Mazda recently surprised customers by requiring them to sign up for a subscription in order to keep certain services. Now, notable right-to-repair advocate Louis Rossmann is calling out the brand.
It’s important to clarify that there are two very different types of remote start we’re talking about here. The first type is the one many people are familiar with where you use the key fob to start the vehicle. The second method involves using another device like a smartphone to start the car. In the latter, connected services do the heavy lifting.
Transition to paid services
What is wild is that Mazda used to offer the first option on the fob. Now, it only offers the second kind, where one starts the car via phone through its connected services for a $10 monthly subscription, which comes to $120 a year. Rossmann points out that one individual, Brandon Rorthweiler, developed a workaround in 2023 to enable remote start without Mazda’s subscription fees.
However, according to Ars Technica, Mazda filed a DMCA takedown notice to kill that open-source project. The company claimed it contained code that violated “[Mazda’s] copyright ownership” and used “certain Mazda information, including proprietary API information.”
OK, they can add $1 to the price of the car for a lifetime subscription (and no the load probably will never add up to that).
You still have to pay for the cell service to connect the car. That’s going to cost a whole lot more than $1
But not that much more.
A consumer mobile connection is about $30 a month. A car company could get it cheaper, not just by buying in bulk, but also because by not needing that much bandwidth for their connection.
A car is is multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars and a 3g, low data IoT sim card is less than $100.
Fucking what?
This is the equivalent of “I mean, it’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost? 10 dollars?”
Most of us aren’t buying lambos.