My partner recently bought a newer Subaru. It’s great, and when we looked it up we saw it had remote start. Turns out it’s behind a subscription. When I found that out I essentially wrote off Subaru as a brand for my future car purchases. Catch me driving my 2017 civic into the ground before I pay a freaking subscription for basic vehicle functionality
I took my wife's 2020 Crosstrek in for service a couple of years ago.
The service writer told me (and documented) that the car needed rear pads when I came to pick it up.
That's a little weird, I thought.
I took it to a tire place for snows two weeks later. They inspect that shit for the upsell while the wheels are off anyway. Front and rear brakes: fine.
Checked 'em myself. Sure enough, barely worn.
That was the last time that car visited the dealer.
I still have to pull the dash apart to bypass the spy box they never mentioned when selling the car.
These dicks feel they aren't making enough money just making and selling cars they have to do shady shit.
Honda dealer told me I had an oil leak. Odd, never saw oil in my driveway. Said no thanks. A friend mechanic looked at it and said there was no evidence of an oil leak.
I have this[0] in my cart waiting to pull the trigger. It's supposed to allow you to pull the power from the data communication model, while preserving the functioning of the microphone and front speakers, which are routed through the DCM.
I was thinking of the exploit back from 2023 that effected Acura, Genesis, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Infiniti, Nissan, and Porsche. I remember it being discussed on HN at the time but I can't find the relevant thread. Here is an article covering it: https://www.securityweek.com/16-car-makers-and-their-vehicle..., at the time.
In the age of push-to-start cars, yeah it does feel basic to me. If I can unlock my car with my key fob, why can’t I send a signal to start it?
My 2017 Honda civic has it without a subscription so I was pretty shocked to learn that Subaru decided its customers would be cool with it being behind a pay-wall.
Are you looking to remote start from the fob, or from an app? I agree that if it's done via the fob, that shouldn't require a subscription. But I understand that something requiring a cell signal will usually be paid, one way or another. I prefer it not be baked into the cost of the car, since some people (me) will not want that feature.
This seems like a very HN-specific use case. It's not surprising that automakers don't have APIs that let customers host servers that they use to remotely start their vehicles. Security is obviously a huge issue, and almost no one cares about remote starting that much, and has the know-how to implement relay servers and such.
I'm not happy with how consumer choice is boxed in by automakers, but for sensitive systems like ignition, I don't think that their approach is unreasonable.
What do you mean HN-specific? I don't understand how cars got to require permanent cellular connections in the first place while Bluetooth would've been enough
I was referring to the fact that a very small sliver of the population would be interested in running their own relay server, or even figuring out what that means. They just want to press a button and have the car turn on.
Key fob-based has worked great for me in a variety of living configurations (apartments, single homes) in the past 7 years with my 2017 civic. It can connect surprisingly far distances, and it doesn’t need a direct line of site or anything. Just good old RF.
I get what you’re saying about app-based. My civic has that too and it’s for a cost. I’ve just never needed it since we have the free for life RF version.
At $110/yr for cell-based remote start via Honda link, I’ve saved $770 over the years. Over the life of the car for me I could be looking at doubling those savings. That’s the power of avoiding needless subscriptions.
Most people in my area don’t have garages and we get well below freezing in the winter. Yes we use it for defrosting and getting the car a little warmed up prior to driving to work in the morning.
Gasing your neighbours and every living beign on a 100ft radius. I can't stand drivers that idle their cars while they're gone doing other stuff. Remote start should totally be a subscription feature, before it gets banned or regulated. Why? Because it's very annoying.
I’ve never heard of remote start being used as a way to idle your car while doing other stuff. It’s most commonly used to defrost a car in the winter without having to get into it and sit in the freezing car while you’re not moving anyway.
There’s a time limit on it on my car, I think about 10 minutes or something pretty sane. If you don’t get into your car by then it turns back off automatically.
I once spent two cold nights standing on my head putting an aftermarket remote start system into an old BMW.
And sometimes I did use it to keep the car running while doing other stuff. This function was a design intent of the device.
It would work like this: Drive to a destination not so far away on a cold wintry day and put transmission in park like usual. Then, push the start button on the remote and turn the ignition switch off.
After that: Remove key, get out, lock doors, go do whatever quick errand it was that had us out to begin with, and return to a car that was finally actually warm inside. The engine and accessories would continue running uninterrupted, like nothing ever happened.
After returning: Put key in, turn it to "on", select a gear, on to the next destination. Engine stays running the whole time.
When I read about this function, I figured I'd never use it. But it did work very well and my then-wife liked it quite a lot. Also if short, cold runs are bad for things like bearing wear and oil contamination, then keeping it running and letting it get up to operating temperature was perhaps a nicer way to treat that old engine than the alternative of never letting it really get warm might have been.
(It would time out and turn off after about 10 or 15 minutes. Otherwise, the engine would cease immediately upon touching the brake pedal if the ignition switch wasn't on.)
I have a hybrid. If I remote start it, generally the engine doesn't start - and even if it does, it's extremely quiet because it's an Atkinson-cycle model. I have to be within 10 feet of the car to hear it running in a quiet parking garage, let alone on the street.
Sure, it sucks when someone idles a diesel outside your house, but new cars are QUIET.
Sure. I start the engine and then proceed to get the snow off and defrost the windows using a broom and a scraper. Good way to adjust yourself to the cold. Remote start won't help much in anything more than 2" of snow because it would take half an hour to defreeze by itself. My wife prefers the garage, though. Still, we don't live in Alberta or Alaska for the car to freeze shut.
We had a hybrid replacement Yaris. It's nice but it still turns on the engine when it's cold. I wasn't complaining abut the noise, but the fumes. Diesels are the worst, regardless of CO2 rating, but gas engines produce a lot more CO even if they stink less. There are places where idling is regulated up to 5 minutes.
Does it clear your driveway of snow? Otherwise I'm not sure why leaving a running vehicle unattended is useful. If the car is too cold when you get in, put a coat on. Too much ice on the windows? Scrape it off.
It warms the engine (and thus the interior) while I clear the driveway of snow, and it does this even if the doors are frozen shut because of a layer of ice.
By the time I get back to addressing the car itself, the snow and ice is easier to brush or scrape off and the doors might actually open without ripping the handle off (which is something that I've directly experienced twice so far in my days).
This all conspires to mean that it makes my life easier.
And it's OK if you don't like the feature and take a very dim view of it. It's also OK that some others may find merit in using it.
If you have a driveway and no garage, my sympathies. If you have a garage, and your winters are as severe as you say, why not park in the garage? It's better for your car and tires and you won't spend any time or fuel scraping and warming.
It's not the feature I dislike. I find the practice of idling a car to warm it wasteful and polluting.
Even better to move to a place where there isn't regularly any winter weather. Perhaps something below the 35th north parallel, and as close to sea level as can be mustered, would be good.
Let's all do this. It will be a Great New Beginning for so many people.
And thereafter, we'll burn our money polluting the world by running the aircon while we drive instead of burning it to help pre-emptively warm our cars on wintry days.
Air-conditioning uses less energy than heating. And places where you need air-conditioning also have abundant solar power.
If you park your car in your garage you'll burn less fuel and own less stuff (because you can't store it in your garage). I'm telling you an easy way to save time, money, and your own energy (scraping ice) and you're mocking me. That's nice.
Heat is free when we're out driving around. Internal combustion engines generate more heat than they know what to do with. I do like your idea of putting solar panels on a car to run the aircon, though: That sounds neat!
(I adore and embrace every opportunity for a stranger on the Internet to tell me how I should live.)
> I do like your idea of putting solar panels on a car to run the aircon
I thought you were talking about air conditioning in buildings. In warm climates, in a car, cooling is usually free: roll down your window and catch something called a "breeze". Works great unless you're on the freeway. But if everyone moved to a warm climate, as you, suggested we'd be living way more dense so you'd drive way less anyway. checkmate
There are also these things called "electric vehicles" that you can charge with solar power without requiring a panel on the vehicle.
> I adore and embrace every opportunity for a stranger on the Internet to tell me how I should live.
You're welcome! Normally I don't care what people do. But this idling cars affects everyone's air quality.
You won't have any options for non garbage vehicles pretty soon. It's more profitable to sell you garbage and than sell you the maintenance on the above mentioned garbage while getting a steady trickle of revenue for ad impressions.
Ford pulled focus/fiesta lineup from US ignoring great sales (despite widely known DCT issues) just so they can focus on selling the garbage SUVs and pickups, highest margin cars. But hey, no CAFE regulations to follow, can pollute as much as you want.
Jeep quality is a joke - they would've been sued out of existence with trucks like that in Europe. When I first saw the Jeep Gladiator photo I through it was a joke/meme.
Corporations do truly control everything in US. They'll sell you garbage overpriced trucks, convince you to feel happy about them and laught all the way to the bank while raking cash for all "dealer maintenance" required to keep such garbage on the roads. And then they lock down all the maintenance behind encryption so you can't replace a battery without going to the dealer for the unlock code.
Please speedrun your late stage capitalism asap, it's getting harder and harder to watch
Technically you are correct, practically you will get into question of "who pays for the internet in the car?" and if customer refuses to pay (like in VAG case) then you will have just a car without an internet.
great sales yeah (7bn+) but those dsp6 recalls on the fiesta cost ford about 2 billion.
id buy another one. (in manual.)
i dont know how many other gen5 fiesta owners would walk down the aisle with that car again tho
i think the dsp’s kind of cool. still have a 2011 in a barn somewhere. its on engine #2 and transmission #2 at 124,000 and thats not even counting all the bad grounds, bad caps, electrical squirrels ive been able to track down and fix. it wasnt that bad to deal with, but i totally empathize with anyone who doesnt remember theirs fondly or want to go out and get another one just like it
Now the bulk of car-buying research is not "how good is it?" but "what are the purposefully in-built annoyances? Can I hack them away?"