Here’s a story you may find interesting:
A guy bought a new Toyota Camry equipped with factory GPS navigation, remote start (via an app) and Apple Car Play. A year after he bought the car, these features stopped working – because the one-year “free” subscription to these features that was included when he bought the car ran out. If he wants to be able to use his car’s GPS, the remote start and the Apple Car Play, he must henceforth pay to use them. Serially. Every month, a bill. Twenty-five a month bucks to be able to use the Apple Car Play. Another $25 to be able to use the remote start and $15 per month for the GPS.
It all comes to about $50 per month, which amounts to about $600 annually. Factor that out over a six year loan and the tab comes to $3,600. That’s a tidy little revenue stream for Toyota.
It is not just Toyota that’s doing this, either.
Tesla was the first to apply the Bill Gates/Microsoft model to vehicles. Microsoft used to sell software. This was a long time ago, back in the ’90s. You bought the box that contained the CD that had the software and once you paid for it – once – it was yours, physically as well as legally. You could use what you had bought on more than one computer; you could give the CD that contained the software to your kid to use. It maybe got old (out-of-date) eventually, but it was like owning an older car that maybe didn’t have the latest features but nonetheless still worked and – the important thing – it was yours to do with as you liked.
Then Gates – who is arguably the incarnation of Satan, if he exists, in a Mr. Rogers sweater – figured out that much more money could extracted from people by forcing them to rent his software, forever.
He did not use that word, of course. Satan is more clever than that. He styled the rent a subscription – which made it sound less evil, as if you were just paying to get your daily newspaper.
Of course, the difference is you got a new newspaper every morning when you paid for a subscription. With Gates, all you got was a “license” to use the software. This license has to be renewed, too – assuming you want to be able to continue using the software and it is licensed only to you to use. It is like having to pay The Washington Post a recurrent fee to read the same newspaper – and it being illegal to let someone else read the paper.
Elon Musk saw that it was good and – behold! – applied the same to his EVs. If a person bought a Tesla with the self-driving tech, it worked for him – but not the next guy who bought the car. That guy would have to renew the subscription. Tesla makes good money off these subscriptions. Toyota – and BMW and a number of other brands – saw that it was good and – behold! – they have made certain features subscription based,too.
BMW does this with heated seats. You can subscribe via the touchscreen, too – which is now being used in some cars to peddle ads at you as well as mine your “data.” Of course, you can’t force the vehicle manufacturers to subscribe to your data.
This here river only runs one way, Cap’n. Hadn’t you heard?
This dirty business is only going to get worse because the manufacturers – Toyota, BMW Ford, GM, et al – see this model as their new business model. They are moving away from the old model – selling you a vehicle that’s yours to use once you pay for it – because that kind of paying eventually ends. They want regular, ongoing – endless – paying. It will probably get to the point that essential vehicle functions stop working if you stop paying. Ultimately, you’ll pay a subscription for the car itself.
One that never ends.
This is how Satan – in human (sort of) form – operates. He tempts you with something, a bauble or convenience. See how convenient it is to be able to make a call from anywhere? To send texts and pictures? So much more convenient than having to find a phone and put a quarter in the thing to make a call – or drive home to where your phone is (was) plugged into the wall. Once you’re plugged in, they have you. They can track and monetize you and you get to pay a subscription – monthly or yearly – for this.
Same with software.
Same with what are styled “e” books. It’s all in the “cloud” now! You rent. They own. Same with cars, too. All the downsides of being a renter; all the costs of being an owner.
There is of course a way out of this new business model: Don’t buy into it.
If only enough of us did this, they’d be forced to stop monetizing us. It’s as easy as it is difficult – because while it’s not a hard thing to do, all-too-many aren’t willing to do it, because they are tempted by convenience, dazzled by gadgets and enraptured by the glint of shiny new objects, like a seagull pecking at a piece of tinfoil at the beach.
. . .
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I bought a 23 Tacoma new 2 years ago. Remote start from the fob worked for 1 year and then stopped. Called Toyota and was told it would be $8/mo for the subscription. Thanks anyway. Got the Startx remote start wiring harness for about $175 and i installed it in about 20 minutes. Like someone else mentioned here, I too suspect and hope that there will be aftermarket workarounds for alot of this subscription based crap.
Hi VT,
Excellent! And I hope so also. If this trend isn’t halted dead in its tracks, it is certain to expand and get worse.
The good news is that even if you neglect to renew your GPS and car cellphone service subscription, the NSA & your friendly local cop will still be able to track in real time exactly where you are and how fast you are going.
For your own safety, of course!
Indeed, John!
For that reason alone, I would never buy a new vehicle. The idea that my vehicle can be controlled or monitored by some third party is something I won’t abide – much less pay to have.
Luckily, not everyone sells subscription features to the car, and we can vote with our wallets, for now.
All the manufacturers you mention, Eric, let you subscribe to those features, or pay extra for them, lump sum, when you buy the car. It’s cheap for them to install all this stuff, so they do, and hope to make up for it. Give the hackers time, they’ll figure out how to crack them. Remote start might be hard since it requires servers in the cloud to talk to the stupid app, but the rest should be doable.
My issue with all these “connected” features is that manufacturers only support the servers needed for the features for a short time. I bought a used Porsche a few years ago, and the servers for their various connected features no longer exist. I don’t care since they’re unrelated to how I use the car, but that’s the future of everything. When Toyota decides they don’t want to maintain some server that enables heated seats, no more heated seats for anyone, without hacking the BCM.
A lot of cars lost functionality when the cell companies decided to drop 3G service. There’s often a parallel path using WiFi but if the owner didn’t put in their personal WiFi SSID and does not link their phone to the car it might never find an open public access point to call home.
I wonder how much consumer research Toyota did prior to implementing this. Are there so few of us rebelling / refusing this BS? It’s hard for me to fathom.
I’m sure the hackers love a challenge be great to see this “business model” destroyed with an independent override that activated everything permanently.
“Are there so few of us rebelling / refusing this BS?”
That is correct. Most people have the inability to say, “no” which makes the rest of us look like a-holes because we do. Look at the idiots who buy Wi-fi connected appliances. Does one really need their phone to tell them when the washer is done or how many minutes are left on the dishwasher? That someone is out willing to download an app and pay for heated seats leaves me flabbergasted.
haha…. wifi appliances. I don’t get it. A fad? IDK.
we just did an addition and had to get all new appliances. We just picked them all on-line, didn’t pay any attention to their features. Really didn’t care.
When the contractor was turning stuff over to us, every dam one of them had some form of ‘connect here’ thing. Nope………… none connected, but they still work.
My next washer is going to be a ’65 Maytag.
Get a speed queen….
Your grandchildren will thank you…
YMMV….
You need a connected washer machine, how else are you going to post on fuckhead book your clothes are done.
Have to avoid confrontation at all cost, hence the inability to say no.
Ugh, old school is fine with me. My old dryer lasted 25-plus years before it died. I dreaded getting a new one, and opted for the dumbest one I could find. I did not want smart anything. It only has to dry the clothes for crying out loud! One lady in front of me at the grocery store tried to pay for her bagged groceries with an app. Whoops, the app did not work, and she had to leave her groceries behind.
When you think about it lots of services have you under the gun. Electricity and gas are a subscription that you have to pay each month at the threat of going dark and cold. There’s some protection against doing that in the middle of winter but that exists because the collusion of government and their chosen monopoly would rile up the riff-raff otherwise. In comparison the software subscription model is irritating but at least competitive. If Microsoft didn’t take the path they did Linux would not exist in the form it does now. Apple knows giving away their OS drives hardware sales for laptops. So MS is not an impossible or insurmountable pain in the ass for the most part.
Hi anon,
I haven’t found the way to get around the electricity burden yet, but the gas one is pretty easy. With a big enough yard one can buy their own propane tank and then shop around for a propane distributor to fill it. It is what makes the natural gas/propane market competitive. Electricity would not be so high if they allowed outside competition.
Given sufficient motivation ($$) I’m sure some redneck will figure out a way to bypass the software (embedded CPU) and hardwire those “features” to be more consumer friendly.
The underground barter economy lives.
One minor quibble.
I think Adobe beat Microsoft to the subscription model.
I’m not sure Adobe was the first but they were the first to do it bigly when they moved from BS6 in 2013 to the cloud model. Autodesk moved a lot of stuff online then, too.
That’s CS6, although BS is probably a Freudian slip typo…
A license is a permission to use something. The owner of that something is the one with the ability to license (think NFL logo). When it comes to car features, who is the owner?
Were people sold a car, including features, but those features built into the car actually owned by someone else? In a sane world no reasonable person would accept that the ability to unlock your car remotely would be owned by someone else. To me, this constitutes a fraud.
Would anyone buy a house thinking that the ability to use the air conditioner would be subject to a monthly payment to the realtor or homebuilder?
I’m sure the sale agreement that no one reads has this subscription in there somewhere, but I would not enforce such a clause especially since it is so out of the norm.
Unfortunately the only fix is to walk away from the deal when the buyer discovers this or wait for states to outlaw such contracts.
“When it comes to car features, who is the owner?”
Here in the States, it’s almost exclusively the state government. The Document Prep and Transfer Fee? They charge you money to trade the Certificate of Ownership (COO) that your car came into a Title. You have agreed to just give the car to the government, and in exchange, the state allows you to pay for the privilege of Registering and Licensing it every year.
There are still a handful of cars on the roads here in Indiana where the state auction screwed up and transferred COOs instead of Titles, and they are not required to do the annual mulcting.
“ Would anyone buy a house thinking that the ability to use the air conditioner would be subject to a monthly payment to the realtor or homebuilder?”
Hey Dan, don’t give them any ideas! 😆
Sadly I notice that many books that were freely available at archive.org are disappearing, so get those free books while you can. I know that there are “other sites” for “free” books but sometimes that free e-book is a virus in disguise.
As for subscriptions and their nickel and diming you I tell my friends when my current daily diver dies I’ll probably buy some old square body with plenty of patina. I used to drive four speeds and carbs in winter so I can probably do it again.
Booster packs and ether can be your new best friend at 20 below.
I’m not so sure it’s -all- nefarious at Archive. I think they had to do a purge of copyrighted material and they needed a way to monetize things. I noticed a lot of books went to a check-out model, like a library. It’s not free to run an archive like that, servers have real cost.
That said, it really I think is important to stash away old printed copies (which also cost money after all) of important papers and books. I noticed an abridged version of Huck Finn that was sanitized of the pearl clutching stuff as required reading in my kid’s high school.
That was several years ago now and not recently but it was part of my wake-up from the normie slumber I was in a couple of decades ago.
They also lost a big copyright case, threatening their existence
https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/internet-archive-loses-appeal-in-copyright-case
Let me see if I got this straight; I buy a new vehicle and I am paying $700 – $1000+ a month on loan payments, then they want to add another couple of hundred dollars to access features I thought I already paid for? If these idiots thought they have hundreds of cars and trucks on the lots collecting dust now, just wait for this to become the standard operating procedure from every car company in the world.
Most, if not all BigBiz is doing this, trying to, or will be doing soon.
It must be being taught in Masters Degree classes.
One of our major competitors is just starting to do it for engineered equipment. We are expecting a fallout from those that will refuse to do it, and gain significant market share.
It’s a serious struggle to keep Rockwell/Allen-Bradley things moving if you try to go completely offline for too long. I value my time too much. I had my employer get me a hotspot a few years ago instead of constantly swimming upstream when in the field. It’s a cop out but it’s work, not charity. For personal stuff I make the effort to stay off the cloud whenever, where ever possible. Some of that bleeds over to help at work but I am not going to spend extra time at work. If they want to screw things up with their subscription model so be it, I’m happy to help bloat up costs and nose dive profit and productivity by doing things their convoluted way. The whole Windows 11 push has really f’d up embedded stuff.
Yup, A-B is in our industry, and get the majority of the PLC work, but we make a pretty good living on being the antithesis of their model to the people that get it.
I understand the complaint about the underlying principle. But at the same time, if you want or need petty indulgences such as “remote start” then you should have to pay, hopefully a lot, for your laziness and gullibility. Stupidity should be painful, particularly in the wallet. ZFG
People in these parts ARE willing to pay for remote start, and some of it is not because of sheer laziness. Okay, maybe it is. But coming out to a vehicle that is nice and warm, and not freezing your balls or boobs off in a -40 below car is quite nice in the dead of Winter. I saw where we may hit -50 below the week of Christmas, so you can sure as hell bet I will enjoy being “lazy”. But here is a kicker for you: Some of the new vehicles that come with auto start, you are only “allowed” to start the vehicle (remotely) twice, and it only runs for ten minutes at a time. Please. Some of the “gifts” these car manufactures offer are not worth the effort.
‘That’s a tidy little revenue stream.’ — eric
This week I ordered an item from Home Depot online. Minutes later, an email from a credit card issuer offered me a $10 rebate if I signed up for their browser-based app that applies discounts automatically.
Turns out, though, that the app demands access to EVERY website you visit. Capital One is using this surveillance to create complete consumer profiles, including their interests, political leanings, how they learn about and search for products, etc.
As the old saying goes, “If it’s free, YOU are the product.” Just say no to spyware, which includes nearly all phone apps these days. One of the most ludicrous examples was a heated blanket which required a phone app to unlock all of its features — and which demanded access to the phone’s location services (GPS). So the price of keeping your bed warm was being tracked night and day. I returned it.
“ So the price of keeping your bed warm was being tracked night and day. I returned it.”
Pretty much like being a married man…
AH HA HA HA … submit to the velvet shackles!
“One of the most ludicrous examples was a heated blanket which required a phone app to unlock all of its features”
The wife bought a powered cat litter box that did the same. It no longer had the “Cycle” button on the top of the unit, like the picture and reviews had shown, but instead you HAD to use your phone. It was the only way it worked. Well, sort of. Took me all of 10 minutes to reverse engineer, yank the board and receiver out, and solder a push button back on.
Ticks me off that the time and effort they put into making it user unfriendly, though.
Just like the “free” thermostats the gas company offered last year, only catch was you had to hook them up to the internet, thereby giving someone else control of your home. No more heat for you peasant! you’ve exceeded your quota for the month. No thank you, I’m old and it gets cold here, I prefer to be comfortable in my own house.
I remember the start of this “smart thermostat” BS some years back.
Some place in Colorado, heat wave and the Elec. Co. dialed off people’s AC boy were they pissed – long day at work come home to a 85 degree house or worse.
Ditto on “old and comfortable” my limit is 70 overnight, 72 daytime in the winter and summer AC no warmer than 75. Where’s my bourbon and get off my lawn.
Ha ha ha, I remember reading a story (out of California, no less) where the authorities can remotely shut off your air conditioner in the Summer, if they think you are using too much energy. Yeah, the joys of the smart grid, combined with connected appliances.
Grocery stores have probably been doing it the longest. Think Costco, BJ’s Wholesale, Wal-Mart, Amazon, and then all the stores with Saving Club cards. I was watching a video on YT that grocery stores have used so many AI programs that they already know what you are going to buy and how much you are willing to pay for it. They will charge different rates for the same product to different individuals.
Ways to get around this: 1) set up one card for the whole family (siblings, parent, aunts/uncles) and everybody use the same phone number to retrieve the same deals; 2) set it up through a business (harder to track individuals this way); 3) don’t download anything; 4) always pay cash…your credit card is a dead give away.
Your area code plus 867-5309 works in almost all of them, if you punch it in using the alternative entry option. Even if you use a credit card it still makes deciphering some of the signal from noise difficult. If you use cash they’d have to use other variables, like finding a time or day pattern or increasingly facial recognition, to try to individualize your specific purchases. It’s also important to change your appearance and vary your routines so you don’t fall into a predictable pattern.
That is my phone at Ollie’s! 😉
“They will charge different rates for the same product to different individuals.”
For online purchases – yes, I could see them doing that. But how could they do that at the cash register? Where we shop for groceries, the price of each product scanned appears on a screen visible to the shopper — before the checkout girl asks for a membership card or associated phone number, or any such thing. How would the store know who I am beforehand?
No sympathy for buyers of new cars that “discover” that features are now subscription based and that these subscriptions are expensive.
FAFO.
Everybody wants to be the cable guy. Charing a monthly fee for something that used to be free.
The cable was never free. They all want to be a government, with tax revenue.
Funny thing about cable TV, one of the selling points was not having to watch ads. As soon as a critical mass was subscribing to cable, that changed.
Between “xyz as a service”, the tipping culture at restaurants, and the non-stop begging for “charity”, this grumpy old man has had enough. Wonder if the Amish would accept me? I don’t really have any skills they need tho…
My Lord, this “subscription” to use anything and everything is not only annoying, but getting out of hand! I am surprised that people are not standing up and saying “no”! There is no way in hell I am paying extra for “features” in my vehicle that should come standard at time of purchase, especially given the price I am paying per month in car payments. Ha ha, and as for the pig, yeah, I do that, as well, Eric. There is one long stretch of road out in BFE that-during the Summer when the roads are clear-people speed down it. However, at the one end, a LEO likes to hide next to the trees in a turn-off, and cannot be seen by people coming from the south. One day, I saw the LEO from the north, and I passed him. Saw a trucker coming in the other lane, and flashed my lights at him. He waved to me on the way by. Yeah, he understood.