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Comment by samdunham | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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