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 ?
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.
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).
$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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.