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 ?
Do you walk into the dealer and state affirmatively “I am not buying a car here because I don’t want a subscription!” and then turn around and walk out?
Won’t matter. The company knows you don’t want this. They also know that enough other people will pay for it that it won’t matter. These subscriptions are not new. If people put their foot down and refused to pay for them they would go away, but the opposite it happening.
Well although older car doesn’t have subscription & sometimes break the emition regulation at least i can repair & modified it by my self, all i need is OBD & some skill tho
In the end I don’t need to worry about subscription, because it doesn’t have it at all plus I don’t need to worry about SOFTWARE UPDATES THAT CAN BREAK CAR, as long as you have gas & your car engine is healthy enough it can run no matter what
All of the features listed rely on external services and servers. I think it’s completely fair to put them behind a subscription. This example isn’t like the seat warmer subscription where you unlock hardware.
If you don’t like subscriptions, don’t buy them. You can still drive your car without all of this extra crap.
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.
Based on the context of the other features, I assume this isn’t “start your car through your remote” but “use an app to start your car”. Same with all the other stuff.
Some manufacturers give this stuff out for free… for a while. There’s no money in giving away free services, so assume any internet operated service by any manufacturer can and will make you pay for a subscription.
“Usage data” for these types of features is completely worthless to anyone but car manufacturers, and KIA isn’t going to sell their own analytics to a competitor.
More likely, this data will be used to justify shutting down servers for certain old models of car when only a few people still use them.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Servers on a KIA scale aren’t free. I’d rather see KIA put this stuff behind a subscription than give it away “for free” by making you pay for 10 years of service upfront, hiding these fees in their pricing.
The cost isn’t in the servers themselves or the bandwidth necessary to keep this shit running, it’s in the network people maintaining yet another rack of servers, the team of programmers kept around to update old APIs, the third party subscription fees to keep data up to date, and the customer support for when this shit breaks.
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.
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.
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.
Just buy used and modify yourself with the tech you want. Send a message that this shit is unacceptable and we are willing to live in a less technologically enhanced world if it means no subscriptions. We keep buying it, they will continue to think this is how you “extract profit” from consumers.
Don’t think about the one actual subscription service here. Think about all of the features that are technologically built into the car that you can’t access without paying a subscription fee.
The options I see on this screenshot seem to be options that need a data connection to work, so I can understand a subscription for that. There is no free Internet mobile connection afterall. The monthly payment option is expensive for sure but the annual option is not too bad.
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.
It’s the nature of time that the old ways must give in. Automatics outperform manual at every level, and most people would rather drive an automatic than a manual. Even here in Europe, where manuals have been the “default” forever.
If people were only buying manuals, there wouldn’t be a push to put automatics everywhere, especially sports cars. More than 50% of cars in Europe are now automatic. Only 3% of new cars are manual. The old meets the new, and the people chose the new thing. That’s usually what happens. The age of the manual transmission comes to an end.
My dad was driving automatic Jags back in the late 1970s, but he did work in the motor trade. I am seeing more and more automatics around but I still think manual is king (at least in the UK) for the time being. If nothing else, you can save some fuel driving an auto!
I’d rephrase that. If you give me a new car for free, of course I’m taking it!
BUT
Buying a new car, right now, as somone who’s actively looking and keeping up with the market… There really aren’t good cars for a reasonable price. A lot of new cars have been enshitified.
It’s not like older vehicles came with those features enabled by default. On my 15 year old pickup you can’t have any of that even if you paid for it. I think this is not quite the same as other brands that are locking you out of features like heated seats.
Pretty sure there were cars around 15 years ago with remote start, heated seats, and fancy ways to lock and unlock. No there weren’t phone apps, but nobody wanted that - key fobs worked just fine.
My 2021 jeep’s key fob has an unbelievable range and works fine. My wife’s ford does have a phone app, but it’s completely free.
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