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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
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!
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
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.
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.
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 ) _ / ¯
What if, instead of just attempting to retreat into a shrinking world that will eventually disappear, we all collectively worked together to fix things?
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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/)
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.
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?
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.
Do you live in an area where it snows frequently?
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.
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
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
Just a reminder: shit like this doesn't easily happen where a regulation like GDPR is in effect.
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.
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.
Until that voids the warranty or the car refuses to start without internet access. Why do you think the depravity will stop here?
So nothing of value is lost.
If you consider updates to be zero value, sure.
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.
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.
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.)
“Ok", "Remind me later", "To opt-out, call..."
The jokes write themselves in 2025
> 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.)
It's incredible that companies get the right to do this. What a corruption.
"Agree to kangaroo court or be unable to go anywhere forever." I wonder what people will choose!
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!
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
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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
> 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.
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
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 ) _ / ¯
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?
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
black construction paper?
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)
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
Getting a pop-up like this would be a sure way to get me to never buy your brand again.
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.
Have you contacted your representatives and demanded something that would improve the current situation?
So what's the collective action? Any proposed regulations to sign on to?
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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.
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...
Pro tip: if you buy the new car, the ad goes away for a year ;)
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.
Reason # 10034 why I do not want a TV screen in my car or truck.
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
This kind of behavior should re-open the return window for the car.
I wonder if we're gonna see a class action lawsuit.
Any screen is just an advertising delivery system.
Relevant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g
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...
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.
Here is an idea for a project - open source street legal EV car platform.
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.
Saw this in my car this morning myself. I only noticed it as I was getting out and right before turning it off.
1. Locate cellular modem.
2. Disable it.
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/)
Nope.
Same company that is planning to deprive customers of CarPlay even though virtually all of their customers want it.