Mazda's $10 Subscription for Remote Start Sparks Backlash | Hacker News Reader

Mazda's $10 Subscription for Remote Start Sparks Backlash

carscoops.com

57 pointsthunderbong91 comments

> However, irrespective of whether one can afford (or is willing to pay for) a subscription, the key lesson from all this is that, if automakers have their way, the car ownership experience is going to change dramatically in the near future.

Yep, unless people stop buying cars that offer these features, it's just going to get worse and worse. But here's the thing: they won't.

Can't stop buying if no options exist. I need a car. Toyota has done this for a while. BMW has IAP heaters in chairs. Etc. Etc. Etc.

There are hundreds of options without subscriptions.

This is the crux of the bigger picture. I'm pretty sure all carmakers want to do this and they'll introduce it gradually, keeping an eye on each other to make sure that they're all doing it roughly in tandem so the vast majority of people just throw their hands up and accept it. I'm not sure what the solution is though. I can't imagine legislation working. Something along the lines of "if the funcionality doesn't change you can't charge a subscription for it" would probably be met with claims that because it's all software controlled the overhead of security udpates to the software requires some kind of recurring fee.

US tariffs were put in to prevent Chinese cars from competing here too.

It's not competition if it's actually dumping.

I agree that people will think they don't have a choice, and will even act like they don't. But the reality is that there are plenty of new vehicles without subscriptions or in-app purchases, and even more used vehicles without them. Those are all options. With this process, it's always a series of choices, where choosing what the company wants is slightly easier than not choosing it, but it's still a choice.

For now. Give it a few decades when all those used cars are no longer on the market. We're already entering the age where media is solely released on streaming platforms with no legal physical copies ever produced, let alone available to consumers. Cars will go much the same way.

The only way to counter it would be some kind of legally enforceable "right to ownership", which could be argued is the next step after "right to repair". Relying on consumer choice is a libertarian fantasy, right up there with corporate self-regulation. Yes, both exist and have substantial impacts, but they lack the teeth to create sustainable economic systems that support a prosperous middle class. Only well-written government regulation can do the latter.

If you give up in advance of an expected loss, you create that loss, whether your expectation was right or wrong. On the other hand, if people didn't buy these vehicles, the companies who sell them would have to stop or be outcompeted. If, in the future, companies again try the same tactic, rinse and repeat until they go away. I think we both agree about what the outcome will be, but I am placing much of the blame on the above attitude and behavior by consumers, rather than on some sort of invisible force of the universe that leads towards enshittification. We're the enshittifiers.

You can't rely on uncoordinated action from individual consumers to solve a problem that is being created by coordinated, collaborating companies.

If BMW came out with a car that gave you an electric shock every 5 minutes of driving, people would just not buy BMW and the problem would eventually work itself out. But if every car manufacturer slowly introduced it and normalized it, to the point where soon no other alternatives exist, then we'd all just accept it and buy cars that shock us.

BMW stopped charging monthly for heated seats over a year ago

Everyone who knows will and that’s all it takes.

I have a Mazda but simply don't use the paid wireless features. It works fine and is still an incredible value.

BTW I think they charge for this feature because it requires the car to be connected to the Internet for it work, as it receives the remote start command from the Internet (so it works if you are far from the car). The Internet connection is certainly not free for Mazda.

But the article said that remote start used to work from the keyfob. Which does not require internet. So they replaced a working option that cost them nothing with a paid option that required internet.

That is the way of things more and more these days.

Insert yourself in the middle of a transaction and charge a toll. The transaction in this case is remotely starting your car.

If covering the cost were the issue, they could probably easily cover remote access features for like $25 a year (and easily get the contracts to do it).

Maybe not stuff that uses more data at that price.

Why can’t they just use an RF widget like we’ve had for 30 years? No subscription needed.

At least in the case of my Mazda, this feature and a few others are activated from a phone. You can not only remote start but set an AC temperature from far away. To be clear, I'm not trying to defend Mazda... I'm simply trying to explain the rationale behind the charge.

If you sell the car, there's a chance¹ the buyer will form an enduring relationship with mazda and sign up for everything.

[1] on someones meaningless OKR.

(also, shouldn't remote start fall back to keyfob or bluetooth if cellular isn't available?)

>it requires the car to be connected to the Internet for it work

If only the car were NOT connected to the internet.

Companies love subscription based services. I have to assume it's becauce they're much more lucrative. But many times companies forget the other part: what value are they providing? Telling me I now have to subscribe to something I'm using to owning isn't going to work, or shouldn't work.

The problem is it does work, a lot, and not enough people push back to hurt their sales, versus the number of people that just pay it, or weren't going to use the feature anyway.

Same thing with all the data collection and privacy violations of many other companies as of late. They keep doing it because it's not hurting their bottom line. I think tech people often forget that we are not their target audience.

> The problem is it does work, a lot, and not enough people push back to hurt their sales

All the evidence in the car industry to date I've seen appears to show charging subscriptions for hardware functions that were previously free or included from factory with no ongoing cost tends to back fire - BMW famously first tried a few years ago to make heated seats subscription based, and has fully backtracked etc.

> https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/bmw-will-not-cha...

"We thought that we would provide an extra service to the customer by offering the chance to activate that later, but the user acceptance isn’t that high. People feel that they paid double – which was actually not true, but perception is reality, I always say. So that was the reason we stopped that."

Remote start, widely available as a free to use feature in many Mazda models to date, falls in the same bucket really. If BMW can't make it work at the premium ends of the market, difficult to see Mazda doing it either.

> People feel that they paid double – which was actually not true, but perception is reality, I always say.

Do you have any ideas on why the double cost is not true? Maybe manufacturing efficiencies make it cheaper to install the parts despite whether the customer paid for the upgrade?

It's likely just economies of scale, similar to how almost all cars, even the cheapest ones, have electric windows. It's cheaper to include them in all model tiers than to keep a separate SKU for roll-ups that'll barely sell anyway, because they exist so they can say "Starting at [lower $]" than what dealers actually keep in stock.

This kind of stuff happens in tech all the time, like lower tier CPUs that are actually manufactured as higher tier ones, but with CPU/GPU cores disabled even if they weren't defective.

Maybe if they didn't gatekeep the feature behind an app in the first place, a lot more people would use it.

Very much indeed. Lots of auto makers are quite naive … there should be laws governing this …

How long are memories? Annoying a subset of your customers for 20 years in exchange for orders of magnitude more profit for the rest of time?

We're seeing it in housing right now - predatory institutional investors buying up stock while younger generations are increasingly coming to terms with the idea of renting for their entire lives.

In theory they much better align expenses with revenue. If you need to maintain servers and pay for LTE plans in perpetuity to make this functionality work, then a subscription makes more sense than bundling it with the purchase price. People are just tired of paying for this kind of thing though, every aspect of human existence is being loaded into a subscription service.

The problem is value add:

The old remote start system worked just fine. I click a button, a remote signal is sent to my car. Boom. Was it perfect? No. But it was local.

Now we replaced a local system with a worse one. I tried using the mazda start and the delay could be 10 minutes because it depends on network coverage OR just how frequently the car wakes up to check the network.

Edit: What would I pay for?

- Remote start service that will automatically start my car 45 minutes after my alarm goes off if the external temperature in my area is below 40 degrees F.

That's additive, and many would want this in say wisconsin, but its not a feature many would need, so the market is reduced.

There is lots of value to LTE-based start.

It works even if you're too far from the car for the RF signal to reach. I park just below my office window because if I'm too far away, my RF-based remote start won't work.

Also being able to remotely adjust climate settings would be nice.

I do fully disagree with their implementation of this, especially with regards to a $10 subscription fee.

And what about if you don't have good cell service in your parking lot or garage?

The problem is the trade-off.

We don't get to decide "I like remote-start, but I want to be able to start it from inside the store while the car is in the parking lot" -- That's a $10 a month gain that I'd pay. I don't care about that? Well I can use short-range radios.

If that was the feature? It would be hailed as awesome.

This is the pushback. Mazda turns off a bunch of features unless I pay $10 and the old version was working just fine for me.

For a feature like remote start, this makes some sense, but companies are trying to charge subscription-based fees for things which have no ongoing expense.

For example, BMW offering heated seats as a monthly subscription.

Regardless, ongoing costs for an LTE data connection which can handle things like remote start costs fractions of a dollar per month at the scale of Mazda.

The stock market love companies with subscriptions…

It's basically free money. You get money from people who subscribe and nothing from people who don't.

Since so many companies are simultaneously doing this app-powered subscription based value extraction there is no competitive disadvantage to doing it.

I'll say as clearly as possible. I will go to extraordinary expense to avoid subscriptions in cars. If I have to spend 30k making an old car run and be road worthy, I'll do it solely out of spite. I can take this quite far: there is a lifetime Spotify ban in my entire household because the early Spotify client paused advertisements if you turned the volume off.

Remote start is not needed to make the car roadworthy.

I don't think OP was saying subscriptions for road worthiness but rather that they would go out of their way to spite car makers if they try to force subscriptions on us. See "Fuck Me Money".

Problem is: How many people are like you? Not enough. We can't rely on a few individual principled actors to influence an entire industry where people's full time job is to oppose those principles. The free market is not going to solve this problem, unfortunately.

Before even getting to that question, I think we need to ask - How many people have the means to do that? I probably would if I could, but I certainly don’t and I’m sure many more fall under that same bucket.

Yeah I’m keeping my boring AF no internet connection car until it blows up and I can’t fix what’s left after the explosion.

It was convenient that they wanted to update terms of service right as they were implementing this. I was able to just decline the terms, delete the app, and I think that lets me off the hook with them.

I'm much more invested in the notion that someone else can't remote start my car than that I can or can't, and my experience in the transportation industry is that security is pretty lousy.

I will miss the occasional reminder that I left the doors unlocked but mostly, nothing of value has been lost.

If I could get a car without such features I'd happily do it but it has to be a late model with warranty or I'm out, like most people.

Mazda basically records your life, so they know where you go, how fast you go, distracted driver information, and most likely sells your data. (I bet insurance companies love this data)

WE AUTOMATICALLY COLLECT CERTAIN DEFAULT DATA FROM THE CONNECTED VEHICLE ON AN ONGOING BASIS. ONLY WE CAN DEACTIVATE THE TCU AND DISABLE OUR COLLECTION OF ALL DEFAULT DATA. NOTE THAT THE SALE, TRANSFER, OR LEASE TERMINATION OF A CONNECTED VEHICLE WILL NOT DISABLE AUTOMATIC DEFAULT DATA COLLECTION.

“Default Data” includes the following:

“Driving Data”: driving behavior data, which includes the acceleration and speed at which your Connected Vehicle is driven and use of the steering and braking functions in your Connected Vehicle (Driving Data is collected for each driving trip and transmitted at each Ignition Off); and “Vehicle Health Data”: includes Vehicle Identification Number (VIN); odometer, fuel level, and oil life readings; Diagnostic Trouble Codes (DTCs); and data from the Connected Vehicle’s OBD system (“OBD Data”). OBD Data includes, but is not limited to, engine coolant temperature, fuel injection volume, engine Rotation Per Minute (RPM), and the status of doors, hood, trunk, and hazard lights (Vehicle Health Data is transmitted at each Ignition-Off).

Driver Attention Alert (DAA) This safety feature monitors the driver's awareness and learns their driving habits when the vehicle is driven above 40 miles per hour.

Driver Monitoring (DM) This system detects driver fatigue and sleepiness by monitoring changes in the driver's facial features

Corporations have figured out how to exploit human psychology when it comes to subscriptions. Just as how people are willing to spend $99 on a product when they wouldn't have spent $100, they will gladly pay a $10/month subscription (with annual price increments) for 30 years straight rather than a $500 one-time fee.

I can't wait to read about renters not only having to pay their landlords rent, but also extra subscriptions for common amenities, like central heating, A/C, and even shower. The dream is a subscription for everything.

Unauthorized Bread might be the book for you!

(Disclaimer: I haven't read it yet.)

one of those insufferable section 8 'get rich' influencers brags about doing this all the time on tiktok.

Well don’t we? Utilities are often a separate expense. I have to pay extra to get any parking space in our parking lot

This is one of the minor themes in PKD's Ubik.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7444685-the-door-refused-to...

Remote start requires an internet connection. Is your internet service included with your rent?

Sadly, I think if we started seeing landlords charging tenants a per-month shower fee or a per-use fee for the home's door, we'd have commenters on HN defending it.

But it’s convenient and you don’t have to pay it’s optional… Heh.

Has Mazda made their remote start at all useful? My Mazda can only be started, I can't set the climate or control the seat or steering wheel heating. Some settings can be set before the car is turned off, if you remember, but some reset no matter what. And the few times I have tried remote start, it has stopped after a short while, as apparently the system requires continuous cellular connectivity to keep the engine running. So if the connection drops at all it shuts off the engine. And finally, if you do remote start, the engine shuts off as soon as you open the door, so you immediately have to start it again, which just seems bad for the engine.

Lots of ICE cars these days shut the engine off anytime they come to a stop, to conserve fuel, so I guess it doesn't amount to too much wear and tear.

I’ve yet to see one where you couldn’t disable this “feature” though.

What percentage of people use the app at all? And also interested to know how many people tried the app for a week or so, and then never again. There is no shortage of people over at /r/mazda, etc. recounting how they found the app so worthless, they tried it a couple of times, and then deleted the app.

Potentially unpopular take but I don't think free services linked to physical goods are a good idea in practice. Maintaining such services costs money forever, companies can't sustain that as a business model, so the market is littered with hardware that is now useless because the services it required has gone offline. If there's something to gripe about here it's that Mazda removed the fob-based remote start, or that $10/month is too high, but it should not be that they're charging a maintenance fee for something they have to maintain.

I'd love if there were a bring-your-own option. A usb-a port you can plug in your kwn always on cellular controller to.

It's unfortunate as hell for car companies that they need to become maintainers of Internet of Cars infrastructure that needs to stay running, that brings legal obligation & maintenance. It's be better for consumers if there were free market options, and it's save so much pain and development costs if car companies could get out of having to DIY all these IoT offerings.

You probably just hit a billion dollar idea. Come up with a (many really) car computer replacement. They generally use standard protocols and there can only be so many variations. Your solution could end all the car subscriptions, give more and better options, unlock heated seats, etc. With physical access to the car there is only so much a manufacturer could do to stop it.

If you are considering responding negatively in these comments, and also work on or for a SaaS business (or any kind of aaS), I would like to hear your reasoning

Don't work on or for a SaaS business.

But the argument would go for a SaaS, you're paying for (1) potentially upgrades and support, and (2) the ease-of-mind to off-load self hosting to someone else. So yes I agree, only SaaS business people who offer customers a buy-to-own option (open-source their SaaS suites with a push-button to deploy and host on AWS) should be able to comment on thread!

I don't, but SaaS is very clearly "we provide this product, you pay for it". The business model revolves around access to some useful improvement.

Here, Mazda have removed a traditionally zero-dollar standard inclusion which incurs no ongoing cost (keyfob start) and replaced it with a paid option (smartphone start).

These aren't the same thing.

I would like to know when people will realize again the power of being united: a vendor start to screw it's customers? Few hours and all socials invite to boycott it. All intentions to order, reserved test drives etc got deleted "sorry, we hear the news, due to the vendor behavior we are not anymore interested not only in this specific car but in the brand altogether".

It's not enough of an issue to sway regular people into doing that. It's a, "yeah that's shitty" but not a deal breaker.

That's why we are here: people do not react for tiny annoyances/changes, so a step at a time they got TFU without realizing. Since we are in the information era hopefully a significant cohort of people have realized that and react at first sight to avoid being played in the long run. If not, well... We are TFU, only waiting to discover how much a step at a time...

People are tired and only have so much energy. I can keep tilting at windmills about the loss of the headphone jack, but the public response is a big meh. Companies will incrementally capitalize on tiny inconveniences for any potential profit.

Replacing a local option which worked forever with a subscription locked alternative is a no-go for me.

As long as aftermarket solutions exist, I will opt for those every time. Aftermarket systems being locked out due to DRM is a natural consequence of the DMCA and everyone should write their congressperson about it. People did not appreciate at the time the far-reaching implications.

For those saying "people need to stop buying cars that have locked subscription features" -- soon it may be very hard to do so. The industry has been allowed to consolidate so much, and our antitrust enforcement so lax, that the market is tightening in favor of a few players.

Some of these make sense though, considering the car needs an LTE modem and data connection in order to make these things work. That isn't free to the car company.

It doesn’t need to use the cell network to remote start though, that was a bad design decision IMO.

The way Tesla does this is more honest. $9.99 for everything.

They really don't need an LTE modem or data connection. But if it's going to be there _for a finite period of time of course_. Why shouldn't I be able to send a command down off their servers? It's not like they're going to just disconnect the telemetry thing if I don't pay some arbitrary subscription fee.

Do not ever buy a car from a company who locks features behind a subscription.

I assure you, your vote matters and they will listen. This community has the power to change the future. Hell, The product managers considering it are probably members. Here’s how we do it. Do. Not. Buy. That’s it. And we change the path of the future. Away from the shit life where everything is a subscription all the time towards the one where you own things after you buy them.

For as many problems as my Tesla has given me at least the phone app acting as a key and all the wireless features are included. Only 2 digital upsells were FSD and data for apps like apple music and live traffic, but normal maps without live traffic are all just free.

It is yet another form of DRM so consumers can fork over more money for the same functionality.

When are cars going to be jailbroken?

Will there be FLOSS-powered cars?

How does "right to repair" come into play?

Food for thought:

https://craphound.com/news/2016/11/23/car-wars-a-dystopian-s...

Still don't see anything better than Mazda to buy, if you look at the "general modern car bullshit" bingo card including but not limited to: not enough real buttons, cybersecurity blunders (https://samcurry.net/web-hackers-vs-the-auto-industry) or ridiculous corner cutting.

The MX-5 ND especially has no serious competition at its price, as a true sports car (manual gearbox, truly light weight, independent suspension, not FF layout, "fun" engine) with high build quality. The Yaris GR could have been it, but Euro eco taxes killed it for my wallet (and the US doesn't want small cars).

As some in the comments correctly point out, this service requires a cellular connection. Which involves costs for Mazda. It's appropriate for them to charge a small monthly fee for the service. My only real complaint about this is discontinuing the keyfob-based feature. All that said, I see no need for remote start, anyway.

It only requires cellular because that's how Mazda designed it. Plenty of remote start systems have been built without requiring cellular.

There may be a blurring of use-cases here, between:

1. Starting a car from a short distance in order to pre-heat in cold temperatures or because you're in a huge hurry. (Or paranoid of car-bombs, I guess.)

2. Starting a car from a long distance on someone else's behalf so that they can borrow it for some reason.

While I think #1 is most common, #2 overlaps with other "call support to unlock your car" or "disable if stolen"-type features. So it's likely manufacturers are motivated to use cellular connections "because it's already probably there for the other stuff."

P.S.: That said I really don't like the lack of owner control implied but some of those systems.

Cars have had remote start systems since before the first cell phone was invented. What is LTE/4G/5G adding in this scenario? Who exactly needs to start their car from the other side of the world? It's trivial for manufacturers to add a short-range radio that will work from across the driveway, which is what 99% of their customers want. In fact every key fob already has this functionality, which is how cars can unlock from a distance. As the article states, Mazda themselves had this version of remote start until they removed it in favor of the subscription option.

It's not about the other side of the world, my RF remote-start works reliably only to maybe 100 feet or so.

I park directly below my office window so it's no issue for me to hit the remote start and then leave 10 minutes later but if I couldn't do that my remote start would be mostly useless.

For example say I go to a movie, ideal would be to remote start it just as the movie ends so it's warm by the time I make it to the car. With an RF-based remote start there's a 0% chance my remote starter works inside the theatre. It will only start working at some point after I leave the building and start walking towards the car giving me maybe a minute of warm-up time. Makes the feature kinda useless for this case.

Remote start is very nice if you park outside during the winter and prefer not to sit in a car that's 20 degrees Fahrenheit for the first 10 minutes of your drive.

Remote start is accidental carbon monoxide poisoning waiting to happen if your garage is directly connected to your residence. I live in an area with brutal winters in Wyoming and just bought a new Ford Bronco, wish I could fully disable it (there's a button on the key fob as well).

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/13/business/deadly-convenien...

It auto-shuts off right? I’d hope the timeout would be lower than the amount of time to kill someone in a garage.

Ford's remote start has a 15 minute cutoff without any intervention. Using numbers from a cold-started 2011 F-150 Raptor during a driving test and trapping it in a single car garage, 15 minutes with zero circulation results in ~40-120ppm carbon monoxide* which would still take multiple hours of exposure before symptoms occur. Your bronco probably has lower emissions and with good circulation to the much larger air volume of the rest of the house CO poisoning really shouldn't be a concern. Obviously don't use the feature with the door closed but accidentally triggering it wouldn't be that big of a deal. It also is pretty hard to accidentally trigger from the fob, requiring pressing the lock button and the remote start button twice in quick succession.

* 0.263-0.725g CO/min in a 12x22x10 ft garage. higher number is from testing under load before the cat is warmed up

https://www.edmunds.com/car-reviews/features/emissions-test-...

https://www.lenntech.com/calculators/ppm/converter-parts-per...

The service costs orders of magnitude more than what their actual costs should be.

You can have an LTE connection for probably around 10c/month/sim at the scale of Mazda with tiny amounts of data (plenty for, say, 100 remote starts/month).

Not defending subscriptions, but it's not just data. You need developers for your apps, you need servers, the service needs to be secure, etc. On the data side, as soon you have data, other services also start working, like live traffic info and so on.

Again, not defending these expensive subscriptions, just pointing out that it probably costs more than 10c a month per car to keep all that stuff running.

Eh. Consider the sheer volume of vehicles Mazda for example sells globally. Even at a dollar per unit the gap would more than make up for that.

Plus, a cellular connection provides direct customer information that Mazda or whoever now no longer have to pay for in terms of market research. They can now just know the usage of their vehicles and tie that in with whatever data sources they want to.

I agree, it's more than 10c/month.

Charge me $10/year for the service and I'll happily pay it, that should cover all your costs at a scale of millions of cars.

They have cellular so they can do telemetry, not so I can start the car.

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