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 ?
Charging for that is so criminal. My 2010 vehicle can do most those things already for no recurring fees
Tesla’s run on Linux and have already been jailbroken, the future is now.
The crack was done because of a flaw in the AMD CPU and not the Linux component. My understanding is it’s only good for temporary override of the subscription enforcement.
Can’t wait till a nefarious actor hacks it.
Reminds me of that movie on Netflix I just watched - leave the world behind, this happens
Can’t wait till it gets brought to a service station and Tesla intentionally bricks it
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.
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
Fuck sakes. Those features were free on my 2020 Telluride.
The care package with roadside assistance seems reasonable, though your insurance usually already cover road assistance. The plus package is insane though, they charge that much just to enable remote start via their app?
Roadside assistance doesn’t even make sense as a subscription. And, for that price, none of them do.
These features require the cloud, which costs money and uses carbon. If you don’t want them, as many don’t, you shouldn’t have to force the company to price them in at the purchase.
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If you’re in range for these to work, the fob will also turn the car on. These features are useful if you park at a public place or on a large campus.
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Can you get remote start/climate without a subscription though? Because those do not need the cloud.
Install a modchip, or as we used to call them a “remote starter” lol
I’m sure someone still makes a product that you can splice into the wiring harness. And if they don’t… There’s a market for it
If the remote can do it with a local signal, yes, but that’s not the feature in the picture, which uses the app I think.
How remote are we talking about?
Subaru offer a certain set of keys for it iirc. Their software is absolute garbage though. Either get an older model or one with physical AC controls.
You wouldn’t download [the basic features of an item you already purchased.]
How is unlocking your car over the internet a basic feature?
Your oxygen subscription expires in 2 weeks. Please take note that absence of oxygen leads to hypoxia. Due to the detrimental effects of the war in Ukraine we have been forced to increase prices by 420%. Would you like to extend your subscription?
How is that related to unlocking your car from your phone?
Both are, or at least should be, ridiculous.
Yes, an app costs money. Yes, servers do cost money. But do they need to use servers? No. For example, self-hosting. Or just connecting the car to the cellular network (which they already do, mind you) and just let the phone talk to it directly, no manufacturer server required. Just pay an ISP for cell service and you’re set. Are there problems with such a solution security-wise? Yes. And while I’m not an expert in cybersecurity I think the risks are about the same for this and a server model.
Hell, they might not even use servers for anything other than checking if you’ve paid your subscription in order to lower costs already (as if a few thousand unlock requests a minute couldn’t be managed without a problem on a Raspberry Pi). They don’t need some huge, expensive and power-hungr supercomputer for that, so I don’t see a need for such a steep price.
Are the features useful? Absolutely. Would someone be willing to pay this price? Also absolutely. But the festures objectively don’t cost that much to maintain and competition should and could put an end to it.
It’s just corporate greed, and it feels to me as if we’re getting closer and closer to the fabled oxygen subscription, and we have to call manufacturers out on their bullshit while we still have air to breathe.
Just don’t buy their cars or at least their subscriptions. Get your car ‘jailbreaked’. What will they do, remote disable it? I think we’re still not that far down the dystopia plotline that a boycott couldn’t work.
You want to selfhost your own server that communicates with your car so you can ulock your car from your phone? Are you dumb? Do you want to lose your car in a week?
Delusional.
Because the cost of the app to do that isn’t $60 a year.
No the cost of the Servers and the maintenance and the work required to have all that kept online and secure is.
Do you think admins and security guys work for free?I’ll refer you to unexpctedkeg’s comment
will refer to my already posted answer to that comment
Why do I need to unlock my car over the internet? What is the use case over a FOB?
Nice strawman.
Dont get the subscription if youre fine with a fob.How is asking you a follow-up question a strawman exactly? What do you think a strawman is?
Because the question was answered in my original question. You don’t. That’s why it’s an additional subscription feature.
My question was why the guy claimed it was a basic feature when it never was.
And then you came along and asked “well hurr durr why do i need to unlock my car from my phone”
You don’t. So you don’t need the subscription. Done.That’s why it’s an additional subscription feature.
So why is it worth a subscription? You’re defending it as something that is not a basic feature that validates the subscription, but asking what the feature actually provides is somehow a strawman?
Oh you were seriously asking? It allows me to unlock the car from my couch when my wife wants to get something out the car real quick. Or i don’t wanna carry my keys around.
I can also start the A/C 30 minutes before i leave so i dont have to freeze to death in winter.
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The only problem with services as a subscription is THE FUCKING IDIOTS THAT PAY FOR THEM
If nobody fell for shit like that, manufacturers would drop it like boiling diarrhea
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
Agreed.
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No, you should choose a vehicle with but steal it and pirat the subscription software.
Not until my 2007 Tundra literally collapses into a pile of rust and plastic. Hopefully it’s not too late by then.
If you buy an older car, you will likely still have none of the functions listed in those supscriptions. Just don’t buy the subscriptions.
Lmao imagine when it get vanced to work without subscription.
I miss when you didn’t need a cell connection for remote start, like my fob can lock and unlock my car from the third floor of my building why can’t I just have a button on my remote that does the same as unlocking my doors.
Although, the roadside kinda makes $60 a year worth it just for the peace of mind, gotta atleast give em that.
My 22 civic remote starts from the fob. So they are still out there.
All of the features listed rely on external services and servers. I think it’s completely fair to put them behind a subscription. This example isn’t like the seat warmer subscription where you unlock hardware.
If you don’t like subscriptions, don’t buy them. You can still drive your car without all of this extra crap.
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.
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.
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.
Based on the context of the other features, I assume this isn’t “start your car through your remote” but “use an app to start your car”. Same with all the other stuff.
Some manufacturers give this stuff out for free… for a while. There’s no money in giving away free services, so assume any internet operated service by any manufacturer can and will make you pay for a subscription.
They’ll make you pay for it, while simultaneously collecting usage data via the app, and further turning a profit off you.
“Usage data” for these types of features is completely worthless to anyone but car manufacturers, and KIA isn’t going to sell their own analytics to a competitor.
More likely, this data will be used to justify shutting down servers for certain old models of car when only a few people still use them.
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.
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.
If it was worthless they wouldn’t put a fucking 4g modem on all of them “for free” and siphoning all the telemetry away
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. Do even the after market solutions have subscriptions.
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).
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.
$59 is still too much to ask for what amounts to just a few API calls to some cloud service.
Roadside assistance is more than a few API calls, though. 5 bucks a month sounds pretty cheap for that, though I suppose it depends on the quality of the assistance you get.
They could’ve just as easily put a $600 optional upgrade package with all of these features and I doubt anyone would’ve complained. I really don’t get what the big deal is here.
I don’t really see the problem with these silly extras being priced that highly. If you think the price is too high, don’t buy it, and wait for the price to drop, or only subscribe for the time you actually need this service (i.e. when you lose your spare key, are waiting for another one, and you want to be sure you can enter your own car within a short time period). Beats paying through the nose at the dealership.
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.
Remote lock & unlock? It’s literally been a feature of dumb cars since the 90s.
I don’t remember cars from the 90s coming with app support for iOS and Android. I don’t recall the keys having several miles of range, either.
Of course your car key still works, this is about the internet connected app.
Then maybe don’t make them rely on external servers? Your car has a computer, put the server there.
How would you accomplish that? IPv6 is available for only half the world, and no ISP is going to hand out dedicated IP addresses to cars. Even with peer to peer technologies you need some kind of external server for STUN/TURN. The best you can probably do is Bluetooth, but that’s spotty and unstable inside the car, let alone outside it where the metal frame gets in the way of its own antenna.
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.
In a perfect world you could host your own server for this functionality so you can keep using your car even if the manufacturer takes their shit offline, but lacking that I think I’d rather have no service features than rely on server daemons running inside the car.
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.
One central server is easier to update and secure than thousands of cars. Now you have two security boundaries instead of a hundred.
You can also easily upgrade servers whereas software updates to cars are all done by expensive mechanics (unless you push the over the internet, but then you’re back to having to host a server anyway), and you don’t need to worry about murdering flash storage like Tesla accidentally did or maintain knowledge and workarounds for the terrible custom compiler for the shit tier SoC that was certified for automotive.
