95B models with PCM 3 didn't support CarPlay at all without an adapter, did they?
I know full-screen CarPlay isn't supported without a jailbreak, but I don't care about that myself so haven't done it.
Only 3.1415% joking. I predict people will eventually get credits for saying things like, "Brought to you by Carl's Jr." in their car, bonus if the kids also repeat it. But seriously I figured someone would have found Easter-eggs by now that allowed some form of super-duper-root similar to windows god-mode.
I am honestly surprised that car manufacturers have not been sued into oblivion for adding distractions.
There's less attack surface on these systems than your typical windows install. The only reason I was able to hack the Macan is because they'd left a debug avenue open such that you could plug an ethernet adapter into one of the USB ports and use it drop a shell, and then exploit a bug with handling of a certificates to get privileged access. I was more surprised they'd left that USB ethernet avenue open than that there was a certificate handling bug.
I believe since I did it, somebody found another way in by inserting a malicious payload into a USB firmware update image.
I had an old Prius with a nav system that disabled all the controls when the car was moving. But it also had a full-screen page of legalese that you had to dismiss every time you started the car.
So Toyota's lawyers were OK with drivers reading a legal contract, but not with drivers pressing a couple buttons to get where they need to go.
And isn't this just weeks after a bad software update bricked a bunch of Wrangler 4XEs?
... Oh, and isn't this the same Stellantis that now requires a fuck-ton of hoops to access your own diagnostics now because of their "secure gateway"? (https://autel.us/security-gateways/)
The last (hopefully only) Stellantis vehicle we owned had trouble with its transmission’s network connection.
“Nothing stops a Ram, except routine driving”.
I’m completely unsurprised they’re pushing spam to the dashboard.
The crazy thing is BMW has been doing this well for years. They should have just copied the playbook. There’s a little shop icon in the app where you can buy digital services, swag and schedule dealership appointments.
Sometimes it has discounts or track day invitations in there.
I bough a new Honda and Mazda within the last year and neither have any of this kind of nonsense. Both are great. I hope people vote with their wallets. I would never have considered anything from Stellantis anyway.
I had already scratched Jeep off my car-buying list years ago.
Now the bulk of car-buying research is not "how good is it?" but "what are the purposefully in-built annoyances? Can I hack them away?"
My partner recently bought a newer Subaru. It’s great, and when we looked it up we saw it had remote start. Turns out it’s behind a subscription. When I found that out I essentially wrote off Subaru as a brand for my future car purchases. Catch me driving my 2017 civic into the ground before I pay a freaking subscription for basic vehicle functionality
There was an article not long ago about a Subaru vuln that allowed anyone to remote start, track, or unlock any new Subaru
Interpretation The First: One does not need to subscribe to enjoy this functionality.
Interpretation The Second: These vehicles are maintained by a corporation that is both greedy and incompetent.
I took my wife's 2020 Crosstrek in for service a couple of years ago.
The service writer told me (and documented) that the car needed rear pads when I came to pick it up.
That's a little weird, I thought.
I took it to a tire place for snows two weeks later. They inspect that shit for the upsell while the wheels are off anyway. Front and rear brakes: fine.
Checked 'em myself. Sure enough, barely worn.
That was the last time that car visited the dealer.
I still have to pull the dash apart to bypass the spy box they never mentioned when selling the car.
These dicks feel they aren't making enough money just making and selling cars they have to do shady shit.
Well fuck that, I won't buy a new one again.
I have this[0] in my cart waiting to pull the trigger. It's supposed to allow you to pull the power from the data communication model, while preserving the functioning of the microphone and front speakers, which are routed through the DCM.
[0]https://www.autoharnesshouse.com/69018.html
Honda dealer told me I had an oil leak. Odd, never saw oil in my driveway. Said no thanks. A friend mechanic looked at it and said there was no evidence of an oil leak.
Never going to that dealer ever again.
Wasn't it the other way round? Subaru was the only manufacturer that wasn't affected, I thought.
I'm referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42803279
I completely forgot about that.
I was thinking of the exploit back from 2023 that effected Acura, Genesis, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Infiniti, Nissan, and Porsche. I remember it being discussed on HN at the time but I can't find the relevant thread. Here is an article covering it: https://www.securityweek.com/16-car-makers-and-their-vehicle..., at the time.
I presume it needs a cellular subscription for this, which is not free nor basic functionality.
I’d understand a complaint for heated seats subscription, but not for remote start.
Bettet write off Toyota too then, and many others.
I agree with boycotting subscription looked down cars, but what is the point of remote start? Defrosting?
Most people in my area don’t have garages and we get well below freezing in the winter. Yes we use it for defrosting and getting the car a little warmed up prior to driving to work in the morning.
Or the opposite: cooling the interior to a survivable temperature.
It could be for both defrosting and cooling.
Gasing your neighbours and every living beign on a 100ft radius. I can't stand drivers that idle their cars while they're gone doing other stuff. Remote start should totally be a subscription feature, before it gets banned or regulated. Why? Because it's very annoying.
I’ve never heard of remote start being used as a way to idle your car while doing other stuff. It’s most commonly used to defrost a car in the winter without having to get into it and sit in the freezing car while you’re not moving anyway.
There’s a time limit on it on my car, I think about 10 minutes or something pretty sane. If you don’t get into your car by then it turns back off automatically.
I once spent two cold nights standing on my head putting an aftermarket remote start system into an old BMW.
And sometimes I did use it to keep the car running while doing other stuff. This function was a design intent of the device.
It would work like this: Drive to a destination not so far away on a cold wintry day and put transmission in park like usual. Then, push the start button on the remote and turn the ignition switch off.
After that: Remove key, get out, lock doors, go do whatever quick errand it was that had us out to begin with, and return to a car that was finally actually warm inside. The engine and accessories would continue running uninterrupted, like nothing ever happened.
After returning: Put key in, turn it to "on", select a gear, on to the next destination. Engine stays running the whole time.
When I read about this function, I figured I'd never use it. But it did work very well and my then-wife liked it quite a lot. Also if short, cold runs are bad for things like bearing wear and oil contamination, then keeping it running and letting it get up to operating temperature was perhaps a nicer way to treat that old engine than the alternative of never letting it really get warm might have been.
(It would time out and turn off after about 10 or 15 minutes. Otherwise, the engine would cease immediately upon touching the brake pedal if the ignition switch wasn't on.)
I have a hybrid. If I remote start it, generally the engine doesn't start - and even if it does, it's extremely quiet because it's an Atkinson-cycle model. I have to be within 10 feet of the car to hear it running in a quiet parking garage, let alone on the street.
Sure, it sucks when someone idles a diesel outside your house, but new cars are QUIET.
Do you live in an area where it snows frequently?
Sure. I start the engine and then proceed to get the snow off and defrost the windows using a broom and a scraper. Good way to adjust yourself to the cold. Remote start won't help much in anything more than 2" of snow because it would take half an hour to defreeze by itself. My wife prefers the garage, though. Still, we don't live in Alberta or Alaska for the car to freeze shut.
We had a hybrid replacement Yaris. It's nice but it still turns on the engine when it's cold. I wasn't complaining abut the noise, but the fumes. Diesels are the worst, regardless of CO2 rating, but gas engines produce a lot more CO even if they stink less. There are places where idling is regulated up to 5 minutes.
https://www.wandsworth.gov.uk/environment/pollution/air-qual...
Does it clear your driveway of snow? Otherwise I'm not sure why leaving a running vehicle unattended is useful. If the car is too cold when you get in, put a coat on. Too much ice on the windows? Scrape it off.
It warms the engine (and thus the interior) while I clear the driveway of snow, and it does this even if the doors are frozen shut because of a layer of ice.
By the time I get back to addressing the car itself, the snow and ice is easier to brush or scrape off and the doors might actually open without ripping the handle off (which is something that I've directly experienced twice so far in my days).
This all conspires to mean that it makes my life easier.
And it's OK if you don't like the feature and take a very dim view of it. It's also OK that some others may find merit in using it.
It's all OK.
In MY day we walked to school in the snow, uphill both ways! Turn that light off! Just put a coat on! Get off my lawn!
Remote start is basic vehicle functionality for you?
You and I understand the word "basic" differently.
I wish they'd offer a lifetime purchase option--but maybe they learned from the 2g remote start debacle not to rely on technology they don't control
In the age of push-to-start cars, yeah it does feel basic to me. If I can unlock my car with my key fob, why can’t I send a signal to start it?
My 2017 Honda civic has it without a subscription so I was pretty shocked to learn that Subaru decided its customers would be cool with it being behind a pay-wall.
Are you looking to remote start from the fob, or from an app? I agree that if it's done via the fob, that shouldn't require a subscription. But I understand that something requiring a cell signal will usually be paid, one way or another. I prefer it not be baked into the cost of the car, since some people (me) will not want that feature.
Even if it was from an app, why can't I use wifi/bluetooth? Even if it depends on a relay server, why can't I load my own sim and run my own relay?
This seems like a very HN-specific use case. It's not surprising that automakers don't have APIs that let customers host servers that they use to remotely start their vehicles. Security is obviously a huge issue, and almost no one cares about remote starting that much, and has the know-how to implement relay servers and such.
I'm not happy with how consumer choice is boxed in by automakers, but for sensitive systems like ignition, I don't think that their approach is unreasonable.
What do you mean HN-specific? I don't understand how cars got to require permanent cellular connections in the first place while Bluetooth would've been enough
Key fob-based has worked great for me in a variety of living configurations (apartments, single homes) in the past 7 years with my 2017 civic. It can connect surprisingly far distances, and it doesn’t need a direct line of site or anything. Just good old RF.
I get what you’re saying about app-based. My civic has that too and it’s for a cost. I’ve just never needed it since we have the free for life RF version.
At $110/yr for cell-based remote start via Honda link, I’ve saved $770 over the years. Over the life of the car for me I could be looking at doubling those savings. That’s the power of avoiding needless subscriptions.
My Toyota is charging a monthly fee for it as well.
You won't have any options for non garbage vehicles pretty soon. It's more profitable to sell you garbage and than sell you the maintenance on the above mentioned garbage while getting a steady trickle of revenue for ad impressions.
Ford pulled focus/fiesta lineup from US ignoring great sales (despite widely known DCT issues) just so they can focus on selling the garbage SUVs and pickups, highest margin cars. But hey, no CAFE regulations to follow, can pollute as much as you want.
Jeep quality is a joke - they would've been sued out of existence with trucks like that in Europe. When I first saw the Jeep Gladiator photo I through it was a joke/meme.
Corporations do truly control everything in US. They'll sell you garbage overpriced trucks, convince you to feel happy about them and laught all the way to the bank while raking cash for all "dealer maintenance" required to keep such garbage on the roads. And then they lock down all the maintenance behind encryption so you can't replace a battery without going to the dealer for the unlock code.
Please speedrun your late stage capitalism asap, it's getting harder and harder to watch
> Corporations do truly control everything in US.
You know, when the matrix movie came out, humans as batteries seemed ludicrous, obviously a joke! it's not that unrealistic or funny now.
great sales yeah (7bn+) but those dsp6 recalls on the fiesta cost ford about 2 billion.
id buy another one. (in manual.)
i dont know how many other gen5 fiesta owners would walk down the aisle with that car again tho
i think the dsp’s kind of cool. still have a 2011 in a barn somewhere. its on engine #2 and transmission #2 at 124,000 and thats not even counting all the bad grounds, bad caps, electrical squirrels ive been able to track down and fix. it wasnt that bad to deal with, but i totally empathize with anyone who doesnt remember theirs fondly or want to go out and get another one just like it
Technically you are correct, practically you will get into question of "who pays for the internet in the car?" and if customer refuses to pay (like in VAG case) then you will have just a car without an internet.
I got a Honda, it's fine
I remember many years ago thinking, "if they can have a add a SIM card on a phone, why not add one in your car? Imagine an Internet connected car?"
What I didn't think about was this would be an opportunity for ads and subscriptions. And everyday you'll own less and less of your car. I'm shopping for a car right now, I may have to just put a fresh coat of paint on my old one.
Not just the ads. They are likely tracking your location, and drive events. These can be sold to your insurance company who may adjust your rates, or even drop you if they consider your driving patterns to be risky. When we got our Ford Maverick, first thing I did was disable this. Kudos to Ford for making this easy.
Downside is that we got a recall notice about the software for the backup camera needing an update. I scheduled an appointment, and it took over 3 hours. Asked the service guy why it was taking so long to flash to software, and he said our system needed an update because we had not enabled over-the-air connection with Ford which allows this to be done in the background. Evidently the download speed for this was incredibly slow according to the SG, so it took over two hours before our Mav was current, and they could apply the backup camera fix. Note: I was very suspicious about this claim. I thought it was more likely we were being purposely held captive in the service waiting area -- which has a big screen constantly running Ford ads. I guess that is OK. I had my Kindle, and was into a great book at the time, so I actually was not too put out.
I highly doubt the overworked service center employees were wasting your time, they probably were just as annoyed as you were that your car was sitting in a service bay longer than expected.
Nissans have a disclaimer that they spy on your sex life : https://nypost.com/2023/09/06/nissan-kia-collect-data-about-...
>They are likely tracking your location, and drive events
I can't speak to whether or whither they sell the data, but they are 100% tracking your location and vehicle events
What would be the point of collecting the data and then doing nothing with it??
Do you really think that a dealership would tie up a service bay to keep you captive?
Service is where dealers make their money. You’re convinced that manufacturers will sell data to insurance companies yet believe that dealers will sacrifice hours of profit. That doesn’t work out.
We were not in the service bay. Our Maverick was outside. The Service Guy said they had to download the update to their servers. From there it was a quick trip to the service bay for the updates. That is the reason I had asked in the first place. I could see the Mav outside. Not blaming the SG. I am sure it as not the Dealership, but someone at Ford Corporate??? Not so sure.
Also: I made sure we were the first appointment, arriving at 7:45am for my 8am reservation. Soon another guy was behind me. One thing I have learned it to always schedule "the first time in the AM" if you do not need immediate service.
Edit: In retrospect, they had turned on the OTA system in the Mav. So maybe when the SG said it was downloading, I thought "to a server" but maybe it was directly to the Mav. As I noted, was not a big issue. Still not using the OTA features.
The dealer is paid per job for warrentee work so they still want you out quick.
even for non warrantee service they are generally paid based on how long the job is expected to take not how long it takes them. The only reason to not hurryitoo much is they warrantee their own work and so if you bring it back that costs them.
Just a reminder: shit like this doesn't easily happen where a regulation like GDPR is in effect.
In most vehicles, you can pull the cellular capability (either a physical sim or the RF component). You'll lose telematics, but will also lose this.
So nothing of value is lost.
If you consider updates to be zero value, sure.
Of course I do? Across all my utilitarian devices, e.g. phone, desktop, laptop, I already find updates to be a large net negative except for the vague and nebulus 'security'. If a car 'needs' updates then it isn't doing its job.
I can't imagine the expletives that'll come out of my mouth the day I'm running late for a meeting and my car won't start because its in the middle of an update.
I consider OTA updates to be of negative value, actually. If my car needs fixing, I'll bring it in for servicing. If it's not broken, I don't want my car tampered with.
Come back to me when there's a punitive liability model for OTA updates. If the garage manages to break something during, that's on the garage, not me. It should be the same for OTA updates: the company pushing the update should be liable for any failure and for providing replacement transportation if they manage to break my car with an update.
"Car won't start because the radio failed to update" and "insurance company tracking and other telemetry" are not just zero value, but net-negative.
Hence why folks should be pushing right to repair and similar legislation through to prevent this before it happens. Technical hacks are tactical solutions, good policy implementation is the strategic, long term solution.
For a lot of things, zero value would be a high peak. Often the value is negative. Thus:
You don't update anything if it works and it's not connected to internet.
If it works and is connected to internet, then disconnect it from internet if possible.
For the rest, delay updates for long enough without having heard complaints that there's sufficient confidence on the update not breaking anything.
Until that voids the warranty or the car refuses to start without internet access. Why do you think the depravity will stop here?
Stellantis makes some of the most unreliable vehicles in the world and charges a small fortune for them. I predicted they'd be out of business a year ago but apparently somebody keeps buying them.
Just when you think Stellantis couldn't do anything worse...
This is the company that ran Chrysler into the ground. The only remaining Chrysler product is one mini-van.
They raised the prices on Jeeps so much that they lost their market. They went the "mild hybrid" route, with such silly things as 21 miles of electric range.
The Stellantis dealers signed a joint letter demanding that the CEO be fired. That was done. It didn't seem to help.
(I own a pre-Stellantis Jeep Wrangler, and would like to buy a replacement, but Jeep now has nothing I want.)
> They went the "mild hybrid" route, with such silly things as 21 miles of electric range
"Mild hybrid" typically refers to a vehicle with a passively-charged battery pack, not a PHEV that has any material amount of electric-only range.
What does that mean, "passively charged battery pack"? Did we invent batteries that slowly regain charge over time and I somehow missed it?
I imagine it means a normal hybrid, in contrast to plug-in hybrids.
Normal hybrid will at least regain charge when you brake (and maybe from the gas engine?). You don't actively recharge it.
Passively charged in the sense that the driver cannot actively force it to be charged, either while driving or by plugging it in (it cannot be plugged in).
Vehicles with a stated electric-only range are typically PHEVs, which can be plugged in. Some non plug-in hybrids can be driven in electric-only mode for very short distances, at low speeds only.
“Ok", "Remind me later", "To opt-out, call..."
The jokes write themselves in 2025
For those unfamiliar and confused, Stellantis is the mega corporation formed from the merge of Chrysler and Fiat that owns Jeep, Dodge, Peugeot, Opel, and many other brands.
Their reputation is verging on the likes of private equity
Trying to estimate whether I'm old enough that when I buy the last car of my life, there will still be ones without screens to choose from.
All new cars have screens since reverse cameras are mandatory. You’ll have to shop on the used car market.
The screen doesn't have to be obnoxious like this, though. A Chevy van has a small screen embedded in the rear view mirror, which is impossible to see when not in reverse.
Oh really? My current car is over 20 years old so I'm way out of the loop. I guess I'll hope for options with smaller screens that control fewer of the functions.
My daily is a 1997 Range Rover.
My next daily will likely be something with approximately the same level of technology.
There are about ten buttons on the dashboard, of which the only ones I care about is the rotary knob that turns on the headlights and the button that switches the heater from "normal" to "EVERYTHING UP FULL ALL ON RIGHT NOW FULL BORE MAXIMUM EVERYTHING WE ARE GOING TO AIR FRY A POLAR BEAR ON THE BACK SEAT".
There's an LCD screen. It's the size of my thumb, and tells me how many miles it's done (only 190,000 - it's my low mileage one, my other has done 270 and there's a guy on my forum who's rapidly closing in on 600,000 miles in his), what gear it thinks it's probably in, and occasionally it uses this LCD to lie about the gearbox overheating because water got into the plug for the sensor when I drove through a river and it came over the bonnet.
It's not very fast or very efficient, but it does everything I need a car to do, and I have a full factory service manual for it and easy access to spares.
Keep that car as long as you can. Modern cars are shit. Peak of cars was probably 1990s/2000s.
You could still buy some rad cars into the '10s but you generally had to go looking.
The fiesta st is a decent example. An economy car, so very simple, but with a sports package. The only "smart" features, like traction control, can be turned off.
You forgot to mention that ST is a manual transmission car, not for everyone
The attitude that the computers should always be subordinate to the driver also extends to the transmission.
100% manuals are the way to go if you want to feel like a driver, not a passenger. I love my manual Jetta Thing is, people are lazy. US market is automatics only. Can't make people understand what the clutch is or why slushbox is bad for fuel efficiency. No one cares. Gas guzzlers are the national idea My kid learned to drive a manual in 15 minutes. Too much effort for US drivers!
why slushbox is bad for fuel efficiency
Automatics have been more efficient than manuals for decades. And the computer can shift a DCT faster than you can. These days a manual tranny is right up there with hand-crank starting your car: if you enjoy it, great, but don’t get smug because people don’t want to manually adjust the spark advance.
>Automatics have been more efficient than manuals for decades.
No, they haven't. At least, not ones the average consumer could actually buy.
While it's true that modern 8 or 10 speed automatic transmissions do now compete favorably with 6 speed manuals, the former didn't meaningfully exist in passenger cars or trucks until around 2017. Neither did DCTs outside of high-end brands- sure, they're starting to do that now that "torque converter loss" means they don't pass emissions, but that was an option that commanded a premium back in the mid-00s when they were introduced (and still not actually more efficient than a manual outside of shift speed).
An automatic with 4 gears is less efficient than a manual with 5, much less 6 (this was the standard until about 2010 or so); one with 6 gears is likely on par with the 5-speed manual (and loses to a 6-speed, obviously).
So no, "decades" is bullshit. It's a very recent advancement.
So no, "decades" is bullshit.
First car I looked up from 20 years ago (I own one), and the automatic does just a bit better than the manual:
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bymodel/2005_Scion_xB.shtml
We bought manual version despite that. You shouldn’t have a hard time finding other examples.
Only because they cheap out and don't put in manual with optimal gear ratios. Otherwise the manual is better because you can use high throttle with low rpms - try that in an auto and you get high rpms which is bad for efficiency - but great for acceleration.
I honestly can't say I notice any difference between driving a manual or an automatic car.
If we were in a car right now and I was driving, I'd have to look at the gearstick to tell you if it was auto or manual.
I genuinely don't get the USian obsession with driving manual gearbox cars being somehow "elite".
When you have a small fuel efficient engine, you can tell and feel the difference. With a V6 under your hood, you probably don't care. US is mostly big engines
You will still care that you're wasting a bunch of your engine's potential, even with a V8.
Autos (not DCTs) don't generally let you rev the engine as high as manuals do, they don't really let you take advantage of engine braking, and they may ignore your command to manually shift them into a lower gear at will (DCTs can do that too).
> You will still care that you're wasting a bunch of your engine's potential, even with a V8.
You're not really, especially on a long run. If you're doing motorway speeds there is no difference in economy and performance. An auto will be a bit worse in slow driving, when it's using the torque converter which is quite lossy.
> Autos (not DCTs) don't generally let you rev the engine as high as manuals do, they don't really let you take advantage of engine braking, and they may ignore your command to manually shift them into a lower gear at will (DCTs can do that too).
They will let you rev the engine as high as you like and will engine-brake just fine if you select a lower gear. They might not shift into a lower gear if you've got a gearbox that's smart enough to stop you money-shifting the engine.
Not really, although I guess the least powerful automatic I've ever driven was a 1.7 litre naturally-aspirated diesel Citroën Xantia. It was very economical on long runs but acceleration was really something for very patient people.
Most Xantias had a 1.9 petrol making roughly 50% more power, although with appreciably less torque.
It's an anti theft feature too
1960s/early 1970s for me.
To be fair, I have a 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee. It was the first year of their then new model rollout for the GC. It was (as I understand it) the last of the Mercedes JGCs.
I love this thing, it's a "cold dead hands" kind of car for me. Only has 120k-ish miles on it.
I won't say it's my last car ever, I just have a hard time visualizing swapping it out for anything.
It starts, all the buttons work, it's cosmetically 95%. The single biggest issue is that last year it was down for a couple of months simply because of parts availability. It's not unreliable, but it's swapped a few things (water pump, radiator, A/C has had work twice, guess it's a bit notorious in the community). Purchased in 2013, it's a 12 year old car.
But waiting months for suspension components (air suspension, which I adore) was a real drag. Even with a dealer supplied rental.
That would be the thing that sends me over the edge long term, I think.
It'll be a shame when it happens, I love the car.
The dealer wants to buy it every time I take it in for routine maintenance.
So your 12 yrs old truck with only 120k miles got:
- radiator replaced
- water pump replaced
- AC repaired (twice)
- suspension rebuilt
And that's considered to be a "good" truck? Good lord I'm happy we don't get such garbage sold here in Europe
You don’t know much about cars. All the work they had done on their vehicle was typical for that model generation. Air suspensions are generally problematic because of constant wear mixed with parts issues, and A/C problems are common in that model generation. This is all normal stuff to fix over twelve years.
I do most of the maintenance of cars in our garage, and I would never accept double AC repair, suspension and radiator replacement to be "normal" around 120k.
The thing is, modern jeeps are a joke even compared to this "reliable" example.
There was a post recently about over-the-air update bricking Jeeps WHILE DRIVING ON THE FUCKING HIGHWAY. And no one cares. People keep buying this trash and defend double AC repairs. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
Yeah, it's not as if Mercedes (who made the vehicle he's talking about) or BMW are German.
Mercedes or BMW don't sell "tough trucks" lol.
They sell luxury goods, which people know to avoid when they care about reliability
The thing is, jeeps are even beating the BMWs when it comes to unreliability.
Yes Mercedes built that garbage for the US market because US market eats that crap. Then stellantis took it a step up and removed reliability from their vocabulary entirely - more profitable that way. I'd pick a modern VW over American garbage all day any day.
But sure, keep yourself convinced about exceptionalism of American SUVs.
>Mercedes or BMW don't sell "tough trucks" lol.
G-Wagon is body on frame
> And that's considered to be a "good" truck? Good lord I'm happy we don't get such garbage sold here in Europe
Yes, in spite of this it is considered a good car.
People drive 70 year old cars today. Just buy a sensible car from sometime before the 2020s, keep up with it and put on 400k miles on it.
My 2016 Corolla seems to be the last year without a SIM (it does have a screen but whatever it just shows me what's playing on the stereo), but despite a Corolla being bulletproof and me rarely driving anymore, i do still wonder whether i can get away with this car forever or if I'll have to buy some spyware carriage someday
May I present Coretti Cruisers restomods. Prime example: https://x.com/washghost1/status/1994198208545714472
Cost roughly $150K
What if, instead of just attempting to retreat into a shrinking world that will eventually disappear, we all collectively worked together to fix things?
Current gen base model Chevy vehicles don't have smart screens, just some basic UI for the reverse camera/radio etc.
black construction paper?
> To opt out, call 1-800-777-3600
You call the number, maybe let it ring one time, and hang up. You did your part to opt out.
Then you sue them.
You signed up for mandatory arbitration in the sales agreement probably.
Arbitration is still a pretty big money sink for them. If enough people do it then it becomes a problem for them. There have been instances of companies reinstating normal class action lawsuits back into their EULAs because it turned out that forced arbitration wasn't a magical wonderland of cost cutting for them after all. Forced arbitration and especially when they have a clause that forbids class-action arbitration can turn into a huge liability for them even if they nominally win every instance.
The fundamental financial maneuver of the modern world is to take modest risks of modest loss and financially engineer it into a smaller risk of much, much larger loss, with a higher expected loss (risk*size) in the end after the engineering than before. Forced arbitration (and especially when class arbitration is banned) is that manuever in the legal sphere. It isn't a ticket out of the risk entirely, it's shoving that risk under the rug and making it net larger. If you and a few hundred of your closest friends put their minds to it you can trigger that smaller-chance-of-larger-disaster scenario and all you have to do is file... you don't even have to win.
I won't deny it's an uphill battle but the forced arbitration clauses can be turned to consumer's advantage with relatively modest coordination, you just need to get enough annoyed people together.
(I can't help you with this one, I don't have a car with this problem. Your few hundred closest friends will need standing.)
"Agree to kangaroo court or be unable to go anywhere forever." I wonder what people will choose!
It's incredible that companies get the right to do this. What a corruption.
it'd be cool if we had a more consumer-friendly admin who would ban advertising on long-term purchases like washing machines, fridges, cars or require you the seller to tell you about how the advertising works on said things (ad types, whether they are child friendly, frequency, and upfront option to permanently opt out)
Yes. This problem of in-vehicle ads definitely stems from the current president, and a different president can and will solve it for good. A multi-step config panel for these ads is exactly what we need.
The word "admin" in the above comment is short for "administration" which encompasses thousands of individuals across pretty much every branch and department of the government.
Exactly, I mean departments like the FTC, CPSC, DOT (these ads are probably displaying while driving at highway speeds, much like the jeep software updates deploy at lol)
https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/Jeep/Wrangler/34192
$50000+ for such garbage? I wouldn't voluntarily sit in such a fish can for more than emergency travels.
It's Renault Zoe level safety -> I would pay $12000 max.
Any screen is just an advertising delivery system.
Relevant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g
It's an interesting phenomenon. Something like this happens every week or two, and then these threads basically just become cope, with vague advice that most people can't easily do ("oh, just desolder the eSim contacts, it'll be fine"), as though that is in any way a longterm solution to corporate overreach in our daily lives.
What if we all decided to actually work together to fix this terrible situation? Unfortunately, it will involve collective action, and holding companies accountable who are otherwise very averse to that sort of thing. But dear God, we can't keep "why don't you just"-ing forver as the world closes in around us, people.
If we want a better world, we are going to have to build a better world.
First you have to pick one thing to work on. Just one. Then you have to find all the people who agree with you that ONE thing is the most important thing to pick, and get help on crafting a message that will stick, develop a theory of change, and work backwards from that theory to actionable efforts the people you recruit can do.
It's hard work. I've done it. I am happy to help you do it. Let me know.
So what's the collective action? Any proposed regulations to sign on to?
Have you contacted your representatives and demanded something that would improve the current situation?
[dead]
Imagine you will buy a house and somebody will have so much gall to slap a billboard on the side of your house. Repeatedly. Would you tolerate this behavior? Obviously not, then why companies thinks that it is OK to show ads on my fridge or in my car? This is outrageous behavior and I hope that some nasty regulation will end this nonsense so we can hear crying of companies how big government is bullying them and hampering innovation...
I never owned a car with such a system. Do they at least give you a way to install uBlock and NoScript or will that brick the car?
You're joking, right? The systems are locked up tight. I did manage to hack into my Porsche Macan's system so that I could turn Apple CarPlay on (it's disabled in the Macan, but supported by the system because the unit is shared with the VW Atlas which has CarPlay), but it involved a pretty complicated jailbreak.
What generation had CarPlay disabled? It works very nicely in 95B.2 and .3, and the pre-facelift 95B models with PCM 3 didn't support CarPlay at all without an adapter, did they?
I know full-screen CarPlay isn't supported without a jailbreak, but I don't care about that myself so haven't done it.
You're joking, right?
Only 3.1415% joking. I predict people will eventually get credits for saying things like, "Brought to you by Carl's Jr." in their car, bonus if the kids also repeat it. But seriously I figured someone would have found Easter-eggs by now that allowed some form of super-duper-root similar to windows god-mode.
I am honestly surprised that car manufacturers have not been sued into oblivion for adding distractions.
There's less attack surface on these systems than your typical windows install. The only reason I was able to hack the Macan is because they'd left a debug avenue open such that you could plug an ethernet adapter into one of the USB ports and use it drop a shell, and then exploit a bug with handling of a certificates to get privileged access. I was more surprised they'd left that USB ethernet avenue open than that there was a certificate handling bug.
I believe since I did it, somebody found another way in by inserting a malicious payload into a USB firmware update image.
I had an old Prius with a nav system that disabled all the controls when the car was moving. But it also had a full-screen page of legalese that you had to dismiss every time you started the car.
So Toyota's lawyers were OK with drivers reading a legal contract, but not with drivers pressing a couple buttons to get where they need to go.
Drink verification can to continue journey
Getting a pop-up like this would be a sure way to get me to never buy your brand again.
Is this also the brand that tracks your driving data and sells it to insurance companies?
Even Toyota does this, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they all do.
Here is an idea for a project - open source street legal EV car platform.
Unfortunately street legality requires testing, not just compliance.
And isn't this just weeks after a bad software update bricked a bunch of Wrangler 4XEs?
... Oh, and isn't this the same Stellantis that now requires a fuck-ton of hoops to access your own diagnostics now because of their "secure gateway"? (https://autel.us/security-gateways/)
Saw this in my car this morning myself. I only noticed it as I was getting out and right before turning it off.
So, what happens if you accidentally drill through your car's LTE modem while doing an oil change?
It'll throw a code, just like it does if you forget to put DEF in. It's not a malfunction, they just want you to think it is.
Looks like Stellantis is on my no buy list now, along with Samsung, Microsoft and Tesla.
This kind of behavior should re-open the return window for the car.
I wonder if we're gonna see a class action lawsuit.
Never buy any product from any company who does this.
There is a time to put your foot down and that time is now.
Let's start from Samsung!
https://mlq.ai/news/samsung-faces-backlash-after-rolling-out...
The last (hopefully only) Stellantis vehicle we owned had trouble with its transmission’s network connection.
“Nothing stops a Ram, except routine driving”.
I’m completely unsurprised they’re pushing spam to the dashboard.
The crazy thing is BMW has been doing this well for years. They should have just copied the playbook. There’s a little shop icon in the app where you can buy digital services, swag and schedule dealership appointments.
Sometimes it has discounts or track day invitations in there.
Pro tip: if you buy the new car, the ad goes away for a year ;)
This is why I drive a 2015 Honda.
I bough a new Honda and Mazda within the last year and neither have any of this kind of nonsense. Both are great. I hope people vote with their wallets. I would never have considered anything from Stellantis anyway.
i'll never get car that has touchscreen, internet, or adblue.
Reason # 10034 why I do not want a TV screen in my car or truck.
1. Locate cellular modem.
2. Disable it.
Nope.
Same company that is planning to deprive customers of CarPlay even though virtually all of their customers want it.