It isn’t “unlock a door.” It’s “unlock a door from your phone regardless of where you are as long as you have cell signal and the car has cell signal, it doesn’t have to be in range of the fob.”
With this service I can lock my car from a different city. I can see where it is. I can set a polygon zone where it emails me if my kids leave the city and whatnot.
It requires cell service and servers. So I get that it requires a subscription.
That is really interesting. How did you handle that conversation with your kids? Or am I imagining that it's a bigger deal than it really is since they've grown up in a world where everything and every one is connected to the internet and tracked all the time?
Also - tracking when a vehicle leaves a polygon zone feels like a minor subset of the already more privacy invasive "Where is this vehicle" that presumably exists already.
But I think it’s a very good question. The way I would handle it is:
“I won’t set an alert. If I ever feel like I have to, you won’t be loaned the car. As always, please endeavour to text me a couple times to help me rest easy that you’re safe. You’ll understand when you’re a dad. If I don’t hear from you I might peek at your location just to know you’re where you planned to be.”
Naturally the conversation is much longer and spans a great many years.
It would work on any car. And have some with cell service capable as well. You can use it to monitor specifics on a car (ie oil pressure) in real-time. But you can get cellular enabled ones that would alert you or track the vehicle as well.
You absolutely don’t need something new for this and you can decouple it from your make/model so if you want to swap/change/upgrade or cancel it’s trivial.