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.”
There is no need for the internet to use remote start
I just bought a new car and it has internet enabled remote start. The salesman touted the feature. My response: “oh so I can start the car in [one state] while I’m in [another state] so it’s ready for me when I get back?” He didn’t have a good response for that. Nice car, dumbass feature.
I use mine all the time. I have about a 1/4 mile walk to get to my car, I like to start it in winter to heat up, or summer to cool down before I get to it.
It’s a luxury, but one I enjoy.
Lora and other RF based communication protocols exist and are much better ideas than using the internet. If someone is starting their car they are probably less than a mile away and the benefits of having something that works regardless of cell towers probably outweigh the benefits of being able to use it through bunker doors and across the globe.
add that an internet connected car is not something we want, we want our remotes which we already have to do this
I’m not familiar with Lora or other RF systems. Can they adjust temperatures too?
My other vehicle is from 1976… I love it and I love the ability for me to fix it without plugging a computer in.
Walking a 1/4 mile in cold wind to a warm car that’s already defrosted is pretty amazing though. And I’m vehemently against subscriptions where possible, so I get the hatred towards connected cars as well.
Lora is mostly intended for small packets of information (like sensors), temperature could be sent in base 1 and still be sendable over it.
Maybe if you don’t live where it gets cold or you work in an office within range of your car.
Some people live in these tall things that are called, “not a single family house” and so starting the car from up there you would need some way to communicate to the car, keyfob ranges are limited.
It’s a good thing we invented remote start at the same time as the car itself, I can’t imagine the horror of only operating a motor vehicle I’m next to (let alone touching)
What are you talking about?
Remote start of any kind is a luxury and it’s wild to me that someone would defend internet car controls as any way important or even desirable. That’s what I’m talking about. Physical keys work totally fine and add like two seconds of time to the process.
Not when your door is frozen shut. I wrote another comment detailing my personal struggle as a second shift worker during the polar vortex in -40 degree weather. The guideline was five minutes before you began to risk serious damage, and that was about the length of my walk through the lot. Have you tried opening a car frozen shut by a literal sheet of ice while standing on another sheet of ice while your joints are already starting to stiffen from the cold despite the layers of winter clothing you’re wearing? Remote start stopped being a luxury for me when the Midwest winters started getting deadly cold.
Who said it was not?
YOu know except for the fucking case I described where you don’t live in a house so the keyfob might not reach so you need some other way to connect to the car to be able to remote start it.
not my fault you struggle with social skills and can’t relate to other people
I mean, his point is still valid. Take the 2-3 mins it takes to go down and start the car.
We managed before so let’s not pretend that wireless fob are necessary.
Counterpoint: During the polar vortex everyone was told that staying outside in the -40 or lower temperatures for more than five minutes risked frost bite. I worked 2nd shift so I was getting out dead of night at the coldest time, walking to the back of the lot to a car covered in a sheet of ice that simply did not allow me to even open the door to physically start it. That’s a 4-5 minute walk already to a car that I can’t open, who knows how long to chip away ice I can’t see, sometimes can’t even reach leading to struggling with the door using brute force trying to get leverage standing on icy pavement just to FINALLY enter my car, which is still -40 inside.
Or I could have had remote start and skipped the potentially lost fingers. Thank goodness I had coworkers who started staying behind to help those that didn’t.
We managed before remote start, we still can manage now.
What will happen is that more manufacturers will follow suit, until it becomes the norm and every manufacturer does it.
So be ready to be inconvenienced or be ready to pay.
To moment we stop acting like these things are necessary in the real sense of the term is the moment we can find workarounds. Because we know damn well that this practice won’t be legislated.
I sympathize with everyone that lives in cold climates because I do too and it fucking sucks having to heat the freezing car, but be ready to live without the feature because it will definitely be behind a paywall soon enough.
And then what genius? Should I sit in the cold car or stand next to the cold car while it heats up?
The point of the remote start is to avoid this, are you all some brain damaged kind that doesn’t understand user experience?
I agree with your entire premise on the usefulness of remote start for cold winters. I live in Canada, though I do not have remote start.
All that being said, I think it’s wild that you accuse others of lacking “social skills” while calling everyone “brain damaged” because they didn’t immediately agree with you.
Why should that use the internet though? There’s low-power wireless communication technologies like Wifi HaLow that have a range of around 1km (0.6 miles), which would be totally fine for this use case. No internet needed.
Is that ubiquitous and does it go through walls? And what’s the cost of that compared to existing solutions?
HaLow is sub-1Ghz so it goes through walls pretty well. Not sure about cost or how widespread it is yet.
Do you usually start the car from your bedroom?
In the winter I would, yes, if my car had it, sitting into a cold car in the morning fucking sucks, starting it 10 minutes before take off and have it defrost, and turn on seat/steering wheel heating would be the fucking tits, and I don’t live in a house so might not even have a line of sight on my car so keyfob wouldn’t be enough
Huh, TIL.
Nice for you to live somewhere mild enough your car doesn’t need to pre-heat but some people live in Chicago and other places where it still snows and pre-heating the car is a must 3 months of the year.
I live in a snowy climate and we did just fine before the invention of wireless starters. My car does not have one and we manage just fine.
That is a great QoL, but let’s not pretend this is necessary.
My main point is fuck subscription for every fucking thing to try and squeeze more money, even worst by removing features and putting them back behind a paywall.
However, we need to stop saying that things are necessary when most of the time they are convenient.
Because that is how they get us to pay. Every little inconvenience is treated as if it absolutely needs to be adressed.
Then, we can say fuck off to these companies and live with the inconveniences they left on purpose to sell a subscription.
But until, companies will push these hardware subscriptions because it nets them more money.
Yes, but we have had remote start without the internet for decades. It’s nothing but a cash grab. That’s what people are upset about here I think.
They took a feature that did not require the internet, then made it require the internet, for literally no purpose except:
It’s one thing to withhold a feature. It’s another thing to overcomplicate a feature for the purpose of withholding it.
I agree with you all the way. But we can kick and scream all we want, but if enough people buy the subscription, car manufacturers will keep hiding features behind paywalls.
When I was like 20 or so and needed to drive every morning and it was -25C or colder outside, I’d go outside in my t-shirt, start the engine, remove the key (because the ignition lock was so worn, I could remove it), lock the car, go back inside
Woke me right up and afterwards when I went outside with proper winter clothing, I didn’t feel the least bit cold. Plus the car had a nice big gasoline V6 as opposed to the diesels I mostly drive nowadays, so it actually did manage to defrost the windshield in <10 minutes no problem.
I don’t believe you’ve lived anywhere cold for very long. Cold places existed long before remote start. The car warms up while you finish shoveling and brushing off the car. You’re warm from shoveling, and the car is ready to go. If it’s just cold and you’re late to whatever, you sit your shivering ass down behind the wheel and drive away anyways…
The issue isn’t “I don’t want to be cold.” The problem is when it’s below 20F/-7C, you need to wait long enough for the coolant to warm enough to evaporate the moisture in the defrost vents and the inside of the windshield. Otherwise the inside of the windshield frosts over and you can’t see well enough to drive safely. And the colder it gets, the longer it takes.
Do you need remote start? Nope. I don’t have it on my vehicles. But you will need to wait long enough to keep the windshield defrosted.
Where I come from, we just scrape off enough ice to see where you’re going, and crack a window to keep it dry enough the interior doesn’t freeze. But, hey, if you know how to leave early enough to get to places on time in a warm cabin, more power to you 😉
You ain’t likely to want to do that at -20F at highway speeds.
By the time you hit the highway you’re usually warm enough that things have defrosted.
Remote start is a fine feature. It just shouldn’t need internet access.
In truly cold weather, starting and idling your car doesn’t properly warm it up in any sane amount of time and can even be bad for the engine. What you want is an auxiliary heater like Webasto or Ebersprächer (sp?)
Remote start would be nice with with mild weather or on a hot summer day when you need AC though.
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As a Midwesterner, pre heating is a luxury. It’s often a nice and affordable one, but I park outside and just wear my coat in the car.
I promise you that there are plenty of people in Chicago without the ability to preheat their car and they’re surviving just fine lol