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 ?
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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.
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.
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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
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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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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