GM makes $1,500 subscription mandatory on GMC, Buick, Cadillac Models
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Once that was done I originally pulled the daughterboard housing the entire modem but this bricked my compass and GPS. To keep those working I ended up altering the modem itself with a soldering iron per the pdf posted here:
https://www.chevybolt.org/threads/internet-without-onstar-wi...
The guy there on that forum did so in an effort to use your own sim with the HMI, but using 0 ohm resistors or just solder bridging the relevant connections is enough to prevent my vehicle from getting online, but leaves the GPS intact. You can test by trying to make phone/onstar/data related actions - it just won't work.
Another good measure is to remove one of the antenna leads, I forget which one is cellular primary, but the other is more GPS/aux. Doing it all this way allows you to still connect your vehicle to wifi should you so desire to, for updates and such.
There are other secrets and tricks to these things, including a git repo I cloned that is now gone from the public internet, where a guy figured out how to solder an EMMC reader to a few points on the mainboard to get and modify the filesystem.
Edit: here's a mirror https://repo.or.cz/bosch_hmi_hacking.git
They really go out of their way to keep you from owning your vehicle.
Also bought a device that lets me plug HDMI inputs into the truck, unfortunately some kind of refresh rate or resolution issue prevents it from working properly.
As an aside, if you bought and financed through GM, they may have attached a secondary GPS/cell tracker to your OBD2 port, and used sticky tape to hide it somewhere - make sure to remove that once you're not financed through them as well (it is illegal to do so I believe before using alternative financing or paying it off).
It is legally problematic to remove until you switch financing...
In addition, if tracking bothers you, your tire pressure sensors all have trackable (if there are enough sensors around a city) IDs, and if bluetooth is on, and it probably is, that as well...aside from your cell phone...
My next (secondary) vehicle will 100% be a dumb vehicle from the 90s or earlier.
A while back I set up a Ubiquity Wi-Fi system for a friend who lives near a fairly high-traffic street.
The default Ubiquity scan interval for spectrum and Wi-Fi network awareness was enough to map schedules for a shockingly high number of people driving by.
I imagine something custom built for this purpose would be significantly more, umm, “effective” for this purpose.
What kind of janky banks are you working with?
My spouse and I financed a couple of cars recently, one new and one slightly used, and did not have anything of the sort. Different manufacturers, different banks, different dealerships.
Sure, if you finance through the dealership, then dealership personnel could stick it in there before you drive away, I guess. It plenty of people finance through third parties. Surely Wells Fargo, for example, doesn’t send an agent down to stick a tracker in your car while you’re sleeping or at work…
Is it?
Unless their financing T&C specifically tell you you are bound to let them track you, can't you just pop it out and tell them to pound sand?
I have never heard of this. Do you have any reference to learn more?
Who exactly does this installing - someone hired by the bank? The dealer? If I pay cash for a vehicle, does that guarantee that the dealer won't install a tracker? How can I find this out?
It was just hanging off the OBD2 port, so if you're concerned about it when leasing or buying a new car then just make sure to check that port.
I still have it in a box somewhere. I'm not sure if there's anything interesting that can be done with it...
[edit: minor grammar]
If you pay cash, you probably can't be 100% sure there isn't one, but it would still be illegal for them to do this. Otherwise, when you loan/lease the car, it's legal for the dealer to put a tracker on 'their own car'/do it as required by the bank ('their own car' or a car they have a 100% value lien on, for those of you in lien states).
Via the article, the FTC was supposedly probing these to determine 'if the availability of car loans outweighed the privacy issues', but nothing came of it (which is why i'm not hopeful for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32426633 ).
Had me scratching my head for a minute there. I guess it's a thing now, though we used to just call them jumpers.
To me, it's still a jumper, shunt, etc.
ALL buy-here-[pay|finance]-here car dealerships put a GPS tracker in your car. Where it's located and how it's connected to your car's electrical system will vary, but they ALL do it using[0] companies[1] like[2] these[3].
[1] https://www.spireon.com/gps-auto-tracking/
[2] https://passtimegps.com/industries/franchise-car-dealerships...
"More customer value" clearly worth 125$/month.
You're basically paying > 100 bucks a month for something that allows them to collect and sell your data to third parties.
EDIT: as people mention in reply, I have absolutely zero reading comprehension skills and the fee is actually 1500 for three years not one. Still... I pay less for cellular service with near limitless data and voice.
I have no idea whether GM is also making some not-quite-essential but both simple and useful features only accessible with an ongoing subscription, but I have my opinion as to whether it will do so, if it is not doing so already. Plenty of other manufacturers do this.
But your point is well founded too.
You can make a case to your building governing body to have them installed.
There are solutions designed for this and operate off common area energy and bill at on a cost only basis.
They are not lying. The value of the customer to GM increases.
Anyway... I tried removing OnStar and the only way I could do that was to remove all the feaures I wanted and also needed. e.g. towing package, bigger engine, etc... The only way I could "build" one without Onstar was to have a bare-bones model with nothing else added. Ill try again in 5 years or so.
I think that's the catch. Given the number of customization options in the website, I would find it highly unlikely that there would be one already built with the options I selected, so I will always be guided down the path of working with a dealer.
However, people in this country are notoriously impatient and can often be persuaded to buy a very similarly spec vehicle if it means getting it sooner.
I bought my last car from the “local inventory” despite not being exactly what I “built”.
It's even more fun when you realize the dealer price they show for the ones they match is MSRP and the dealer is actually selling it for thousands more, plus the dealer adds accessories so you get to overpay for things like cargo nets and floor mats.
The US way has its convenience of not having to wait 6 months for the car to be built and shipped.
At least for Ford F-series trucks, you must place the order through a dealer. You can build the truck online and take the build to the dealer for the order. In my experience the online build tool is sophisticated enough that it properly reflects the real order entry system. Not sure if it’s the same for the rest of the models.
One guy literally tried to tell me he couldn't do that - and I had to spell it out for him. Step one, agree to give me floor mats. Step two, you walk over to the service dept, buy floor mats, and put them in my car. Step three, congratulations you made a sale and commission - but you had to buy floor mats for my car.
I dislike boomer tactics as much as anyone (especially the bizarre trope of yelling at people to sound more right) but car salesmen are nearly as degenerate as realtors so I do take pleasure in this kind of a transaction where I'm the boot of the joke.
Most U.S. states have laws requiring car sales only through dealerships. That's why you can't just directly buy a vehicle fully customized from a manufacturer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_dealerships_in_the_United_....
After about 3 hours of use, it would have to be powercycled or the audio would constantly cut in and out. My dad looked at it & he decided to connect it to WiFi to check for a manufacturer firmware update. There was no update. However, this fixed the issue entirely. The problem never happened again.
A literal wired speaker, requires a WiFi connection to work properly.
You can also get 'commercial' sets intended for signage that are apparently OK too. Jeff Geerling did a video on an interesting one from Sharp/NEC that takes a smart module, which can be a raspberry pi, here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-epPf7D8oMk. There are some caveats, but it's something to keep an eye on IMO.
It seems to be true that there are no high end/aspirational sets that don't have smart features. I haven't personally seen any OLEDs, for example (although I am not an authority on this).
There are a hell of a lot of light-to-heavy duty diesel pickups in the US and the aftermarket offerings are enormously deep and broad, for example. I imagine that will take awhile to fade away, and if metrology gets advanced and cheap enough, and integrates well enough with machinists on the floor, I can see a possible future where these parts live on in electronic form to the point where reproducing them from scratch gets into the realm of economically feasible.
The difference is that cars are a extremely competitive market, and the "no connected" version will always be offered.
Are they? Cars are an extremely difficult market to break into, much more so than laptops/etc.
All mainstream manufacturers are already on the way to do the whole "connected" thing (the hardware has been there for a decade, it's just a matter of software) and the vast majority of people don't seem to mind.
Starting a car manufacturer is already a huge expense, even more so if your only customer base is the small percentage of the population who understands the downsides of connected cars.
More likely we'll see reverse-engineered aftermarket replacement controllers that behave just like the original but don't have any connected/DRM crap in them - that market is much easier to break into and you may not even need to make any hardware - just refurbish & reflash the original ones.
Can you name a currently-produced car that doesn’t have the SOS button on it? It’s been mandatory in the EU since 2018. I can’t find proof that it’s mandatory in the US, so maybe you can find one that doesn’t have it.
Anyway, it if has that button (technically named eCall), it has the hardware in place to be fully connected. So the manufacturers figure they might as well use it for other data collection and get some money out of being forced to include that hardware.
Such is life
The little companies that make knobs or whatever AND deal with the bullshit associated with car companies are investing zero. One of the reasons why cars now look the same.
(The above is satire, but analogous statements are frequently made in earnest.)
If this is the excuse being stated, but there is some ulterior motive, then that's another thing.
The mere act of living can "negatively affect others" by consuming resources.
Let's not go down that path to an authoritarian socialist dystopia.
However, I have no idea if they do this subscription fee stuff for their EU-market stuff. Anyone care to chime in?
I've heard that driving a vehicle until everything falls apart is a lot more green/climate friendly than immediately switching to something new.
I was on a local council once and some lunatics were arguing about cups. One faction believed that styrofoam was better because it was lighter, the others pearl clutched and demanded a styrofoam ban and wanted to ensure that a certain type of wax was used on cups.
(It's a stereotypical American "land yacht" with some performance mods and a bit of computer monitoring --- not control.)
My Pilot had 245000 miles and was fantastic, I had to get rid of it last year. The new car I got to replace it sucks, with the stupid touchscreens and shittier interior.
Why not just include it in the sticker price of the car? At a minimum for PR / Optics.
You could argue:
> Its like power steering. You don't have the option NOT to have it, and it costs us money; so its part of why the car costs what it does.
That way instead of people feeling like they're being cheated out of an extra $1,500 on a $50,000 vehicle; they just purchase a $51,500 vehicle?
In my personal finance, I’d always rather have $1500 now than an IOU for $1500 over three years.
Predictability. Recurring subscription revenue is drastically easier to forecast and plan cash flow around, and the financial models can be so much simpler to work with than non-transactional sales.
a) GM can remotely disable the car if the subscription isn't paid. So likelihood of abandonment is minimal.
b) more importantly, this takes $1500 off the sticker price, making GM cars more appealing when compared to Ford, BMW, etc. People who don't buy a GM car don't buy OnStar subscriptions at all... so just increasing the volume of subscriptions is the most important metric
c) 3 years/$1500 is just the minimum. People who have paid for 3 years are likely to keep paying in year 4, 5 and beyond. Totally different reaction than just starting a new monthly payment in month 37. And GM can add new features as upcharges to increase those payments in future years.
d) GM can use the recurring subscription creatively to roll owners into a new GM car. Think family plans where the 2nd sub costs less, or a % of future subscription payments are credited against the cost of a new vehicle.
There are a bag full of other tricks. Like - increasing subscription revenue, offsetting lost subscribers.
I could rant for hours on how absurd this is, but it’s better to just abuse it. You know mba and finance people are idiotically valuing revenue in this way. So game it.
Perfectly rational people may factor everything in properly... but the world is woefully short of perfectly rational people.
While if it's a subscription from GM, it's $1,500 and that $1,500 directly goes to GM.
I forget exactly who does it, TicketMaster, or Axios, or something - will say something like:
> Ok, two tickets for the concert; that's $120
I'm like great. No idea how you came up with that number, but I'm good with it.
Then they'll come back after I'm locked in and say:
> There's also a convenience fee of $30. Your total is $150.
I'm livid at this point - which is totally irrational; because had they just told me the cost was $150 up front - like an idiot, I'd have just said "well, that's the price. Here's money."
Instead, I'm left with a sour taste in my mouth and hate all ticket vendors who I feel pulled a fast one on me.
I'm sure you could make the argument that a greater percentage balk at the $150 number than would walk at $120 + $30, so you make more money. That's fair, but to me it feels like I was tricked for no good reason.
:shrug-emoji
(slightly off topic, but in my country consumer laws also mandate that sticker and advertised prices must be the final price including all taxes. The standard USA practice of stickers/adverts with pre-tax price is also absurdly anti-consumer).
Government gets more money this way
Because the US collects taxes very differently, so you can never make a fair comparison between identical tax categories.
Just look at the gasoline tax differences between the two. The core purpose of that tax and what it’s used to fund varies dramatically between the two regions. So, naturally the amount being taxed would be different.
Also, The US govt tends to have taxes below the rates needed to operate (US has a higher deficit), so the taxes will more likely be lower by comparison.
We drive greater distances here. More rural miles. More highway miles.
Rural driving (constant 50mph with no stop and start of lights for an hour or more), is far less damaging to roads than start and stop traffic. Interstate miles are the same concept.
Beyond that, expanding and building roads, is cheaper in rural areas.
So there may actually be more gas tax collected per repair cost, even with the rate lower in the US.
Canada has higher gas tax than the US, but lower than the EU. But we also have cold weather everywhere, with frost and ice destroying roads.
So on average, we need more than the US, which only has a few northern/cold states.
In general, Americans pay less in total taxes but we give that back with much greater expenses for things like healthcare & drug costs, retirement, education, etc. At the top end that works out in your favor but there’s no equivalent for things like our rates of medical bankruptcy for everyone below the highest income levels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_we...
As far as I can see the differences are in what happens on the retailer's supply side. In the US generally there won't be sales tax on the supplier's sale of goods to the retailer. In the EU there might be VAT on those, but the retailer might get to deduct the VAT they pay when they are remitting the VAT they collect.
The net result in both systems is that the consumer pays all of the sales tax or VAT. In the US system the government doesn't see any of that until the final sale to the consumer. In the EU, entities up the supply chain pay part of it but get it back later via deductions so in effect VAT for those entities is a loan to the government which the government pays back from the VAT consumers pay.
Not displaying the taxes is infuriating when visiting other places, since unless you look up all of the applicable taxes you're effectively just guessing at the cost of anything.
Brazil went through the same thing, but took the (imo smarter) approach of describing the tax breakdown in the receipt
Obviously, the be able to reclaim the tax, they need to know how much has been paid on the transaction.
In other words, I don’t think that argument holds.
0: https://www.theflightexpert.com/all-in-ticket-prices-usdot-r...
Governmental spending can be a huge drag on the economy, and people may not realize just how much, unless they are personally confronted with the true scale of governmental intrusion. Many people today take it all as an unquestionable given, rather than as one choice among many.
edit: you can get a refund on the state’s portion of the sales tax, but not the city. (ex. WA state form https://dor.wa.gov/file-pay-taxes/apply-tax-refund/state-sal...).
So in-store vs delivery, or online event vs in-person, etc.
Most entertaining: where I live, we have to charge the client's tax rate if it's consulting work, but our provincial tax rate if it's hosting.
We can make either type of tax regressive, progressive, or vary by income level to push people toward the median lifestyle.
Implementation costs and the ease of avoidance should be larger concerns I think.
So in that one case, choosing sales tax isn't regressive.
* Income Tax
* Property Tax
People in all states pay some combo of those 3. Some say no income tax (FL). But that means higher sales tax and property tax. Others have all 3 taxes, but in lower amounts.
Do you really think in New Hampshire you pay less total tax then someone like me, living in the Midwest? You likely do better than NY/Cali, but not the Midwest..
Bragging about no sales tax while paying a higher income / property taxes was a pretty funny / American thing to do..
Seems to me for local taxes land-value tax is clearly the most sensible. It aligns the intensives much better.
On state and federal level you can use flat or progressive income tax.
I don't understand why anybody would do sales or value added tax.
But recently I have been thinking if land-value tax for everything just didn't make sense.
Obviously this is a cherry picked example and can't represent but .1% of the population. But each lever you pull for tax rewards/punishes a different group. A famous example if FL has no income tax, letting retirees stretch their fixed pensions further.
In general, if a state has a lot of tourists coming to it. They won't get property tax nor income tax on the visitors, but they WILL get sales tax. So it makes sense to raise the sales tax, so that you can lower the property / income tax for people that live there yearround.
Tourists will make some locations more valuable then others, so it should have an impact on property tax.
I'd rather not deal with sales tax, gets annoying sometimes with cash.
When you negotiate salary with a new employer, do you include the employer paid Social Security and Medicare taxes? Do you say I require $100,000 or $107,650 (Social Security is $6,200, Medicare is $1,450)?
Most VAT based countries have a single VAT rate for the whole country (or possible a country-wide set of rates for different types of products). The United States is not like that. Even if we consider an individual state as the equivalent to Country, each state does not have one consistent sales tax rate.
Typically the state will have one rate, the county can have its own rate, the city its own rate, and potentially even special districts with their own sales tax rates.
That complicates things a lot. For example, if a law required the shown prices to include tax, it would mean that an online website cannot show you the price until you have entered your exact street address. Most people don't want to tell the website where they live just to find out a price that may not be any good.
The variable tax rate means that if the law applied to advertised prices shown on say TV, it would not be possible to have nationwide advertisements that show a price, or even statewide advertisements, or in some cases not even city-wide advertisements. (Unless they set a post-tax price based on what they can sustain with the highest tax rate, which means charging people in lower tax areas a higher price than they would otherwise have charged, just to be able to mention a price at all on TV). Unless the law allowed "between $x and $y depending on your local tax rate" (where X and Y are based on the lowest and highest tax rate for the advertising area).
Most people who want such post tax pricing laws would not be terribly happy with a law that allowed advertising a range like that.
What's wrong with this solution?
Getting rid of sales tax would be the best solution imo but complicated
To replace consumption tax, which ensures those with large savings, yet no income, still get taxed as they spend, you'd have to somehow have full disclosure of all assets, and tax that, along with all the privacy implications.
And just imagine all the work, with every citizen's assets being examined yearly.
Of course, there are other options, but not many which replace consumption tax.
Some places may also benefit from high property tax, which now that I think of it, is a "holding" tax, not income tax.
Additionally, not all consumption taxes are across-the-board sales taxes.
Across-the-board sales taxes are highly regressive taxes, because basic consumption needs are relatively flat across a population, so the poorest people pay a much higher percentage of their income in sales taxes than the wealthy.
Which makes it harder for people to know all the ins and outs of...
This is also the case in the US (varies state by state).
Here in Mexico we have something called the "canasta básica" (basic basket) which encompasses a set of goods that are defined as basic for living (they are 40 https://www.gob.mx/canastabasica unfortunately the list is in an image so not easy to google translate... stupid government pages). These are closely guarded by the government and I believe the price is closely protected.
Something like that could be extrapolated, and set different taxes to different goods and services. Like, (IMHO, please don't flame me) an XBOX should be heavily taxed, running shoes should be heavily taxed, a "gaming graphics card" should be heavily taxed. Same with services: "go cart racing" should be heavily taxed, Fast-food should be heavily taxed, while fixing stuff (fixing your blender, or your washing machine) should not.
For example, an unsliced bagel is food. A sliced to order bagel is prepared food and taxable. A system like you describe would be insanely complex.
Here’s NY guidance on when a sandwich is taxable: https://www.tax.ny.gov/pubs_and_bulls/tg_bulletins/st/sandwi...
As insane as that is, I think it makes the sales tax more progressive, as poorer people spend a high proportion of income on food. I am always struck when I travel to a place like South Carolina, where the property taxes are low, but people with nothing are paying 9% sales taxes on food.
It is a very important distinction.
There are thousands of different sales tax rates in the US that change multiple times per year.
Each city, county, state and other things like metro transit districts, water districts and school districts can all contribute to the sales tax rate paid by an individual at the point of sale.
Thousands. Every municipality in my area can have their own sales tax and can change them whenever they want. For Texas alone that's ~1,220 potentially different sales taxes which can change at any time. Its not an impossible to keep track of thing though, plenty of organizations do it and most payment processors will essentially handle it for you. But its not exactly easy, aggregating all that and getting it all right in the first place is a good bit of work.
On the other hand thing like cars really should have an all inclusive price sticker. They already have an itemized price sticker on the car so there is really nothing stoping these sellers from putting the remaining fees and taxes on there two as that should be consistent with the same dealer location and with such low inventory.
People will see the post tax price, compare it in their head with the pre-tax price they saw at some other store, and feel like the post tax prices store is more expensive even if this store’s final price is actually slightly lower than the other store’s price.
Many landlords and development companies add on percentage based fees. Some merchants will report these on recipes as PIF Tax (Property Improvement Fees). These are not a technically a tax, but impact the consumer the similarly
Even if you are tax exempt or buying non-taxable items like food, the property own still collects PIF.
PIFs are in the contract between the landlord and merchant the actual details of how fees work are not publicly know. Merchants may benefit from actual property improvements, or the fees are entirely a profit stream for the landlord.
There's a simple solution to this: stop doing this. Ban cities and districts from having their own sales taxes. There's no reason to allow this. In my country, there's a single national sales tax that's the same everywhere.
The US's problems are a result of its own stupid decisions.
Nothing unfortunate about it: that decentralization is the cause of most of the problems.
If they (or a family member) later purchase prints through their online gallery that are essentially drop shipped to them? Who the hell knows.
As far as I can tell there are a vanishingly small number of problems where "new laws" are the optimal answer. Increased regulatory oversight generally leads to ossified markets with higher costs. Many of the most reviled monopolies throughout American history got there in no small measure because of government protection in the form of "regulation".
In this case, there are multiple car manufacturers available to Americans from around the world - if this makes GM vehicles more expensive or causes a consumer backlash that damages sales, GM will change their behaviour. That seems like a more responsive mechanism than piling on new regulation to dictate which types of fees are okay and which aren't.
This is simply not true. The common reviled monopoly strategies include price fixing, collusion, natural monopolies, markets with high barriers to entry, network effects, and others in addition to regulatory capture. Regulations that contribute to monopolistic tendencies are "vanishingly small" in number, you just hear about them a lot because people don't like them.
> if this makes GM vehicles more expensive or causes a consumer backlash that damages sales, GM will change their behaviour.
It may be time to walk through history and see all the dark patterns that were solved by regulation. Before the EPA, it was common for manufacturing companies to dump industrial waste directly into rivers, for example.
Consumers only have so much energy for backlash, and your theoretical system requires everyone to have an encyclopedic memory of all the shitty things that every company does and weigh all of that in their minds when making consumer choices. It's impractical and impossible. Regulatory agencies are a much better system and that's why every modern economy depends on them.
The idea that regulation is a burden on society is fanciful. What is burdensome is regulations that cannot be readily adapted. Unfortunately, popular myths like “regulation bad” is part of the reason regulators stay with policies they would much rather propose updating. Veteran regulators are quite eager to improve their frameworks. It is “politics” that prevents their evolution.
Hey, uh, there's this thing called Google - most people start there when they're making a big-ticket purchase like a car. Or you could pay for Consumer Reports to get expert-level analysis. Or you can just ask people on the relevant subreddit.
Consumers have access to more information to inform buying decisions than at any point in history. So unless General Motors is the only car manufacturer in the world, people can weigh the pros and cons and make their own decisions. More intervention from government is totally unnecessary and likely even harmful in the form of generally higher prices.
It clearly isn't. The power and knowledge asymmetry between producers and consumers is such that most producers can get away with abhorrent behaviour pretty much all the time with no significant repercussions. That's why boycotts don't work, among other things.
They are a free enterprise that can offer whichever products at whatever prices they want. And consumers are free to vote with their wallets.
From TFA, they're advertising the vehicle's MSRP without the extra $1500 cost, and that extra $1500 is not optional when you go to actually buy one.
When you go to sign the dotted line, the price includes this charge. If you don’t like it, don’t sign.
Buying a car is not the hardest feat by any stretch imaginable. If you’ve put down a deposit, you will have seen the all in cost. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.
Yes.
This is the kind of deception that starts early on in the process to get you to narrow down your car selection by deceiving you on the actual price of the car.
> Buying a car is not the hardest feat by any stretch imaginable. If you’ve put down a deposit, you will have seen the all in cost. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.
It's not hard, but it's definitely not pleasant, and the the auto makers and dealers can do some slimy practices. The parent comment I was replying to seemed to conflate auto makers should not be allowed to advertise an inaccurate MSRP with over-regulation. Also you are not 100% correct about deposits, just ask Bronco reservation holders who put down deposits with dealers for reservations, that later got turned into orders, that when the car arrived had thousands of dollars of surprise "ADM" (Additional Dealer Markup in Ford lingo) added to the buy sheet.
What's frightening is how many people believe in the myth of the free market of rational consumers.
I feel like we used to. Everything is so overtly nickle and dime the working class now.
How does that work when advertising in media that is available in more than one country, such as broadcasts of major international sporting events?
Also, for most cars, paying sticker would be a rip off anyway. Unless there is a shortage going on, no one expects to pay sticker price.
Because they have been specifically targeting iPhone + App Store bundling: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/25/22996248/apple-sideloadin...
Like... it needs NO fuel or can be charged at home for electric ones, companies literally can't offer other subscription services aside from "free repair" for x$ a month, because bicycle is too simple... Maybe battery leasing, idk...?
It doesn't need driver license to operate, if infrastructure is good, it can be much faster in the city and you don't need to pay a ton of taxes, in many situations you can repair it by yourself With electric cargo bikes/bakfiets a big chunk of car use-cases is gone, like buying groceries, moving light-medium objects, even take childs to school. For other 5% of use-cases, people can like... rent a car for a day or take taxi... I can't imagine how cheap this could be
And for people that can't use them, there are tricycles, carts or duofiets Aaaaaand you can add a small bicycle trailer at the back, increasing further total capacity.
Of course all this is possible with protected bike lanes AND at least decent public transport like buses AND bike parking. Car drivers will drive without encountering bicyclists and vice-versa, everyone happy, everyone safe, much less stress
I have a car and a motorcycle, but German bike routes are so nice that I still prefer the bike. I bike from the outskirts to the centre of Berlin on a dedicated bike path in nature. It's awesome!
Canada has few such routes. You have to fight for a place on a wide, ugly boulevard lined with box stores, and the drivers take personal offence to your existence.
In this case GM has taken the perplexing case of front loading the requirement at the initial purchase, but I suspect that it was easier and quicker to implement as a pseudo MSRP bait-and-switch increase than to create a more fleshed out scheme like we see with Toyota and BMW.
Fundamental features of a car are things like engine and tires.
A mandatory tracking service is fundamental to an open air prison.
I don’t mean to be pedantic but…they’re not forcing you to buy this any more than they’re forcing you to buy the rest of the car. You could always just buy a Ford instead.
I'm no fan of OnStar or forced subs. But can Car Play call 911 or the police if you are unconscious after a crash? Or prevent your car from being driven if you report it as stolen?
Crash detection isn't a thing in phones generally, but it's worth noting that all cellular devices, regardless of subscription/service status, can call 911 (even without a sim card). You don't need some subscription payment to do that.
You do if you're not conscious
If you aren't wearing a seatbelt (admittedly, a bad idea), very close to 100% of them.
That's some slick words for "Get people to pay for shit they don't want".
“By including this plan as standard equipment on the vehicle, it helps to provide a more seamless onboarding experience and more customer value,” GM spokeswoman Kelly Cusinato told Automotive News in an email.
What nauseating corporate speak. I'll translate:
"We are forcing this grabage on our customers so we can drive up the price and remove their ability to opt out of our tracking and spying service," -- which is primed to be used to track driver movements and 'carbon' use (Lol!) and rat back to the nanny state. Just like every electric car.
I originally removed the power, but then most of the "smarter" electronics stopped working.
How hard was it to disconnect, out of curiosity. Not asking for anything identifying, just wondering if it required removing panels or was just a matter of reaching an arm in the right spot.
Nice to know it can be done without anything too drastic.
They're quite obviously pointing out that cutting the antenna does nothing about the fact that the subscription is still bundled and active.
So, what value does it add? It seems to simply exist to make an assumption that makes the other HNer look bad.
Whether you activate the subscription or not, you're still paying $1500 for it.
My issue is more with 4chan greentext being a low form of communication.
Almost anything is better than it, like "Well, you'd still be paying the subscription." Even direct snark feels higher level than greentext-style rephrasing.
Good, go out of business GM.
I'd be shocked if there weren't mandatory subs for all cars in the next 5yrs, and potentially even one time use or limited use IAPs and in your face promotions for them through car UIs.
It will be gradual while there is competition here, but I suspect they are watching the mobile app and gaming industry quite closely.
I ended up calling and having OnStar cancel my "trial" in my 2018 era truck in 2019, to the point I instructed them to disable the OnStar lights on the mirror and everything. This was a task as they're very annoying and persistent...
Once that was done I originally pulled the daughterboard housing the entire modem but this bricked my compass and GPS. To keep those working I ended up altering the modem itself with a soldering iron per the pdf posted here:
https://www.chevybolt.org/threads/internet-without-onstar-wi...
The guy there on that forum did so in an effort to use your own sim with the HMI, but using 0 ohm resistors or just solder bridging the relevant connections is enough to prevent my vehicle from getting online, but leaves the GPS intact. You can test by trying to make phone/onstar/data related actions - it just won't work.
Another good measure is to remove one of the antenna leads, I forget which one is cellular primary, but the other is more GPS/aux. Doing it all this way allows you to still connect your vehicle to wifi should you so desire to, for updates and such.
There are other secrets and tricks to these things, including a git repo I cloned that is now gone from the public internet, where a guy figured out how to solder an EMMC reader to a few points on the mainboard to get and modify the filesystem.
Edit: here's a mirror https://repo.or.cz/bosch_hmi_hacking.git
They really go out of their way to keep you from owning your vehicle.
Also bought a device that lets me plug HDMI inputs into the truck, unfortunately some kind of refresh rate or resolution issue prevents it from working properly.
As an aside, if you bought and financed through GM, they may have attached a secondary GPS/cell tracker to your OBD2 port, and used sticky tape to hide it somewhere - make sure to remove that once you're not financed through them as well (it is illegal to do so I believe before using alternative financing or paying it off).
If you're comparing a GM vehicle to its competitor, you will not see price parity, as this $1500 "option" will show up on inventory web sites as part of the price (it already does now).
In general, I don't want companies to fail, but I certainly want to see this strategy fail horribly.
The automotive industry is huge because U.S. infrastructure demands having a car, and also because everyone wants to buy "just the right car" for themselves. But these GM luxury brands might struggle with a big price hike like this.
And, they will.
It was explained to me by a advertising buyer at a big regional auto dealership chain that the reason that auto dealers try so hard to get you onto their lot first is that in the vast vast vast majority of cases, if someone shows up in person, they're going to buy one of your cars. It's just up to the salesperson to figure out which one.
He said the very small percentage of people who go from lot to lot are the sort of people who aren't worth the effort, anyway. Which, coincidentally, sounds very much like how the tech industry dismisses "edge cases" and people who need customer service because they aren't efficient and don't "maximize shareholder value."
A large part of selling cars is about the brand, the brand's social image, and what owning a car of a particular brand means to the owner. It's why there are so many brand-loyal car clubs. It's why you find debutantes who only want BMWs. It why you find Appalachian dirt farmer who say "I only buy Chevy." If someone wants a Cadillac, they'll pay the extra $1,500 and pretend it doesn't exist because it's just $25/month hidden in a five-year contract.
Personally, I've owned all kinds of cars. More than once when considering a new car, my co-workers have offered their advice. No matter who it was, the advice was always rooted in the same kind of jingoistic tribalism that infects politics and is the basis of professional sports. My brand is better than someone else's brand. Facts be damned. Here's my wallet.
But they still have to decide what type each particular person is. I usually play an ignorant buyer for a bit, make them think the sale is about to go through, then walk out unless they give me deal. Buying a car doesn’t happen often so when I do it, I don’t mind spending some time to get what I want. I don’t enjoy the process, it would be nice to just order it online, but since it’s not possible gotta play the game I guess.
By God the cars in the US are huge. About a decade or so back mostly pick ups were kinda big but now looks like the default size is pick up and it only gets bigger from there. Even Tesla model 3 for that matter is huge by Indian standards.
You hit the nail on the head. Manufacturers aren't forcing anybody to buy big trucks. They respond to demand. If people show enough demand for a tiny pickup like the Maverick, we'll see competition in the space.
So I'd say that this is an artificial demand that is driven by policy. If people paid the "true" price of this worldwide oil infrascture, I'd likely be more expensive and big trucks would not be chosen just to move your family around.
It's a tough situation for buyers. I'd rather have a car 90% of the time, for a lot of reasons, but I legitimately need a truck 10% of the time. A car cannot become a poor truck, but a truck can become a poor car, and so the truck wins.
Mostly it's the automobile as a status symbol.
Bigger is better according to lizard brain.
So they treat a 2 lane road in suburb the same as a highway. Literally.
So you end up with local roads that can fit 4 SUV next to each other despite being like a 2 lane road.
Literally everything is built to accommodate huge cars and even has safety margin for huge cars.
Its actually funny, go to google maps and compare car subburbs from the 50s with those from the 80/90s and you will see the roads being like twice the size. And then you compare it to old street car subburbs and the roads are even thinner.
Ironically those street car subburbs often have population density that make them almost city like.
This all works together to make US style sprawl such a distinctive feature.
Basically they just developed road safety principles for highways and then somehow thought it made sense for all roads no matter if there were people there.
I've been in enough traffic in Hyderabad that I can appreciate why nobody drives a big car there. Different situation.
One legal reason is fuel economy regulations (CAFE standards) encourage car makers to make their cars large enough to be classified as "light trucks", leading to less stringent fuel economy standards.
A larger footprint also reduces the fuel economy standard, incentivizing larger vehicles.
See: https://www.thedrive.com/news/small-cars-are-getting-huge-ar...
I've heard that the latest thing is that when buying a car from a dealer you have to sign over power of attorney to them. Insane.
Fortunately since they don't have dealers Tesla manages to be an exception to this power of attorney stuff; not needed or asked for, nothing even remotely close. Also they only charge $100 / year (totally optional) for LTE connectivity. And their mobile service including emergency roadside assistance is dirt cheap. Who would pay $1,500 for OnStar?
...and ISPs, and retail banks, and apartment buildings, and ride-sharing services, and airlines...
It's not broken; it's working as designed.
> 26. Data Collection / Privacy. GM collects, uses, and shares information from and about You and your Vehicle. The GM Privacy Statement describes what GM does with that information. You consent to the collection, use, and sharing of information described in the Privacy Statement and in any revisions to the Privacy Statement, which may be modified as described in that document.
https://www.gm.com/privacy-statement
> We may collect information about you and your vehicle, such as name, address, email address, phone number, vehicle identification number (VIN) and vehicle performance data ...
> We may share your information ... with our business partners.
With OnStar, they now to track where you drive, how fast you drive, how you accelerate & brake, where you shop & eat, which friends you visit, what apps you use (over wifi), whether you text while driving, and what you listen to (over bluetooth). The value of this data is probably at least $20/mo per vehicle. GM probably sells this data directly to LiveRamp (formerly Acxiom) and other tracking companies.
But the radio module in that car is 3G, and because carriers have been discontinuing 3G Volvo cannot provide their service to my car.
There was roughly 12 months when it was impossible to upgrade the radio in my older model car. Now the radio upgrade is customer-paid and optional.
My point being, if they require the subscription I’d be careful to confirm the service is guaranteed regardless of the carriers and obsolete radios etc.
"National average is about 12 years"
"Great so $1500 for 3 years is $6000, that's the stealth price hike. Take it off or give me a $6,000 discount."
I don't think OnStar is the noteworthy part. They've been putting OnStar on all their vehicles for years.
Although I'm sure that won't last long either.
But there have always been alternatives without subscription services available. What would cause a change for alternatives to stop being available?
But of course manufacturers also benefit from the data collection and functionality the "connected" bit offers such as DRM, etc, so why wouldn't they mandate it?
And nothing was lost.
For now I’ll stick to my motorcycle.
Do they actually give a damn about building cars people want, rather than squeezing another penny out of consumers to make wall street happy and increase their bonuses?
While there's plenty to complain about with Tesla, they're the first company to have their kind of success (in the US at least) coming out of nowhere.
We need more like that. Tesla also needs actual competition since they've been stagnating a lot.
They're in it for the MBAs, and the truck/V8/admittedly luxury interiors buyers who GM does a passable job for.
Not sure they have many legs to stand on.
Eh, GM makes the Bolt. That is hard to beat on TCO.
No, of course not and that’s totally rational for them. Being mad at people for system’s problem is like being mad at a river for following the slope of the land. You don’t curse the river for destroying your house during high tide, you build a dam.
So what’s the news here?
> The $1,500 plan is listed on the window sticker as a separate line item along with other additions to the vehicle’s standard equipment, but there is no option to remove it or order the vehicle without it. Customers who decline to activate their OnStar service will not be given a price reduction, GM said.
> It’s included in the manufacturer’s suggested retail price
That's basically like complaining "what, I bought a car but the price for tires was listed separately, and they didn't let me buy the car without the tires!!!"
Car: €19999
Tires: €999
Just so they could have a main price tag under €20,000 while charging €21000, then they would also get complaints
My inner cynic says some slippery slopes are real.
And I'd say this is the slippery slope from smart home devices all requiring a subscription. Since everything "smart" requires backend infrastructure and cloud bills can't be paid for the entire lifecycle up front, get ready to see a lot of subscriptions added to things that didn't have it before.
I wanted to make a parody where a white collar criminal is rushing to the hydrofoil in a GM vehicle and the police use OnStar turn the vehicle off remotely in the name of "safety".
There's likely at least one dystopian sci-fi story with a similar event in its plot.
You can I think get into the box if you have tools, and pull out the sim though. I really want to hack that thing, so I can control the display! I'd love to be able to put linux on my car. And I deserve to. It's mine! I bought it! As long as it's still safe, why does it matter?
And for those that don’t, there’s probably one or more cell phones in the cab. Probably some open airdrops even. So many e-flys down.
The mandatory subscription doesn’t seem that shocking - that’s just a different flavor of hiding the total price. Wouldn’t be buying a car without that. (Should be.)
The hardware though, this mandatory subscription just puts it in bold. Plenty of makes and models have the (sort of) hardware by default, you can take or leave the subscription and associated benefits. Please take it of course, but that hardware connection is installed either way. In case you change your mind!
BMW is already trying to charge for warm butts. Gotta make that easy to toggle. Taking it to a shop for that “upgrade” is silly compared to OTA.
It’s all silly, and far worse.
Second, even if true, I'm not sure it is legal? This kind of depends on FTC and anti trust law as well as contract terms. Did you know that onstar has curl in it? If you look in a GM manual, at the back they have all the licenses that contain all the licenses for free software they use. Who knows if they are actually following them. They could be running GPL for all we know and not sharing the code. That happens all the time, every day.
Third, even if it is legal, I'm not sure people will stand for that kind of hidden price increase on a car these days. Every consumer is getting squeezed. They will notice this, and all the other little inflation gotchas that the companies are doing to try to milk the US consumer a little harder. But it's proving that the consumer this time isn't going to do it. And getting shafted to do it for so long tends to lead to regulation, which is the second point again. When the consumer is squeezed, regulation is almost always missing.
From an economics perspective, they have the box in it tracking you the whole time if you buy it or not. So the cost of the box is really baked into the price of the car, not the subscription. If you turn off onstar they don't pull out the box or something. The box also has a sim card that is always active no matter what, so you can activate it again.
So in essence, you've already paid for it in terms of the actual real cost, and now you have to pay a lot more for what amounts to a cell phone that can call 911 itself. The subscription is twice as much as just a normal cell phone. Probably 20x what it honestly needs to be. It really should be included as a normal safety feature of every car. The ability to call 911 after an accident. Same for the ability for the cops to shut down a car remotely. If you think this doesn't happen or can't, you're wrong. It's done already. Cars have governors on the fuel injectors to keep their speed down, but not limit power. It's usually illegal to remove them, because that changes the HP, and usually requires retitling the car. Sometimes this means you get pushed into a different class of car based on the HP which means different taxes.
Now I believe that you should be able to modify your car how you want if you own it. It's yours. But we're heading into the car subscription model, where your car is basically going to cost you a dollar to turn it on soon just because we won't be able to stop it if all the car manufactures do it.
So if we're going with the subscription model, why can't we cancel the criminals subscriptions without needing to chase them down and run them off the road, causing unnecessary road deaths and police deaths?
Well, we just don't like it. Freedom, you know. But we're not free. We never really were. That's an illusion they give you, like a free lunch, where they charge you for the drinks.
Merely saying "freedom" I think is the mistake.
We have very specific rights and corporations have very specific restrictions. Corporations profit by taking advantage of opportunities. That's kind of generally what power is all about.
And so I'd be far more comfortable saying that we have the freedom to not buy something that GM is selling.
But people like to say freedom like - right to work, which makes it sound like this magical thing. What it really means is that you can get fired at any time, and get nothing. Which is really the right to get fired. It's kind of like the right to die, it's not really a "right" so to speak. It's just the default. If it were illegal to die, then who would you punish?
Look at the people that don't work under those laws. These are people with contracts for employment. Pro sports (NFL, NBA, etc), executives with golden parachutes, etc, etc. This is how Adam Neuman can be an idiot and run a company into the ground and then quit or get fired, then cash a billion dollar check on the way home while everyone else is stuck waiting for unemployment systems to be built so they can register for unemployment to hopefully maybe get some of the money that they are entitled to.
This is also unions, unions work under contracts. This united auto workers. Teachers, police, etc. All of these people are being ground up into powder. Union busting is living its best life.
IMHO it's a much better idea to read the entire post before replying. I did for you. If you have the time to reply you have the time to read?
For one, the latter is transparent about its pricing.
It's bad because it's duplicitous. GM advertises an SUV for $50k when it's really $51.5k.
IMO, mandatory costs (tax, regulatory, or otherwise) should always be included in the normal retail price (or fee if we're talking subscription services).
... you haven't shopped for a car recently, have you?
I don't understand who's buying these new SUVs. I felt sick paying $42k for my Ridgeline and the Yukon and similar are >50% more expensive. Maybe I'm just frugal?
Pricing power is with the dealers right now and so you see large markups over MSRP for "market adjustment". Three years ago, pricing power was more with buyers and no-one in their right mind would pay MSRP.
And if I would like to save that $1500 by waiving the 3-year free subscription? Do I have that option?