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Comment by matthewdgreen | Hacker News Reader

$8/mo is genuinely a lot of money for this kind of infrastructure, even if there are developers and servers to be paid for. Assume that there are only 100,000 users. This would imply $9.6M per year in revenue to cover infrastructure and dev salaries for a system that handles ~2 queries/day/customer! And 100,000 is a very small number. Presumably Toyota has millions of customers.

If you think that's reasonable, consider that Disney+ charges $8/mo for a system that streams gigabytes of HD video, and they still have money left over to pay actual movie stars.

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Tesla has a mobile app that can remotely turn on the climate controls, lock the car, open/close/crack open the windows, enable sentry mode, show the exact GPS location of your car, and more. In the car, you get GPS that is constantly updated.

And you pay $0/month for any of that.

They DO offer a $10/month "Premium Connectivity" package. That adds music streaming via Slacker Radio, Tidal, and Spotify, enables satellite images for the GPS, and allows video streaming (I don't recall the entire list of supported services, but it's pretty comprehensive, and I know includes Netflix, YouTube, Disney+, and Twitch, might also include Hulu and HBO).

Of course, if you're connected to WiFi (ie, using a hotspot on your phone, or parked at a location with WiFi), you can get all that streaming without paying the $10/month. Even if you don't pay for the premium connectivity package, you can play Spotify from your phone over Bluetooth.

The fact that Toyota would charge $8/month just for remote start is just evil. It's a charge designed purely to extract as much money from their customers as possible that does not at all reflect the actual cost to them.

As a reminder, "Premium Connectivity" package was originally included for with an unpublished end date for their vehicles, until it wasn't.

All of the remote controls you talk about being free are provided over cellular connections, in addition to nav, voice support, and telemetry being sent back to tesla.

as such, tesla is subject to the same economics as toyota, they have just decided to hide it in the price of the vehicles or on the backs of their investors. They pay AT&T to connect their vehicles to the internet.

Perhaps starlink will allow them to keep hiding the cost, perhaps not, especially if Tesla tries to turn the revenue knobs.

Tesla probably makes back all the money they spend on AT&T bandwidth through the Supercharger network. As long as the math continues to work out there's no need to introduce any new fees.

I will say it is kind of strange that Premium Connectivity has no data limit. If I could just figure out how to launch a personal hotspot from my Model 3, I could cut the cord with Comcast...

> I will say it is kind of strange that Premium Connectivity has no data limit. If I could just figure out how to launch a personal hotspot from my Model 3, I could cut the cord with Comcast...

I think you just highlighted why they will likely never allow a personal hotspot from the car.

How many people would gladly drop their home internet connection if they could just tether to the car which is only $10/month for unlimited data? It would cost Tesla a fortune unless they charged a hefty premium for hotspotting.

I'm not sure what you mean about the unpublished end date. The cars from back then still have it for free.

They announced the move to a fee model well in advance of actually doing it.

They've handled some things like this poorly at times, but this one they actually did right.

Honestly, though, I'd rather they have a revenue stream than not. Premium connectivity doesn't add any kind of necessary features; it's all just sort of nice to have.

The main experience is free and the premium connectivity fee helps pay for that infrastructure.

I had premium connectivity for a few months and didn't miss it one bit when it expired. navigation still works great and THIS really is a killer feature for Teslas as it makes roadtripping a breeze, since it's well-connected to the Supercharger network's status. The non-premium connectivity also helps facilitate payment for the Supercharger network, so it's not just a pure burden for Tesla.

I'm pretty satisfied with the service fee structure for Tesla. I'd rather have reasonable fees for things that make sense (like Premium connectivity, which has to pay royalties to geospatial mapping companies, artists, and a non-trivial data usage, or Supercharger which uses electricity and requires the chargers to be maintained by technicians) and a long-term sustainable financial situation than free, but crappy and declining, service. And certainly am glad it's not requiring me to pay for super simple things that should be free.

(So the AT&T fee for non-premium connectivity can partially be paid for by Supercharger fees since that's what it helps facilitate. ...supercharging ALSO being reasonably priced, less than equivalent gasoline for a comparable ICE car)

I have a 2014 model S and I’ve never paid for any of these features, yet have them all. Is this a model 3 thing?

I believe older cars got this for free forever, similar to unlimited supercharging.

> It's a charge designed purely to extract as much money from their customers as possible

I don't think that it is. I think that it is a charge designed purely to normalize the idea of paying for everything as a subscription.

The next generation of car buyers might not realize that this is ridiculous because by then _everything_ is a subscription, from their shoes to their haircuts.

There's literally zero infrastructure needed for this, it's only a connection between the fob and the car.

I'm happy they did this, so normal people might realize how much the frog is already boiled. This is absolute bullshit, fuck Toyota.

There are two main strategies in pricing something. Bottom up pricing is where you take the price to create / run the product / service and then add a profit margin. Top down pricing is where you find a price based off the value it provides independent of what it costs to actually make.

Right now you are looking at it from a bottom up pricing perspective when Toyota priced it using a top down strategy. The price isn't from being able to do those two queries, but from the value of being able to remote start your car or whatever.

Here the owners have had the car for three years. They are locked into this market, have no negotiating power, and cannot leave the contract (without a loss) because the price of the key fob subscription is going to be subtracted from the resale value of their car.

Legally, Toyota cars are now like timeshares: you "own" it, but usage fees may increase arbitrairly over time. It's probably legal, but it's a shitty move to charge the consumer the price the market will bear when the consumer has no negotiating power.

I wonder if it is even possible to add aftermarket remote start features.

The infrastructure is completely paid for. Automotive companies extensively monetize telematics data even for cars which do not have telematics purchased. Where you go and when - and things like air temperature, whether the wipers are on, etc - is all sold. It wouldn't surprise me if they pass along data from the infotainment system as well.

Ford offers a bunch of free telematics services for fleet operators. You can pay them and get more functionality, but they'll track your fuel economy, odometers, fault codes, etc - with a really slick web UI.

I recently got a letter from VW informing me that my 2017 vehicle's connection to AT&T will end in early 2022 due to the 2G sunset. I never subscribed to the service anyway, so I just get to chuckle about how they can't spy on me anymore. The fact that they equipped their vehicles thusly without the network operator agreeing to support it for at least a decade or so blows my mind.

Even worse, D+ streams 4k HDR at no extra cost. And, subjectively, seems to have a higher bitrate or better compression than other popular services. (Looking at you and your garbage compression, Netflix!)

Disney can deliver high bandwidth HD because their content is semantically compressed upstream, at the production level.

I don’t understand why, though. I’ve noticed some really ugly compression in brand new Amazon and Netflix original shows, which should have the same benefit of being produced “in-house”

Toyota wouldn't be doing it to cover costs, it would be there to generate profits. I wouldn't even mind if the app is good. We have a BMW with connected drive, the connectivity included is basically useless. It has a latency of around 2-3 minutes, depending on your cell signal.

The price of a service rarely does reflect the actual cost of providing the service, especially with SaaS margins. And $8/mo is not a whole lot of money if you consider your monthly expenses to use your vehicle.

Yes, I understand that people will charge what the market will bear, and in this case Toyota has decided they can charge a lot -- because you bought the car and now they have you at their mercy. I was responding to the GP poster who explicitly justified it by the cost of operating the service.

This might not be a big deal if Toyota was the only company contemplating this business model (what's $8/mo, after all?) but I doubt they will be. If every product in your life adds a "small" subscription fee (calculated at 50-1000x actual service costs), things are going to get painful very quickly.

People are already getting normalized to this.

I paid a few dollars for a better dialer, because the Samsung dialer is garbage. Another few dollars for a good calendar app, again because the Samsung dialer is garbage. Hell, I'd gladly pay for a decent web browser. And I say that as a happy Ubuntu user who has been coding for over two decades in VIM, I know my way around FOSS software.

To conserve energy and help the planet your phone has now stopped using the lower half of the screen. To unlock whole screen functionality please pay $0.2 for each instance.

> And $8/mo is not a whole lot of money if you consider your monthly expenses to use your vehicle.

$8/mo may not be a lot of money only because it's just your car doing that. Then you will have your TV charging $8/mo so that you can your a remote controller, $8/mo for the remote of your air conditioner...

Yeah yeah yeah profits are not what the conversation thread was about.

$8 is a lot but to be fair, Disney+ is almost certainly losing money per subscriber. $8 in this case also has to cover the cost of the 4G connection, which likely is in the $1 to $2 range.

> $8 in this case also has to cover the cost of the 4G connection, which likely is in the $1 to $2 range.

I could get a suitable data line myself for $1, at quantity one. I doubt Toyota has to pay anywhere near that much.

Hmm at a previous company we paid about $1.25/mo/device to connect to T-mobile's 2G network. Knowing how "Enterprise" pricing often works in other sectors, I actually wouldn't be surprised if larger companies pay more per connection than consumers (ostensibly because of "Enterprise" features like dedicated support or uptime guarantees, but really because they are motivated enough to bear the higher cost).

Where does 4G connection come into play here?

"Key fob remote start has nothing to do with an app, nor does the car or the fob communicate with any servers managed by Toyota."

It sounds like this $8/month charge is for the allowing you to use remote start locally presumably over RF.

The $8 fee is the remote connect bundle, which is a collection of app connected features (ie lock/start/monitor status of windows and doors) that connect via cell network.

The fob start is a feature they decided to bundle with the others.

Do they also push ads in their app like Tesla? Like referrals or upgrades? Seems to me like they are fleecing the owners.

You're using a different definition of "ads" than most people do.

A notice or announcement that promotes a service or feature. Standard definition.

Sure, but it's for Tesla stuff (often for stuff consumed on the app itself, so where else would they put it?) and it's not intrusive. You're right that it fits the standard definition, but this isn't the kind of annoying internet ads for 3rd party stuff that people associate with app ads.

"Seems to me like they are fleecing the owners."

They are the owners, the 'owners' are the owned, captive market.

Tesla app does not have ads. There's a sub-menu where you can buy upgrades, but those are not promoted or anyhow popping up.

Kia wants $15 a month for the same app-based signal. It's straight highway robbery.

I suspect what you aren't accounting for is the 4G modem in the car that the manufacturer puts in largely to collect data from you, but would love to offset the cost of with upcharges.

Disney is still in the lose-your-ass phase. The price will go up soon enough.

yup, this is absurd

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