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Comment by cptskippy | Hacker News Reader

After buying an XM enabled car from a dealership, I was extremely disappointed when I started receiving weekly mailings and phone calls from them as my "trial" was expiring.

I am still pissed off about the lengths I had to go to in order to stop receiving communications from them. They refused to remove my contact information from their system and could not promise I wouldn't be contacted again in the future. I had to ultimately change all of my contact information to false information, fortunately the guy I was talking to was sympathetic to my plight and had no objections testing out the system to see what BS info it would take.

The whole escapade landed them on my short list of companies I will never do business with ever again.

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Sirius and Onstar are two of the worst things about my car purchase. I wonder the degree to which these partnerships hurt these car brands for short term profit.

Things I want in an OEM receiver: 1) Carplay/Android Auto, 2) Software updates for 1, 3) Radio, 4) To never do anything else (call me, install bloatware apps, reorder menus, etc).

> Sirius and Onstar are two of the worst things about my car purchase. I wonder the degree to which these partnerships hurt these car brands for short term profit.

Well, you're stuck with the car by the time this kicks in...

And, apparently, the OnStar experience has just recently (<12 months) gotten quite horrific--apparently it used to be an online thing but that wasn't intrusive enough. I made the salesman sit with me while I was signing up (Okay, you want your commission from this, you get to spend your time.). Verbally. Over a shitty, high-latency, low bandwidth voice connection.

The salesman sat there visibly appalled. The salesmen got his manager. The manager got somebody else. etc. By the time I was done, I had 7 different people from the dealership listening with shock on their faces.

Big manager: "Ummm, yeah, this is a problem. We are strongly encouraging our customers sign up for something that makes them angry. That's ... not good."

Apparently, nobody at the dealership had experienced a signup in the last 12 months.

> Sirius and Onstar are two of the worst things about my car purchase

I'd say your car purchase was an awesome experience.

You don't know enough about OnStar, then.

My experience was similar. I think I blocked the phone number they called from, and that seems to have been effective.

Unfortunately, though not a subscriber, my car stereo often defaults to the Sirius input when I start it. This mean I'm greeted with Sirius ads when I start my car. Usually, this ad literally consists of playing a really annoying buzzing/screeching sound, followed by someone explaining that if you subscribe, you won't have to listen to that sound. That's an .. interesting .. strategy.

I told them I sold my car, they stopped calling after that. It was still annoying.

I discussed that option with the person I talked to on the phone and that doesn't stop mail solicitations or prevent them from contacting you in the future.

I got the mailings (though not phone calls) when I recently bought a used car with a SiriusXM radio (2012 model), though they stopped completely by about two weeks after the trial period ended. They may as well have not bothered, since the car didn't have a nav system built in so I was piping all the audio from my phone anyway.

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