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.
app
nah
Low effort.
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Ok, enough. At this point it’s too evident that you’re a troll paid for by Hyundai. You’ll be out of a job soon, since this will no longer be effective.
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It’s a stupid image, how can you give this much of a shit about something so inconsequential? You’re all over this thread sucking hyundai subscription dong, what gives?
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You’ve changed my mind. I am now also so concerned that this post in a piracy community could bankrupt hyundai and poison the minds of an entire generation that I will spend hours arguing about it on some obscure social media platform. Thank you for your service.
🏅
He just indicated that his wife’s car does not have this on the fob. Meaning, it can and will go away eventually especially with folks paying for it.
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Dude. It says “has remote start but only through the app” in his post. You tell me if it has remote start installed
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=Z6UaZSZAOA4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
A 2024 Kia Telluride is right around $50,000 USD (fully loaded specs), but I get what you’re saying with regards to vehicles in general.
Like BMW and Tesla having “creature comforts” behind subscriptions.
Tesla doesn’t have “creature comforts” behind subscriptions. They’re 1-time payments.
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.
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You keep mentioning “official video by (insert manufacturer name here)”. Are you even thinking when you say that? It’s the manufacturer, what the hell were you expecting them to promote? “were fucking you over, so here’s why you have to give us more money for a car that you think is yours but actually will never be”?
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The video shows the fob starting the car. It also states that you can pay for the app to be able to do it anywhere.
It’s not a promo video, it’s a “how to” for car owners.
Are we not to believe that it really does that?
What is this internet thing for if I can’t find information? Do I have to drive to a car dealership and ask to find out if this is true? Do I need to see it in action? When I do, can you even trust my answer?
Not 1 person here has mentioned that it doesn’t work. Not 1 person here has said that the “feature” is useless or anything remotely similar.
What is in question here is the fucking pushing of companies to tie as many idiots as humanly possible to their subscriptions to keep on draining funds from them.
Give me the car for free, and maybe I’ll subscribe. Otherwise, I buy stuff with ALL it’s capabilities enabled or not at all.
My car is worth US$85,000 in my country. Everything works, app and all, and I don’t have to pay anything other than my loan, insurance, maintenance and charge (yes, it’s an electric vehicle).
I own a 2023 BYD Han, I have an account for the app, and I can do whatever it’s able to do from it without ever having to open my wallet again.
If and when they decide to make this a paid subscription, then I’ll sell that one, and move on.
So, yeah, follow a bullshit advertisement that you call a “tutorial” and believe what you want. They are just like drug pushers, only for tech.
Now who is the one making fucking noise without looking a things from a common sense perspective?
Now who is the one making fucking noise without looking a things from a common sense perspective?
IMO, you. Again, the video isn’t marketing. The car auto-starts just fine without paying anyone a penny extra.
The manufacturer offers overpriced warranties and app features. Totally optional. You don’t have to buy it.
The dealership offers overpriced vehicle service also. It’s optional. You don’t have to buy it.
Some people want that stuff. I don’t. You don’t. 🤝
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=Z6UaZSZAOA4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
They have considered how much the gains from being evil assholes offset the cost of alienating some people, and found that they make more by being evil, it’s not stupid.
The issue is that with ongoing service across time, the longer the service is being used the more it costs Kia. The larger the time boxes Kia uses the bigger the number is and the more you’re going to scare off customers.
Using Kias online build and price, looks like the most expensive Telluride you can get right now is $60k MSRP, cheapest at 30k
Let’s assume Kia estimates average lifetime of a Telluride to be 20 years so they create an option to purchase this service one time for the “lifetime” of the vehicle. Taking in good faith the pricing Kia has listed, using that $150 annual package, and assuming that price goes up every year at a rate of 10% (what Netflix, YouTube, etc have been doing) across those twenty years you’re looking at around $8.5k option. At the top trim thats still 14% extra that is going to make some buyers hesitant, at the base model that’s 28% more expensive.
Enough buyers will scoff at that so Kia can either ditch the idea entirely as they’ll lose money on having to pay for the initial development and never make their money back, or they find some way to repackage that cost and make it look like something that buyers are willing to deal with.
To me the bigger issue is the cost of the service vs what you’re getting. Server time + dev team + mobile data link cannot be costing Kia more than a few million annually, mid to upper hundred K is more likely so they must not be expecting that many people to actually be paying for any of this
The average lifespan of a Kia is 20 years
Ay LMAO
Oh yeah I pulled 20 years out of my ass. I could see some manager there saying to plan for it even though all the engineers expect a much shorter lifetime
Kia is actually among the most reliable brands now according to consumer reports (at least for EVs? I don’t have a CR subscription so I can’t check the overall numbers)
Assume the communication with the app it through Internet. The car must have a 4G chip (too early to see 5G in cars, I think?). So no matter what you pay, it won’t work when 4G is retired. With marketing pushing to get new standards always faster, 4G may not last another 20years.
Anyway, bear in mind that once you subscribe, they will most likely collect detailed data about how you use the features and sell that as well…
Bear in mind that they are collecting that data regardless of your subscription…
Reminder buying isn’t owning anymore.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-09-06/carmakers-privacy-data-collection-drivers
Finally someone who gets it
Glad to see you here my fellow comrades
Honestly the people who defended subscription models for something that you already paid & own are dumb (or maybe just trolling around) like people who defend adobe for subscription modelsHonestly the people who defended subscription models for something that you already paid & own are dumb
You don’t own the cellular towers your car needs to connect to in order to work with the app.
Cars shouldn’t require cell phone towers to function. It’s a CAR.
It doesn’t. The car works just fine. The features that require a cell phone are specific to operating your car while not present at your car.
But you do pay to use the network. So, you’re still paying for it.
That’s the point. It IS a subscription. The person I’m responding to believes that it shouldn’t be and that they’ve paid for it already.
Not to mention the data they mine from you with their “app” that they can sell to advertisers.
Finally, the voice (text) of reason.
Thank you!
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.
Just download a car
You wouldn’t…oh goddamnit
Agreed.
And then you can’t use it when the temp is 0F because they decide to do some maintenance
I do find that the days I need it the most it’s slower than molasses.
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
My spouse was just telling me about someone who got stuck waiting for an hour because their car decided to unexpectedly do an update
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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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It doesn’t matter where the data goes, or if it’s kept proprietary. Businesses wouldn’t collect metrics if it didn’t translate to dollar signs for them. It forms their business decisions.
And it not being shared with other businesses is only one point of concern from a privacy perspective. Another is that large corporations are hacked or otherwise infiltrated quite frequently, resulting in user data leaks.
You assume they are only collecting usage data with their apps, which is typically not the case. Some of them request every permission on your phone just to collect as much as they can.
If it was worthless they wouldn’t put a fucking 4g modem on all of them “for free” and siphoning all the telemetry away
Yeah my car has remote start. I can do it with no subscription with my remote. Additionally I can pay for OnStar and do it through the app. It also has heated seats and a heated steering wheel, and unlike some brands those aren’t locked behind a subscription since they are literally just vehicle hardware, not cloud services.
They make you use the app to get the advertised features. Hyundai/Kia are terrible about this.
Oh and the entire implementation is half-assed. I bought my Hyundai used and can’t even use the paid features because they won’t transfer the account to me.
I actually like Hyundai, but I will never again purchase one of their vehicles because of subscriptions and what I mentioned above.
I think the remote start is through the Kia app, not the remote. I would imagine the idea is you can turn on the car and turn on the heat when it is cold outside so you can stay in your home a little bit longer.
yeah, the last 2 cars ive bought had this. no subscription, no app, and it works fine from the very nice remote that is also the key. maybe kia just sucks
By removing the feature from the remote and moving it to an app they turn a cost of a more complex remote into a profit of constant subscription money.
In the winter I’d remote start my car from the top floor and even I got to the bottom my car would be heated; their remote start uses server time.
Now if they charged me to use the remote start from my keys, that’d be a different story.
@originalucifer @devilish666 @skullgiver Kia definitely sucks
My car offered a remote start on the key fob and even the dealer told me not to buy it because the range was so short. I ended up installing an after market Viper system that is cellular and costs ~$100 per year when I get 3 years at a time. So even the after market solutions have subscriptions. If you need a cell connection you have to pay for it
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.
I’m betting they’re paying more than the servers per car for the cellular connectivity.
It’s not what we pay obviously. But it’s not free either.
The traffic and compute for this kind of application is very minimal, a cheap server can hold thousands and thousands of users.
It’s the cellular connectivity that costs a lot, difficult to imagine that would be less than 50 cents a month
They could be paying licensing per user for some third party solution that meets the security requirements of stuff like remote unlocking. (Yeah, they also could do it themselves, at the cost of hiring a couple security experts, and the scale should make it pretty cheap per car, but a lot of the times companies like to hire it out so they have someone to point to if there are flaws.)
They could also just not care and do a shitty job, but doing the software part correctly isn’t free either. But yeah, cellular with how little they use it and economies of scale isn’t going to be a massive outlay, but it’s something that makes some sense to have behind a paid service. Right now it’s not a huge cost, but down the road, if they’re paying for 20 years of cars worth of connectivity when most of them aren’t used, it could add up to meaningful expenses that are pointless.
low-bandwidth data plans in bulk are pretty cheap. it’s what many atms, vending machines, redbox and similar, etc., along with sensors and gauges, and what-not for a variety of applications, use.
over the expected lifespan of a car, it would cost the manufactures less than they charge for a set of floor mats.
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Or “for free” as in paid for by your data and the unskippable targeted ads you wil get on your infotainment system. I’m sure in the future some cheap car brand will blast commercials trough your speaker system to pay for all the free services
The KIA app has three trackers in it. (Can’t scan the latest version, however) Not exactly a lot by contemporary standards, but more than many. Two of my banking apps have 7. One weather app has 10. The apps I respect have none or only a single tracker, and only for crashlytics, and still optional.
Thanks for linking to the tracker site, I’ve been meaning to find more ways to audit the amount of trackers in my apps for a while now.
Happy to help
Maintaining the infrastructure needed for all the shite that modern cars are packed with, including the person cost of maintenance is not “pennies”. You don’t just spin up a EC2 instance and call it a day. You need infrastructure across multiple countries, service level agreements, people on-call to handle issues, account management with third-party downstream services, etc.
With that being said, you’ve already paid. You paid for the car, which costs an obscene amount already. If you own the car, you don’t need a separate payment for the software.
All of these functionalities can be provided by a simple WebSocket + REST server. The car connects to the WebSocket, and you can access these functionalities from your phone either with WebSockets or regular HTTP requests.
Cheapest servers with backend written in JS can easily handle thousands of WebSocket connections, and written in Go tens of thousands WebSocket connections. They would not ever need like over 100 of these servers GLOBALLY, which would cost them around $3000 monthly.
That’s the price of 60 subscriptions, which is freaking ridiculous.
Then maybe don’t make them rely on external servers? Your car has a computer, put the server there.
Even if all of the intermediate server tech is on the car, somebody still has to pay for the car’s internet service, either cellular or satellite, it something.
Otherwise, you’re not going to be doing remote start over IP.
This is only half the issue. You can put a server in the car, but that doesn’t solve the networking issue. Most have a cellular connection now that needs to be paid for by someone. Then there is the issue of discovery. When you open that app on your phone, how does it know where to connect? Sure, it could look for a local or Bluetooth network. But that would only work if you’re already close to you car like when it’s in the garage.
Outside of that home network, something needs to facilitate the connection between your phone and the car. since neither will have a static IP address, it’s essentially impossible to achieve without some server elsewhere to broker that connection.
Just package it into the car warranty. Most people wouldn’t care then. For the most part new car people buy new cars and used car people buy used cars.
It’s a really good idea for the car manufacturer, as it would add one more annoyance to buying a used car. New car, no worries unless you plan to drive it into the ground. Used car, now you have to go online to see what subscription costs might be.
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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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It plays on the classic consumer mindset of “if it’s an option, I need it!” Spoiler: you don’t need it. I understand you want those features, they’d be a nice luxury… but you don’t need them.
You’re excusing their asshole design of requiring the server in the first place. They never needed it before. It doesn’t make sense having to pay a subscription for a fucking car.
$59 is still too much to ask for what amounts to just a few API calls to some cloud service.
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Ok, roadside assistance is maybe worth that price, but the rest are just API calls that cost them virtually nothing to operate. There’s no need for them to keep these functionalities hostage behind some roadside service, other than to be anti consumer.
Not to mention that by paying $90 extra you unlock the functionality to remote unlock your car. What’s the justification for this price? There’s no way it costs this much extra.
Yeah, unless there are features hidden that are hardware based and doesn’t rely on KIA servers then this is not a problem in the slightest.
It’s vastly different from the paid unlocks of Tesla or subscription for hardware of BMW.
Don’t group them under one banner and muddy the waters because if we do then all it will do is normalize what Tesla and BMW does and allow it to spread. Either that or make it so we won’t get the features listed or the features will have an exorbitant cost attached when new to ensure they don’t lose money from maintaining the service for the service life of the vehicle (or do Tesla shit of not letting the feature transfer when resold effectively impacting resell value negatively which is bad for the original buyer).
Agreed, as long as they don’t go the BMW route and charge for heated seats, or the Toyota route and charge for remote start using the key fob.
Unless that “more” button is doing a lot of heavy lifting, this is basically paying for the Internet connection for your car to be able to connect to a phone app through Kia’s servers.
Remote lock & unlock? It’s literally been a feature of dumb cars since the 90s.
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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.
What about when a security vulnerability is discovered and your car can be started and unlocked by someone else? That’s one of my concerns with smart features from companies that aren’t primarily tech companies
This is free elsewhere. The fact that you’re okay paying monthly for remote start is hilarious and sad. Probably don’t tell people you’re okay with this.
The tesla app does an INSANE amount of shit no other vehicle app does and its free. But you want to pay monthly to turn your car on 😆
Except it’s a Tesla.
It’s like the Mr. Garrison’s dildo mono-wheel “it” vehicle, it’s fucking you in the ass!
Congrats on the new Subaru. I also happily paid for the app using the introduction 3 year plan. Hit me up when you hit year 4 and see the REAL price tag they charge.
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I think op just doesn’t understand what the subscription is for.
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Same for me. I have the blue link with Hyundai. It’s free for 3 years, then a reasonable amount after that.
Very personal opinion of mine, I hate subscription crap. However, I have to agree that, based on what you say, Subaru’s cost is much easier to digest than Hyundai/Kia POS.
You don’t need a cellular connection for long range, low bandwidth communication. There are networks such as Lora that don’t require a paid subscription to use.
That’s not what this is though. I have a Hyundai Tuscan that is always connected to a cellular network.
I can always connect with the car with my phone if both the car and phone have internet access. It’s also how the “find my car” feature works. And also I believe software updates (OS and maps).
I meant that they don’t have to use a cellular connection, they could use something else if they wished. LoRa is a two way data connection designed for low bandwidth, long distance. Range can be anywhere from 3-10 miles depending on obstructions/obstacles. There are other similar protocols out there.
3-10 miles is nothing though. With a cell phone connection your car can be anywhere a cell tower is and you can connect with it.
That’s farther than a cell phone. A cell phone might get 3 miles maybe more if you have the high ground. It’s a lower frequency and therefore has a longer range. There are both public and private gateways for LoRa. So you can use it even if you don’t own or operate a gateway.
Maybe you misunderstood me. My car can be in New York City and I’m in Los Angeles and I can check it’s location and lock/unlock the doors
You could do the same thing without using a cell network.
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.
If you are clever, confident, and savvy about it I think you could get your next car for free. If there was a kickstarter type project where I could pledge an amount in support of a jailbreak for a car I owned or was thinking of getting, I’d pledge a decent amount, I think a lot of people would.
That’s the irony of all of this. I too would donate to a project that was actively trying to do this, even donate to their legal fund. I’d probably pay more than the subscription!
These asshole companies just don’t realize that a determined developer and engineer will move heaven and earth to make sure that their freedoms (as in speech) aren’t restricted.
I don’t care if it’s illegal. It’s my fucking car. Once you sell it to me, it ceases to be your property. You leave $100 bill in the glove compartment before you sell it to me? Well it’s mine now.
You leave software on my car’s computer? Welp, it’s mine now.
Right to repair is a main line issue for me
Keep us posted on make and model. I sure as hell will try to get one myself and help you test the shit out of that jailbreak.
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10 years of this subscription is $1500. Would anyone blink if they were buying a new car for 1500 more? lol
I would… I don’t want the feature. So why should I pay for it?
They’re training people for even worse subscription models.
This type of subscription is actually kiiiiinda understandable because the company has to maintain servers, staff and keep the software secure because they’re handling sensitive data such as location etc.
I also remember that BMW I think? Had a heated seat subscription and that’s really not justifiable imo
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.
Indeed; what we need is a jailbreak and a way to operate these systems on our own independent or third party / aftermarket resources. In a REAL competitive market, someone else could set up a server and offer to run these applications (or others!) for a different price. Not that I’m even particularly fond of capitalism myself nor how vulnerable it makes your car to turn it into an IOT device.
This WILL be hacked though, eventually.
The question is, who will venture deep enough and understand all the hurdles like the car self-bricking after even trying to peek at the SW or HW.
Someone figured out how to remotely take control of Chrysler vehicles with the Uconnect 8.4 systems a while back. So people are out there working on these things. Also, the more popular the car, the more likely someone is working on it.
To FCA’s credit in that case, they listened to the researchers and implemented several fixes very quickly to address the problem. I wouldn’t put it past many manufacturers to do the hands-over-the-ears “la la la” thing when faced with the same situation.
cough cough KIA cough cough
Are you talking about people breaking in and stealing them? While I agree that was a stupid problem, it’s quite a bit different than a remote hacker taking over your brakes while you drive.
Well, it’s only a small step from there. Still, it’s dumb and it’s hard to trust the cars nowadays. Hell, some of them may be already infected and waiting for order 66.
Are you going to jailbreak roadside assistance?
It’s called working at a towing company, and I already have. I know what those “roadside assistance” firms do from the inside, because we’re the ones who actually do the work when they call, and most of them are trash; you could just skip the middle man and call us directly, but the good ones actually pay decently and are more likely to get our help. Prices become better for individuals when they act as a group who collectively pool resources to subsidize cost on the basis that having a lifeline to fall back on when you don’t need one is better than not having one when you do need one. Technically any handful of people can found a private social club that they all pay ten bucks a month into but don’t always use, and such a club’s warchest will snowball to thousands of dollars while no one is looking. Then when suddenly one person is in trouble, the club swoops in and eats the cost. Socialization of risk. Mutual aid. Wish more people did that.
It probably won’t be hacked for most of these cars, though. Just the ones interesting enough to attract that kind of attention.
Those prices on the screenshot are annual, not monthly.
I’ll agree that the services are overpriced, and I know I’m in the wrong place for this sentiment, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have a reoccurring fee for something that costs actual money and man-hours to maintain. And I’d rather that fee be a bolt on vs baked into the price of the car (or whatever) so I can choose whether I want to pay it.
All that being said, I don’t pay for the kia online svcs because I think they’re overpriced.
That’s what i pay for gigabit fiber and unlimited 5g combined. (Admittedly my cell plan is one of those crazy grandfathered plans.)
Fuck sakes. Those features were free on my 2020 Telluride.
Simple. Buy an older car and spend the extra money maintaining it. Reducing demand is the only language consumers have that businesses understand.
It doesn’t have to be ancient; even 5-10 year old cars don’t have this bullshit.
Honestly, doesn’t even have to be old. My Toyota Yaris is a 2023 model and it has no subscriptions. Such cars still exist, but they are mostly in the lower end market, because automakers assume if you have the money for an expensive car you also have the money for a subscription.
My “dream” car is a V6 Accord from the last year they made them, which I think is 2016. I’d buy one of those right now and just keep repairing it, and hope no one t-bones me. Unfortunately I think my wife is still in the mindset of “we should buy a new car and keep it forever”, which used to be my mindset, too. But she’s not seeing the news on this stuff like I am, either. I suspect if I explained “heated seat subscription” to her (a feature she will not buy a car without) she would object strenuously.
But I don’t like where new cars are going, at all. I don’t like subscriptions, I don’t like the backseat driver nanny features that blare out false alarms, and on the whole I’d rather not have adaptive cruise control (there are times when adaptive cruise is nice, but overall I prefer the old-style cruise control).
We have a 2020 Mazda that I absolutely hate driving; if that is the future of cars, I’m not interested.
I’m hoping my car and our pickup last forever. The other day we took the Mazda for an errand in poor weather because, as I said, “It’s the most expendable car.”
Just don’t buy a 5-10 year old Kia or Nissan. Nearly every one on the road is going to have their engine sieze or transmission have issues
“You wouldn’t download a car.”
I would absolutely hack the heated seats to work without my credit card.
Look your car has a new software update available!
I hope it’s not like Windows updates; sitting in your car for 40 minutes before work because you can’t use the car until the update is complete.
That’s already happened.
Too many times.
Just. You. Wait.
😭
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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You can’t remote start with the key (at least on the 2020). It’s remote cellular start that runs on a ~40 second interval or nothing (or third party).
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I can confirm from personal experience that the key fob remote start works fine without a sub on 21, 23, and 24 Kias.
I don’t know why you’re bringing up Palisade. The OP clearly says Telluride and the text mentions Kia. I have the same car, 2020.
You either have remote start over Kia Connect or key fob. It’s either, not both.
And a Reddit comment goes further:
No 2020 Tellurides in North America had remote start on the key fob from the factory.
https://www.reddit.com/r/KiaTelluride/comments/14737v9/telluride_remote_start/
See also: https://www.kiatelluride.org/threads/2020-telluride-remote-start.1825/ (outside of US has fob)
Even better, an open source car!
There’s already an open source bike. Carrying several tons of metal everywhere you go is kind of a bad idea anyway.
What about people that don’t live in the city where public transportation between towns is trash?
Don’t you think it’s interesting that even though the vast majority of car trips are a single person going less than a mile, every time someone brings up bikes the rebuttal is always “what if I need to move my family of 16 and their refrigerator 800 miles in freezing rain!?”
The US was built on rail. The infrastructure could be fixed. It’s a choice not to fix it. It would be better to put in energy to fixing this than creating an open source way to access a proprietary transit system. Infrastructure is the problem, car vendors are just exploiting it.
Edit: correction, 52% of trips in the US in 2021 were under 3 miles and 28% are under a mile according to US DoE (https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1230-march-21-2022-more-half-all-daily-trips-were-less-three-miles-2021). 2% we’re over 50 miles. Over 60% were under 5 miles, which is still pretty easy with an eBike given functional infrastructure.
Yeah, but I’m not from the US, I’m from a small town in Europe, you can put “all that effort” in both places at the same time because they are 2 completelly different problems
They aren’t two completely different problems, they’re in direct opposition. Making cars more tolerable increases demand for cars. Improving mass transit and bike infrastructure decreases demand. One is sustainable, the other is not.
I think the term you mean is old car especially from before 2018
in the end old cars basically open source you can modified it whatever you want as long as not breaking regulationsSo my two options are a repairable old gasoline/diesel car or a non reparaible electric/hydrogen car?
Yup, that’s the only choice not you but everyone get
Nissan Leafs are plenty DIY repairable. It was part of our decision making process when considering buying an EV. There’s also electric conversions if that’s your jam.
Some of us want all the internet connected options. And want to own their machine and have good security
Open source car software and firmware would do that
While I’m generally against subscriptions, for the most part the above are things that require cellular service and cloud infrastructure…
While the price may be too high. I’m normally ok with subscriptions for things that have on-going costs to the seller.
