Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

was posted here sometime ago:<p>The door refused to open. It said, &quot;Five cents, please.&quot; He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. &quot;I&#x27;ll pay you tomorrow,&quot; he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. &quot;What I pay you,&quot; he informed it, &quot;is in the nature of a gratuity; I don&#x27;t have to pay you.&quot; &quot;I think otherwise,&quot; the door said. &quot;Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.&quot; In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. &quot;You discover I&#x27;m right,&quot; the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt&#x27;s money-gulping door. &quot;I&#x27;ll sue you,&quot; the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, &quot;I&#x27;ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.&quot;<p>(Philip K. Dick: Ubik)

That is just bullshit.<p>A $8&#x2F;mo charge for a app based remote start? I could live with that. Servers need power, the app needs updates etc.<p>A $8&#x2F;mo charge for something which does not incur costs for Toyota? Hell no.<p>It seems like bit by bit - every single industry is going down a fucked up route. TVs with built in ads? Cars with pay-by-month features? DRM locked coffee machines? I really hope, there is some sort of evil-bullshit-corp ranking homepage.

And the toxic trend of corporate short-term-ism continues...<p>This is clearly set up as a gotcha with a 3 year&#x2F;10 year &quot;trial&quot; included, then suddenly $80(!) a year. The irony is that both periods are right around the time different demographics start to consider a new vehicle, and Toyota has just pulled this nonsense.<p>You may be thinking $80&#x2F;year isn&#x27;t so bad if it includes breakdown coverage&#x2F;SOS button, but you&#x27;d be mistaken. The $80&#x2F;year is ONLY for their &quot;Remote Connect&quot; service (app stuff, remote lock&#x2F;unlock&#x2F;start and notifications), you also need to pay another $80&#x2F;year for &quot;Safety Connect&quot; (breakdown, SOS, stolen vehicle location), &quot;Wi-Fi Connect&quot; starting at $420&#x2F;year for 2GB, and &quot;Destination Assist&quot; for $80&#x2F;year.<p>So you could be paying $660 per year OR MORE for your Toyota vehicle subscriptions alone.<p>edited&#x2F;fixed: &quot;per year&quot; now, instead of a confusing mix of per month <i>and</i> per year. Also, originally miscalculated the per year total and mislabelled it on top (was &quot;$275 per month&quot; which is double-wrong).

The solution is to vote with your wallet. These days consumers are pretty weak willed though and are willing to put up with almost any level of abuse for their shiny new toy. Look at what consumers are willing to (overpay) for during the pandemic as an example of that. $500 NVIDIA graphics cards going for $2000...<p>Eventually people fed up with it will &quot;jailbreak&quot; their cars like the farmers did with John Deere tractors. Then people might face legal action or maybe even jail just to drive their cars as intended. Fun future.

Sigh...<p>While I look forward to having an electric car someday, the trend in new cars does not look promising. Far too many instances of car companies having too much control, because of the advent of internet-connected vehicles.<p>Is there a solution to this? I don&#x27;t know. Especially because I can see legislation cementing these sorts of practices in very much convoluted ways.<p>One can only hope competing car brands emerge whose competitive advantage is along the lines of &quot;Your car, you can do whatever the fuck you want with it&quot;.

Stellantis (the current owner of Chrysler&#x2F;Jeep&#x2F;Dodge&#x2F;etc) has announced that they hope to get $22 billion a year from their customers through post-sale service charges.[1]<p><i>“Software will improve our business model, disconnecting hardware from software ... shifting the center of gravity of our business,” Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares said Tuesday during the company’s “Software Day.” Tavares said profit margins for those services are expected to be more comparable to those of a technology company rather than a traditional automaker. The additional revenue stream could potentially double what the automaker makes today, CFO Richard Palmer said.</i><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;12&#x2F;07&#x2F;stellantis-plans-to-generate-22point5-billion-in-new-software-revenue-by-2030.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;12&#x2F;07&#x2F;stellantis-plans-to-generate...</a>

This is such a sleazy game to play, and it looks to be getting more popular as corporations realize the average consumer just accepts it. Zero Motorcycles, the longest-standing electric motorcycle manufacturer, has announced for their 2022 flagship models that things like battery capacity and charge rate will be gated behind one-time in-app purchases, which is mind-boggling. Having to lug around batteries you can&#x27;t charge to full capacity on a bike, where space and weight are at a premium, actually makes the product worse if you don&#x27;t pay the rent. Hoping this strategy blows up in their face, but all indications suggest it&#x27;s going to be lucrative and the angry minority will just have to eat it.

I wonder if this, too, is a symptom of near-zero interest rates.<p>With an interest rate of zero, future cash flows are valued equal to present cash flows. That increases the net present value of recurring payments (approaching infinity, actually). So it becomes increasingly attractive for companies to discount the initial sale price in exchange for a recurring payment.<p>In a higher interest rate environment, that wouldn&#x27;t be the case, as recurring payments would discount the further they are in the future, converging to a much smaller sum, while revenue earned today from the initial purchase would be more highly valued.

If this keeps up, some used cars will have a higher value than new ones. People will have to break EULAs to drive cars in mines or buildings with no radio access. &quot;Error: please tow your car to an RF access area to enable movement...&quot;

I don&#x27;t know how could anyone think it is a good move inside toyota. $8 falls in the range that it is irritating for consumers yet the lifetime revenue per car is probably 1% of the average car value(5 year lifetime with 2 years free means $250 lifetime revenue). Is it worth it for 1% increase in revenue.

I&#x27;ve been a Toyota Tacoma guy for the last 22 years (and counting). Three Tacomas and I have a son that we&#x27;re deciding on a vehicle for in the coming year. This is how you take someone with massive brand affinity, someone who would even likely pass that brand affinity to the next generation, and push them to look at other options. Charging monthly for a service that isn&#x27;t cloud enabled? If this is true, Toyota, you are literally dead to me.

Ownership is evaporating due to technology and a lack of viable alternatives. The idea is to make personal ownership more expensive and trouble that it&#x27;s worth (monetize misery) so that manufacturers can run their own FSD car sharing fleet so they can charge you whatever they want. Rent-seeking, oligopoly FTW.

This is a classic example of price discrimination. Slowly but surely, companies such as Toyota will converge to a state where every consumer individually pays the maximum amount that the consumer is willing to pay for the product.<p>$8 a month may not seem like much compared to the cost of a car, but that&#x27;s the point. Toyota will be able to get free extra money from a large population of people (many of whom will later barely even remember that they are incurring this regular cost).

When I found out you could pay $2000 to make your Tesla accelerate 1 second faster 0-60 it made me wonder what&#x27;s next. Want to role you windows down more than half way? $500. Want your air-conditioner to run on high? $600. Want you seats to recline 15 degrees more? $550. Want the car to make sharper turns? $2500 Want the radio to remember more than 3 favorites? $150<p>Etc etc etc.... I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s coming because it can.

It is a common opinion in this thread that it is unethical to charge for enabling a feature that only needs the local communication between a key fob and a car. And that it is fine if there is a cloud in-between, such as remote start from a smartphone, because it has maintenance costs.<p>If majority of the car buyers agree with this distinction, it would simply create an incentive to route more communication through the cloud. Besides, this option makes tracking and control easier.<p>I would argue that the maintaining a server does not have a substantial difference that singles it out from the other work that a car maker does to support the car owners: downloads of manuals, managing recalls, parts inventory, etc. Subscription business model has no place here.

Related: Safety as DLC? Motorcycle Airbag vest will not deploy if you miss a payment<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linustechtips.com&#x2F;topic&#x2F;1335312-safety-as-dlc-motorcycle-airbag-vest-will-not-deploy-if-you-miss-a-payment&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linustechtips.com&#x2F;topic&#x2F;1335312-safety-as-dlc-motorc...</a>

Toyota seems to have lost their way. They&#x27;ve been late to the EV game, they wasted a lot of time touting hydrogen as a solution, and now they seem to be dead set on screwing over their relationship with the customer.<p>Here in Norway the electrification of automobiles has come quite far, and one thing that is quite striking is that all these new brands keep popping up. Years ago I read a lot of papers on incumbents in the face of technological disruption. If you look at the last 100 or so years, only about 15% of incumbents manage to hold on to their dominant position in the face of technological disruption.<p>I wonder if Toyota is going to have a significant market share in 20-30 years. A lot of the decisions made by the top brass seem to indicate that they&#x27;re reaching the end of the industrial life cycle.

One less car to shop for.<p><i>scribbling out Toyota</i><p>(heading out to the delearships, non-Toyota, that is.)

I love my 2020 RAV4 hybrid. Like absolutely love it.<p>But after an incredible horrible experience with Toyota connected services support re renewing and issues with the connected services not working, this is my last Toyota EVER.<p>When this lease is up, I will go shop for a new car at any vendor other than Toyoya.

SaaS is eating the world. Software, music, movies, games, books. Now the car industry and big pharma are flirting with this model.

Actually this is fantastic for someone like <i>me</i> - assuming there are no security holes of course.<p>I <i>don&#x27;t</i> want my next car to have remote start or remote anything. If not paying the subscription allows me to make sure that that feature is not enabled, it&#x27;s great news, for <i>me</i>.<p>Of course, different people have different preferences and needs.

This is bullshit. I will never own a car that does that (or a car from a company that does that). I recommend everyone here also refuses to abide such behavior. Vote with your wallet. If you don’t fight back against the dystopia you hate, you’ll get it by default.

Maybe we need some kind of &quot;truth in owning&quot; analogous to truth-in-lending regulations.

Does anyone have a good lead on where I should direct my outrage, where decision-makers might be listening?<p>(I&#x27;m a Toyota owner, but not effected by this.)

Honda charges something like US$15 for a CR2032 for the key fob.<p>The person who was dealing with my car was too embarrassed to charge me, so I got it for free. Still, it makes me want to rethink my relationship with Honda.<p>It seems that Toyota might not be the way either.

If this was pitched to me at the dealership I&#x27;d just laugh at the salesman&#x27;s face and leave. Or get all the add-ons &quot;forever for free&quot; as part of the sale.<p>This makes (any) brand look incredibly cheap.<p>However, If someone wants to sell me Car as a SaaS, I&#x27;m interested.<p>By that, I mean as soon as there&#x27;s an issue with the car, I simply flag it in the App and an employee comes to my place and swap it over for the same model&#x2F;trim (transfers whatever I have in the trunk too). Then I just keep using the replacement car until either I stop using the service or it has an issue or is due for maintenance.

Is this happening to Toyotas in Japan? Feels like the “un-Japanese” thing to do. I remember getting a cell phone as a college student. I had AU but my Japanese friends had Docomo. Docomo was way more than AU for the first year but the longer you were a customer the cheaper it was. It felt like real loyalty. I was trained on the US system that the fort year was the cheapest me then they increased the rates. The complete opposite.

I&#x27;ve always liked and bought Toyota brand cars for the past 13 years, but not anymore. Good job, Toyota, because I am currently in the market for a car and between this type of thing, telemetry crap, and no electric cars that are decent, you&#x27;ve lost a loyal customer. I hope one of your marketing&#x2F;sales&#x2F;exec employees see this and realize you&#x27;re not doing the right thing.

BMW tried to add a subscription for iOS CarPlay. Seems they had enough backlash that they canceled it. Total bullshit they would even try that.

That&#x27;s ridiculous. For a fixed cost feature you can charge $8k once if you want. Even if that&#x27;s more than what I&#x27;d pay over the cars entire lifetime in $8&#x2F;mo fees, I can choose whether or not to purchase the fixed cost fee. I don&#x27;t mind that the fob costs $5 or that the disabled fob is shipped to customers that didn&#x27;t get the $8k fob option.

Meanwhile my Ford allows me to use the app, and connected services without a subscription. Included in the cost of the car.

Interesting that if you purchased upgraded audio, you get this remote unlock feature free for the first 10 years instead of the first 3.<p>Perhaps in the future they&#x27;ll sell all the vehicles with the same audio system, but just disable certain speakers or add noise to the signal if you&#x27;ve not paid your monthly premium audio fee?

A Carmaker’s $23 Billion Plan To Keep You Paying Long After You’ve Bought Your Car<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jalopnik.com&#x2F;a-carmaker-s-23-billion-plan-to-keep-you-paying-long-a-1848172449" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jalopnik.com&#x2F;a-carmaker-s-23-billion-plan-to-keep-yo...</a>

Subaru charges $12.50&#x2F;month I wish it was $8 a year. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.subaru.com&#x2F;engineering&#x2F;starlink&#x2F;safety-security.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.subaru.com&#x2F;engineering&#x2F;starlink&#x2F;safety-security....</a>

Guys this is remote start. Not a key fob entry&#x2F;start service.<p>Sometimes this can be done via cell phone app. And there is always a monthly subscription for this option.<p>But no it is not a monthly subscription for starting your car with your key fob in the pocket.

The whole smart keys trend is the worst case of taking a perfectly functional thing and ruining it with unnecessary features.<p>I hate them so much. They all cost a boatload of cash to replace and give me absolutely no benefit over a regular key.

Reminds me of the mountain dew drink verification can greentext. The most comical of dystopias<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;4chan&#x2F;dgGvgKF" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;4chan&#x2F;dgGvgKF</a>

Only a matter of time before this happened. When Tesla OTA updates breaks autopilot or they remotely disable it [0], I thought to myself surely this isn&#x27;t setting a good precedence for the rest of the industry. Why settle for profits from just selling the car when you can also get owners to pay you a recurring fee every month!<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tweaktown.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;70481&#x2F;used-model-has-autopilot-feature-remotely-disabled-by-tesla&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tweaktown.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;70481&#x2F;used-model-has-autopilo...</a>

A.R.S.E. Automated Remote Start Enrollment

The joy of AAAS! (Automobiles as a Service)

Bullshit like this is why I had to go against my normal no-consumer-credit rules and just cop a loan to buy a (6 year old) &quot;forever car&quot; this year while they could still be had with reasonable mileage. I can&#x27;t imagine any features that would tempt me into the malware, short-termism, and invasive surveillance that&#x27;s going into cars these days. Leaving aside the fact that almost every new car is a boring SUV or imitation SUV and they&#x27;re all a flat wide sea of generic blandness.

I&#x27;ll never buy Toyota after seeing this anti-customer behavior. They were high on my buy list too. Like seriously, forever in my avoid at all costs list now.

If it&#x27;s buried in the fine print, I wonder how long it&#x27;ll be until a major class action suite forces Toyota to enable the fob.

My Volvo has a remote start option, but it costs $200&#x2F;year to subscribe to the Volvo On-Call service to be able to use it.

The real joke is the Toyota app. It feels sloppy and rushed. Is there any protection or opt out from location collection? I wish I could wrap a faraday cage type thing over the 4g chip but I have no idea where it is or how to find it. They probably added it to the same fuse as the ECU so you can’t get rid of it.

Uh oh. Putting off their original plans to shift to EV production, increasing their contract &amp; temp worker pool only to then lay them off in certain &quot;down&quot; quarters to maintain their &quot;no layoff&quot; of FTEs policy, and now this.<p>Pun intended; what the heck is happening under the hood there?

Coming to Smart TV remote controls soon!

Gentlemembers, I thought that after posting about the news from Stellantis ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29469914" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29469914</a> ) a week ago:<p>we now now need an Open Source Car.

This should become illegal. What if the producer of your pacemaker decides to bill you monthly? Or, in a less sinister note, what if your fridge will keep your food at 20C unless you pay a monthly sum to have 5C inside?

I personally wrote Toyota a message to their facebook page letting them know how disappointed I am in their decision to do this. Shame on them and I hope others voice their dislike for this change and force a change of mind.

I just want to point out that the overall sense of superiority in the comments here is somehow funny. I feel like we’re also the “dumb average Joe” for a lot of companies, and most often for way more than $8&#x2F;mo.

What&#x27;s the average duration before replacing your car? 3-4 years?<p>$8&#x2F;month for 3-4 years sounds absurd if you consider other fees such as repair fee, annual checkups, insurance, parking fees, tickets etc.

I just bought a new Toyota truck this past year. It blows my mind that I have to pay extra for remote start in 2021. I didn’t realize it when I bought it, otherwise I would have thought twice.

To keep breathing the air on mars, please top up your Musk-ways air card. Until then please apply the asphyxiation device or expect to pay for air outside of your tariffed rate.

I simply can&#x27;t understand the reasoning other than a cash grab. OEMs, like Toyota, are really showing their true colors to the consumer. They don&#x27;t care about you.

Fair enough charging for the service as there are costs involved but $8 is criminal, nearly the price of a Netflix subscription.

GM charges ~$15&#x2F;mo just to use the remote start from their app. I would be fine paying a fee, but $15 is just insane.

I assumed the Toyota brand still had great goodwill, so I&#x27;m surprised they&#x27;d tarnish it like this.

The author is very naive if he thinks the feature was made open in the older cars with 3G connectivity because of the sunset of 3G as a courtesy for those customers.<p>Given the context it is far more logical to assume they did not enhance the older cars, but instead, they decided not to cut access while they could because then they wouldn&#x27;t be able to enable it remotely should the customer renew their subscription.

It&#x27;s not even the money! It&#x27;s the scumminess and extortionist attitudes that pisses you off!!

Wow. So Toyota are just going to burn a generation of goodwill from their customers in one swoop?

Why people remotely start their car is beyond my comprehension most of the time. Unless you&#x27;re in an extreme climate and absolutely have to bring the car&#x27;s interior temperature to something survivable, what&#x27;s the point? We don&#x27;t have to warm up the engine anymore past a few seconds either.<p>All I can think of is the waste of fuel and unnecessary GHG.

Acura also charges an annual fee for remote start -- though it&#x27;s through an app vs. fob.

That sounds like something Tesla would do... I&#x27;m a bit surprised coming from Toyota.

Does the monthly fee include free key-fob battery replacement? Or is that still $200?

My Lexus (owned by Toyota) costs more than that per month, iirc. I refuse to pay it.

I’m sorry, you don’t get to retroactively remove features like this :-&#x2F;

Good reason not to shell out for remote start in the first place!

Remote start seems like a gimmick anyway, completely unnecessary.

Is there potential ways to reverse-engineer this crap?

car companies are slowly becoming phone companies. Hope we don&#x27;t see days when we&#x27;ll have to subscribe to a plan to use the car.

As a Tesla stock owner, I&#x27;m glad Toyota introduced this feature. If every car company keeps stepping back 20 years of technology, soon Tesla will own the <i>entire</i> market.

Other than a Tacoma, no reason to buy a Toyota.

booooooooooo<p>this is why SaaS sucks

Would this start a class-action lawsuit?

Yep. No thanks.

I consider this a totally unnecessary thing. When they start charging to start my car, then we&#x27;ve got a problem. However, I do resent them inflating the base price by putting more unwanted h&#x2F;w into the base model only to be activated as SaaS.<p>EDIT: Snark removal.

I read a quote once, paraphrasing:<p><i>&gt; geek will figure out cars before car people figure out computers</i><p>Between this and similar issues (e.g. Porsche &#x2F; BMW charging subscription to their updating map data), it’s clear how true that quote was.<p>Not only are they massively losing to Tesla, they don’t even <i>know</i> they’re losing, or why. This is what you get when you hire MBAs and consultants.