A fool and his money are soon parted. From the same class of vehicles that tried to lock heated seats behind a monthly subscription.
You know what’s nice? Those cars can F right off. I won’t buy one new. And never will buy one used.
Always will be “budget” cars (Corolla, Civic, Versa, etc.) that won’t screw around with this crap because the buyers can’t afford to screw around with it.
TRY to paywall a heated seat in a Civic. I dare Honda. It won’t be more than 10 minutes before someone has it badly wired up like an aftermarket subwoofer.
Even Toyota is doing this now. They locked features like the digital tire pressure gauge behind a paywall on their app.
Isn’t a tire pressure monitoring system legally required on all cars now?
It is, but the minimum requirement is a “low pressure” notification when tire pressure drops past a certain point. So instead of a gauge you’d get a warning light.
Ahh so like having a low fuel light with no fuel needle
warning light
No longer an idiot/warning light. It’ll now be called a “poor’s light”.
I have never owned or operated a car and this doesn’t really make me want to.
IOTs are pushing us towards subscription hell-scape. We must demand dumb, non-connected machines and devices.
Never EVER would I buy a car from any manufacturer that does this.
You might not have a choice if they all decide to do it. Companies are actually kinda good at that kind of collective actions sometimes.
When this becomes the norm. I look to the jailbreak community for hope.
I WILL download a car!
Neither would I, but the majority of these cars are going into corporate fleets. I’ll have one at the end of the year. I assume corporate isn’t going to pay for the optionals so I’ll be stuck with a crippled car through no choice of my own.
What job/country do you work in where you still get a corporate car?
IT in Flanders, Belgium. Company cars are almost a given for white collar jobs and even many blue collar ones here since regular income from work is taxed to high heavens. Companies look for other ways to compensate employees without actually having to raise their base salary. Just recently this shifted to electric-only, so most company fleets now are stopping leases on diesel & gas cars and replacing them with EV’s.
Just don’t upgrade your firmware so you can jailbreak it later.
Or just don’t buy a car that needs to connect to the internet. This is beyond stupid
Virgin car ownership vs chad mass transit
Why they just can’t go to a car mechanic and like change that?
We have this issue in my industry. You have to have the (as we say) the golden code to unlock features of a device you already own. The DLC of bullshit.
A lot of cars already have access ports made by third parties to flash ECU tunes on.
If cars like this become the norm, I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of these to bypass paywalls on your own cars
