Toyota announces remote start to be paid subscription on all vehicles.

Blind_Io

"Be The Match" Registered
DONOR
Joined
Apr 5, 2006
Messages
24,200
Location
Utah
Car(s)
See signature
That's rather bold for a company that's arguably behind the rest of the major manufacturers in terms of technology. 10 years free with the premium audio isn't a terrible deal though.
 
Watch this decision be rolled back in a few months
 
Whatever happened to making a product, selling it for a fair price, and being happy about it? Now every company wants to milk everything for all that they can get.
 
How long before it's discovered in the fine print that these "as a service" upgrades/features aren't covered by the car's warranty, and you'll need to buy a special warranty upgrade package to cover it.
 
How long before it's discovered in the fine print that these "as a service" upgrades/features aren't covered by the car's warranty, and you'll need to buy a special warranty upgrade package to cover it.

No, they charged €1000 for giving the car more power, which is perfectly reasonable.
Also, that's a one-time thing, not a subscription.

Exactly, and as long as you get this from the OEM, you're gonna be fine from a warranty perspective (otherwise they wouldn't offer it). It's chiptuning crap that's sold as delivering the same result as the OEM offer but for half price that's gonna screw that up (and which will get detected and deactivated by a software update at some point).
 
 
Just like farmers have to jailbreak their tractors, that will be the future. It should be a simple jailbreak or even redirect to a fake server (like a Raspberry Pi) that will always respond that you have to right subscription for any features in the car.
 
Interesting that, if their reasoning is true, they lost track of a legacy remote start feature and kept building it into the vehicle. The article says that Toyota claims it's a unofficial hack but it's not. As far back as the 07 Camry, one could get a dealer installed Toyota accessory remote engine start that uses that same key fob sequence to start the car:
 
Top