In the end, the KIA car company made its cars into subscription models, I really hate this because in the end the car we buy with our own money doesn’t feel like it belongs to us. Should we finally buy an old school car ? so as not to be affected by this subscription models or is there a way to crack the software installed in it ?
I love all the comments saying “yeah well that stuff isn’t free someone has to maintain it”
YOU’RE PAYING 100K FOR A FUCKING CAR
That’s the payment. That’s what they get their money from.
Wanting more in perpetuity is fucking stupid no matter what the excuse is.
There’s also the fact that remote start, while shorter range, has existed on key fobs for like 20 years. My ex wife’s 2022 Hyundai has remote start, but only through the app, while my 2013 Focus has it on the key fob.
That’s honestly the only feature that’s bundled in those subscriptions that I really want, though the alarm notification is a nice to have.
I have a 22 kia with remote start. I also have the app (that costs the same as this post so I don’t pay either). The remote start sets the car to 72 with nothing else on. No way to change it via settings. Paying for the app remote start is the only way to do the defroster, heated seats, steering wheel, etc. It’s so fucking lame.
app
nah
Low effort.
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Ok, enough. At this point it’s too evident that you’re a troll paid for by Hyundai. You’ll be out of a job soon, since this will no longer be effective.
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It’s a stupid image, how can you give this much of a shit about something so inconsequential? You’re all over this thread sucking hyundai subscription dong, what gives?
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You’ve changed my mind. I am now also so concerned that this post in a piracy community could bankrupt hyundai and poison the minds of an entire generation that I will spend hours arguing about it on some obscure social media platform. Thank you for your service.
🏅
He just indicated that his wife’s car does not have this on the fob. Meaning, it can and will go away eventually especially with folks paying for it.
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Dude. It says “has remote start but only through the app” in his post. You tell me if it has remote start installed
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A 2024 Kia Telluride is right around $50,000 USD (fully loaded specs), but I get what you’re saying with regards to vehicles in general.
Like BMW and Tesla having “creature comforts” behind subscriptions.
Tesla doesn’t have “creature comforts” behind subscriptions. They’re 1-time payments.
Not only that, but if you have no choice but to buy a car with internet connectivity, these are supposed to be the kind of bells and whistles they give to at least make it SEEM like you’re not being completely taken advantage of. It’s like a double-dip. “We’re giving your car connectivity so we can sell your telemetry, AND we get to charge you for all the useful features, too!”
If it costs SO much to maintain these services, cool. I’d be happy to save the poor little car manufacturers money by buying a model that uses no connectivity whatsoever. But, for some reason, they don’t seem to want to offer that. Gee, I wonder why.
Demand more out of them, because they’ll always be looking to get more out of you.
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You keep mentioning “official video by (insert manufacturer name here)”. Are you even thinking when you say that? It’s the manufacturer, what the hell were you expecting them to promote? “were fucking you over, so here’s why you have to give us more money for a car that you think is yours but actually will never be”?
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The video shows the fob starting the car. It also states that you can pay for the app to be able to do it anywhere.
It’s not a promo video, it’s a “how to” for car owners.
Are we not to believe that it really does that?
What is this internet thing for if I can’t find information? Do I have to drive to a car dealership and ask to find out if this is true? Do I need to see it in action? When I do, can you even trust my answer?
Not 1 person here has mentioned that it doesn’t work. Not 1 person here has said that the “feature” is useless or anything remotely similar.
What is in question here is the fucking pushing of companies to tie as many idiots as humanly possible to their subscriptions to keep on draining funds from them.
Give me the car for free, and maybe I’ll subscribe. Otherwise, I buy stuff with ALL it’s capabilities enabled or not at all.
My car is worth US$85,000 in my country. Everything works, app and all, and I don’t have to pay anything other than my loan, insurance, maintenance and charge (yes, it’s an electric vehicle).
I own a 2023 BYD Han, I have an account for the app, and I can do whatever it’s able to do from it without ever having to open my wallet again.
If and when they decide to make this a paid subscription, then I’ll sell that one, and move on.
So, yeah, follow a bullshit advertisement that you call a “tutorial” and believe what you want. They are just like drug pushers, only for tech.
Now who is the one making fucking noise without looking a things from a common sense perspective?
Now who is the one making fucking noise without looking a things from a common sense perspective?
IMO, you. Again, the video isn’t marketing. The car auto-starts just fine without paying anyone a penny extra.
The manufacturer offers overpriced warranties and app features. Totally optional. You don’t have to buy it.
The dealership offers overpriced vehicle service also. It’s optional. You don’t have to buy it.
Some people want that stuff. I don’t. You don’t. 🤝
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
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They have considered how much the gains from being evil assholes offset the cost of alienating some people, and found that they make more by being evil, it’s not stupid.
This reminds me of the video game industry. Make a complete game, then choose to remove pieces to sell later as add-on content. Lol. The only thing I see costing them money is if they have to pay for an LTE subscription to maintain that internet connectivity so you can start your car from an app.
The issue is that with ongoing service across time, the longer the service is being used the more it costs Kia. The larger the time boxes Kia uses the bigger the number is and the more you’re going to scare off customers.
Using Kias online build and price, looks like the most expensive Telluride you can get right now is $60k MSRP, cheapest at 30k
Let’s assume Kia estimates average lifetime of a Telluride to be 20 years so they create an option to purchase this service one time for the “lifetime” of the vehicle. Taking in good faith the pricing Kia has listed, using that $150 annual package, and assuming that price goes up every year at a rate of 10% (what Netflix, YouTube, etc have been doing) across those twenty years you’re looking at around $8.5k option. At the top trim thats still 14% extra that is going to make some buyers hesitant, at the base model that’s 28% more expensive.
Enough buyers will scoff at that so Kia can either ditch the idea entirely as they’ll lose money on having to pay for the initial development and never make their money back, or they find some way to repackage that cost and make it look like something that buyers are willing to deal with.
To me the bigger issue is the cost of the service vs what you’re getting. Server time + dev team + mobile data link cannot be costing Kia more than a few million annually, mid to upper hundred K is more likely so they must not be expecting that many people to actually be paying for any of this
The average lifespan of a Kia is 20 years
Ay LMAO
Kia is actually among the most reliable brands now according to consumer reports (at least for EVs? I don’t have a CR subscription so I can’t check the overall numbers)
Oh yeah I pulled 20 years out of my ass. I could see some manager there saying to plan for it even though all the engineers expect a much shorter lifetime
Assume the communication with the app it through Internet. The car must have a 4G chip (too early to see 5G in cars, I think?). So no matter what you pay, it won’t work when 4G is retired. With marketing pushing to get new standards always faster, 4G may not last another 20years.
Anyway, bear in mind that once you subscribe, they will most likely collect detailed data about how you use the features and sell that as well…
Bear in mind that they are collecting that data regardless of your subscription…
Reminder buying isn’t owning anymore.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-09-06/carmakers-privacy-data-collection-drivers
Finally someone who gets it
Glad to see you here my fellow comrades
Honestly the people who defended subscription models for something that you already paid & own are dumb (or maybe just trolling around) like people who defend adobe for subscription modelsHonestly the people who defended subscription models for something that you already paid & own are dumb
You don’t own the cellular towers your car needs to connect to in order to work with the app.
Cars shouldn’t require cell phone towers to function. It’s a CAR.
It doesn’t. The car works just fine. The features that require a cell phone are specific to operating your car while not present at your car.
But you do pay to use the network. So, you’re still paying for it.
That’s the point. It IS a subscription. The person I’m responding to believes that it shouldn’t be and that they’ve paid for it already.
Not to mention the data they mine from you with their “app” that they can sell to advertisers.
Finally, the voice (text) of reason.
Thank you!
you should absolutely choose a vehicle without subscriptions, and make a point of stating it at time of purchase
this is your one moment to make a difference
Not until my 2007 Tundra literally collapses into a pile of rust and plastic. Hopefully it’s not too late by then.
LOL how does one go about that, exactly?
Do you walk into the dealer and state affirmatively “I am not buying a car here because I don’t want a subscription!” and then turn around and walk out?
Won’t matter. The company knows you don’t want this. They also know that enough other people will pay for it that it won’t matter. These subscriptions are not new. If people put their foot down and refused to pay for them they would go away, but the opposite it happening.
Sorry.
No, you should choose a vehicle with but steal it and pirat the subscription software.
Just download a car
You wouldn’t…oh goddamnit
Agreed.
And then you can’t use it when the temp is 0F because they decide to do some maintenance
I do find that the days I need it the most it’s slower than molasses.
Imagine your car need an updates or you don’t paying subscription fee or but the server are offline & you’re in emergency situation, and the worst of it your car won’t start without it OMG… that’s scarred me the hell out of it
My spouse was just telling me about someone who got stuck waiting for an hour because their car decided to unexpectedly do an update
The only problem with services as a subscription is THE FUCKING IDIOTS THAT PAY FOR THEM
If nobody fell for shit like that, manufacturers would drop it like boiling diarrhea
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When you buy the car, you also pay for that integrated, albeit disable, service. To enable it you have to pay a subscription. I agree with the OP. This should never be the case. Now, the culprit is not the car manufacturer, but the people that pay for it. If nobody, or aven few people, paid for this, they wouldn’t have a business for that and they would likely stop. Bottom line is, you don’t like it? Give your money to another brand.
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Until they take that away from the fobs
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I’ll take that bet in the next ~10 years.
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Finally someone who gets it
Glad to see you here my fellow comradesThis is where capitalism is failing because people are dumb 🤷
This is where capitalism is thriving because people are dumb
Fixed. It thrives on human stupidity and laziness
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It would be reasonable if what that app did was anything that actually needed internet servers to work. Why not just pair up the phone with the car, ad-hoc like you could with a PSP, or any sort of peer-to-peer between car-phone, and call it a day? Oh, right, because then you can’t create a service you can charge monthly for.
That people are willing to pay for effectively a remote temperature control and shutdown timer, that does not need to be an internet service to work properly, can and should be dunked on.
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It’s for office workers or inner city dwellers in cold regions. They can start their car which is in the parking garage blocks away. It makes sense and it costs money to run.
Theres nothing wrong at all with this. At all. Image is FUD
Because you actually believe you didn’t already paid for about 5 years of the service when you paid for the car? Human stupidity and laziness is the accurate reason for manufacturers doing this.
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This is true.
Go and buy a car from a manufacturer who doesn’t insist on subscriptions… whilst you still can!
Something like the XBUS seems like a good choice. They seem to focus on the important and practical stuff, and I can’t find any information about any sort of related subscription.
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looking through that list fully half are internal only , or tied to the remote that comes with the vehicle. no 3rd party required.
i understand all the cellular-required bits… ‘find my car’… but remote start? my brand new vehicle has remote start with no subscription.
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They’ll make you pay for it, while simultaneously collecting usage data via the app, and further turning a profit off you.
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It doesn’t matter where the data goes, or if it’s kept proprietary. Businesses wouldn’t collect metrics if it didn’t translate to dollar signs for them. It forms their business decisions.
And it not being shared with other businesses is only one point of concern from a privacy perspective. Another is that large corporations are hacked or otherwise infiltrated quite frequently, resulting in user data leaks.
You assume they are only collecting usage data with their apps, which is typically not the case. Some of them request every permission on your phone just to collect as much as they can.
If it was worthless they wouldn’t put a fucking 4g modem on all of them “for free” and siphoning all the telemetry away
Yeah my car has remote start. I can do it with no subscription with my remote. Additionally I can pay for OnStar and do it through the app. It also has heated seats and a heated steering wheel, and unlike some brands those aren’t locked behind a subscription since they are literally just vehicle hardware, not cloud services.
They make you use the app to get the advertised features. Hyundai/Kia are terrible about this.
Oh and the entire implementation is half-assed. I bought my Hyundai used and can’t even use the paid features because they won’t transfer the account to me.
I actually like Hyundai, but I will never again purchase one of their vehicles because of subscriptions and what I mentioned above.
I think the remote start is through the Kia app, not the remote. I would imagine the idea is you can turn on the car and turn on the heat when it is cold outside so you can stay in your home a little bit longer.
yeah, the last 2 cars ive bought had this. no subscription, no app, and it works fine from the very nice remote that is also the key. maybe kia just sucks
By removing the feature from the remote and moving it to an app they turn a cost of a more complex remote into a profit of constant subscription money.
In the winter I’d remote start my car from the top floor and even I got to the bottom my car would be heated; their remote start uses server time.
Now if they charged me to use the remote start from my keys, that’d be a different story.
@originalucifer @devilish666 @skullgiver Kia definitely sucks
My car offered a remote start on the key fob and even the dealer told me not to buy it because the range was so short. I ended up installing an after market Viper system that is cellular and costs ~$100 per year when I get 3 years at a time. So even the after market solutions have subscriptions. If you need a cell connection you have to pay for it
You realize that maintaining a server that would allow that costs pennies?
You wouldn’t pay $150 for a lollipop, but somehow people think this is ok.
This problem exists exactly because of people like you, thinking it’s OK to pay for the features you already paid for.
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Or “for free” as in paid for by your data and the unskippable targeted ads you wil get on your infotainment system. I’m sure in the future some cheap car brand will blast commercials trough your speaker system to pay for all the free services
The KIA app has three trackers in it. (Can’t scan the latest version, however) Not exactly a lot by contemporary standards, but more than many. Two of my banking apps have 7. One weather app has 10. The apps I respect have none or only a single tracker, and only for crashlytics, and still optional.
Thanks for linking to the tracker site, I’ve been meaning to find more ways to audit the amount of trackers in my apps for a while now.
Happy to help
I’m betting they’re paying more than the servers per car for the cellular connectivity.
It’s not what we pay obviously. But it’s not free either.
The traffic and compute for this kind of application is very minimal, a cheap server can hold thousands and thousands of users.
It’s the cellular connectivity that costs a lot, difficult to imagine that would be less than 50 cents a month
They could be paying licensing per user for some third party solution that meets the security requirements of stuff like remote unlocking. (Yeah, they also could do it themselves, at the cost of hiring a couple security experts, and the scale should make it pretty cheap per car, but a lot of the times companies like to hire it out so they have someone to point to if there are flaws.)
They could also just not care and do a shitty job, but doing the software part correctly isn’t free either. But yeah, cellular with how little they use it and economies of scale isn’t going to be a massive outlay, but it’s something that makes some sense to have behind a paid service. Right now it’s not a huge cost, but down the road, if they’re paying for 20 years of cars worth of connectivity when most of them aren’t used, it could add up to meaningful expenses that are pointless.
low-bandwidth data plans in bulk are pretty cheap. it’s what many atms, vending machines, redbox and similar, etc., along with sensors and gauges, and what-not for a variety of applications, use.
over the expected lifespan of a car, it would cost the manufactures less than they charge for a set of floor mats.
Maintaining the infrastructure needed for all the shite that modern cars are packed with, including the person cost of maintenance is not “pennies”. You don’t just spin up a EC2 instance and call it a day. You need infrastructure across multiple countries, service level agreements, people on-call to handle issues, account management with third-party downstream services, etc.
With that being said, you’ve already paid. You paid for the car, which costs an obscene amount already. If you own the car, you don’t need a separate payment for the software.
All of these functionalities can be provided by a simple WebSocket + REST server. The car connects to the WebSocket, and you can access these functionalities from your phone either with WebSockets or regular HTTP requests.
Cheapest servers with backend written in JS can easily handle thousands of WebSocket connections, and written in Go tens of thousands WebSocket connections. They would not ever need like over 100 of these servers GLOBALLY, which would cost them around $3000 monthly.
That’s the price of 60 subscriptions, which is freaking ridiculous.
Then maybe don’t make them rely on external servers? Your car has a computer, put the server there.
Even if all of the intermediate server tech is on the car, somebody still has to pay for the car’s internet service, either cellular or satellite, it something.
Otherwise, you’re not going to be doing remote start over IP.
This is only half the issue. You can put a server in the car, but that doesn’t solve the networking issue. Most have a cellular connection now that needs to be paid for by someone. Then there is the issue of discovery. When you open that app on your phone, how does it know where to connect? Sure, it could look for a local or Bluetooth network. But that would only work if you’re already close to you car like when it’s in the garage.
Outside of that home network, something needs to facilitate the connection between your phone and the car. since neither will have a static IP address, it’s essentially impossible to achieve without some server elsewhere to broker that connection.
Just package it into the car warranty. Most people wouldn’t care then. For the most part new car people buy new cars and used car people buy used cars.
It’s a really good idea for the car manufacturer, as it would add one more annoyance to buying a used car. New car, no worries unless you plan to drive it into the ground. Used car, now you have to go online to see what subscription costs might be.
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Beside all that, with how absolutely terrible car companies are at providing software updates and writing code, I’d rather have a pull based cloud API thing than a server implementation full of security holes.
But you have that, except on one central server.
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It plays on the classic consumer mindset of “if it’s an option, I need it!” Spoiler: you don’t need it. I understand you want those features, they’d be a nice luxury… but you don’t need them.
You’re excusing their asshole design of requiring the server in the first place. They never needed it before. It doesn’t make sense having to pay a subscription for a fucking car.
$59 is still too much to ask for what amounts to just a few API calls to some cloud service.
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Ok, roadside assistance is maybe worth that price, but the rest are just API calls that cost them virtually nothing to operate. There’s no need for them to keep these functionalities hostage behind some roadside service, other than to be anti consumer.
Not to mention that by paying $90 extra you unlock the functionality to remote unlock your car. What’s the justification for this price? There’s no way it costs this much extra.
Yeah, unless there are features hidden that are hardware based and doesn’t rely on KIA servers then this is not a problem in the slightest.
It’s vastly different from the paid unlocks of Tesla or subscription for hardware of BMW.
Don’t group them under one banner and muddy the waters because if we do then all it will do is normalize what Tesla and BMW does and allow it to spread. Either that or make it so we won’t get the features listed or the features will have an exorbitant cost attached when new to ensure they don’t lose money from maintaining the service for the service life of the vehicle (or do Tesla shit of not letting the feature transfer when resold effectively impacting resell value negatively which is bad for the original buyer).
Agreed, as long as they don’t go the BMW route and charge for heated seats, or the Toyota route and charge for remote start using the key fob.
Unless that “more” button is doing a lot of heavy lifting, this is basically paying for the Internet connection for your car to be able to connect to a phone app through Kia’s servers.
Remote lock & unlock? It’s literally been a feature of dumb cars since the 90s.
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The crazy thing is that at the price you are paying for a friggin telluride they could easily raise the price by a few hundred (ie several years worth of subscription) and it would be unlikely to shift sales by much at all but would not piss off the buyers like this. You can’t put this crap on your car loan either. I really get the sense there is a conspiracy level concerted effort to try to indoctrinate generation Z into allowing every corporation they deal with to stick an IV into their bank accounts.
They intentionally didn’t roll the subscription into the sale price. That’s the goal. They want that sweet, predictable, monthly income that they sell their investors on.
They also figured that if you’ve found your car, you’re less likely to walk away for what is essentially a fraction of the car’s price.
I honestly hope the next car I buy has shit like this. Because boy am I going to make it my mission to jailbreak it and release my code open source.
If you are clever, confident, and savvy about it I think you could get your next car for free. If there was a kickstarter type project where I could pledge an amount in support of a jailbreak for a car I owned or was thinking of getting, I’d pledge a decent amount, I think a lot of people would.
That’s the irony of all of this. I too would donate to a project that was actively trying to do this, even donate to their legal fund. I’d probably pay more than the subscription!
These asshole companies just don’t realize that a determined developer and engineer will move heaven and earth to make sure that their freedoms (as in speech) aren’t restricted.
I don’t care if it’s illegal. It’s my fucking car. Once you sell it to me, it ceases to be your property. You leave $100 bill in the glove compartment before you sell it to me? Well it’s mine now.
You leave software on my car’s computer? Welp, it’s mine now.
Right to repair is a main line issue for me
Keep us posted on make and model. I sure as hell will try to get one myself and help you test the shit out of that jailbreak.
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10 years of this subscription is $1500. Would anyone blink if they were buying a new car for 1500 more? lol
I would… I don’t want the feature. So why should I pay for it?
They’re training people for even worse subscription models.
Worth noting that these features appear to require your car to be connected to a cellular network. This isn’t the same as BMW charging a fee for heated seats.
They could have just put a SIM card in your car and required you to pay your cell phone provider for a connection.
This type of subscription is actually kiiiiinda understandable because the company has to maintain servers, staff and keep the software secure because they’re handling sensitive data such as location etc.
I also remember that BMW I think? Had a heated seat subscription and that’s really not justifiable imo
I own a Kia. I don’t enjoy the subscription anymore than the next guy but I’m calling bullshit.
The only features behind a pay wall are the ones the app provides. The ones that require an always on internet connection and server infrastructure to maintain.
None of the in-car features are limited. The remote start on my key fob, seat heaters, onboard nav, all work fine without a subscription.
This isn’t like the crap bmw was pulling with the seat heaters.
Fuck sakes. Those features were free on my 2020 Telluride.
Simple. Buy an older car and spend the extra money maintaining it. Reducing demand is the only language consumers have that businesses understand.
It doesn’t have to be ancient; even 5-10 year old cars don’t have this bullshit.
“You wouldn’t download a car.”
I would absolutely hack the heated seats to work without my credit card.
Look your car has a new software update available!
I hope it’s not like Windows updates; sitting in your car for 40 minutes before work because you can’t use the car until the update is complete.
Just. You. Wait.
😭
That’s already happened.
Too many times.
or… we just need more FOSS alternatives to the car manufacturers proprietary OS.
I already see GH issues like: “breaks stop working when going above 200mph.”
While I’m generally against subscriptions, for the most part the above are things that require cellular service and cloud infrastructure…
While the price may be too high. I’m normally ok with subscriptions for things that have on-going costs to the seller.
Even better, an open source car!
There’s already an open source bike. Carrying several tons of metal everywhere you go is kind of a bad idea anyway.
What about people that don’t live in the city where public transportation between towns is trash?
Don’t you think it’s interesting that even though the vast majority of car trips are a single person going less than a mile, every time someone brings up bikes the rebuttal is always “what if I need to move my family of 16 and their refrigerator 800 miles in freezing rain!?”
The US was built on rail. The infrastructure could be fixed. It’s a choice not to fix it. It would be better to put in energy to fixing this than creating an open source way to access a proprietary transit system. Infrastructure is the problem, car vendors are just exploiting it.
Edit: correction, 52% of trips in the US in 2021 were under 3 miles and 28% are under a mile according to US DoE (https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1230-march-21-2022-more-half-all-daily-trips-were-less-three-miles-2021). 2% we’re over 50 miles. Over 60% were under 5 miles, which is still pretty easy with an eBike given functional infrastructure.
Yeah, but I’m not from the US, I’m from a small town in Europe, you can put “all that effort” in both places at the same time because they are 2 completelly different problems
They aren’t two completely different problems, they’re in direct opposition. Making cars more tolerable increases demand for cars. Improving mass transit and bike infrastructure decreases demand. One is sustainable, the other is not.
I think the term you mean is old car especially from before 2018
in the end old cars basically open source you can modified it whatever you want as long as not breaking regulationsSo my two options are a repairable old gasoline/diesel car or a non reparaible electric/hydrogen car?
Yup, that’s the only choice not you but everyone get
Nissan Leafs are plenty DIY repairable. It was part of our decision making process when considering buying an EV. There’s also electric conversions if that’s your jam.
Some of us want all the internet connected options. And want to own their machine and have good security
Open source car software and firmware would do that
