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 ?
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.
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.
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.
The cost to maintain the servers to send extremely small packets of data to instruct the car for the entire fleet of cars they sold could be less than $100/m.
Indeed; what we need is a jailbreak and a way to operate these systems on our own independent or third party / aftermarket resources. In a REAL competitive market, someone else could set up a server and offer to run these applications (or others!) for a different price. Not that I'm even particularly fond of capitalism myself nor how vulnerable it makes your car to turn it into an IOT device.
I might be the guy that shows up at the revolution for the most trivial reason but I hate that it says $59.00 per annually like companies think they're so smart for having business school graduates on staff charging for things only business school graduates would think to charge for but they can't even get basic grammar right.
There is not one single new car on the market that I would take possession of if you gave it to me for free. I like having a manual transmission and a radio with buttons.
These features require the cloud, which costs money and uses carbon. If you don't want them, as many don't, you shouldn't have to force the company to price them in at the purchase.
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