As some in the comments correctly point out, this service requires a cellular connection. Which involves costs for Mazda. It's appropriate for them to charge a small monthly fee for the service. My only real complaint about this is discontinuing the keyfob-based feature. All that said, I see no need for remote start, anyway.
Cars have had remote start systems since before the first cell phone was invented. What is LTE/4G/5G adding in this scenario? Who exactly needs to start their car from the other side of the world? It's trivial for manufacturers to add a short-range radio that will work from across the driveway, which is what 99% of their customers want. In fact every key fob already has this functionality, which is how cars can unlock from a distance. As the article states, Mazda themselves had this version of remote start until they removed it in favor of the subscription option.
It's not about the other side of the world, my RF remote-start works reliably only to maybe 100 feet or so.
I park directly below my office window so it's no issue for me to hit the remote start and then leave 10 minutes later but if I couldn't do that my remote start would be mostly useless.
For example say I go to a movie, ideal would be to remote start it just as the movie ends so it's warm by the time I make it to the car. With an RF-based remote start there's a 0% chance my remote starter works inside the theatre. It will only start working at some point after I leave the building and start walking towards the car giving me maybe a minute of warm-up time. Makes the feature kinda useless for this case.
There may be a blurring of use-cases here, between:
1. Starting a car from a short distance in order to pre-heat in cold temperatures or because you're in a huge hurry. (Or paranoid of car-bombs, I guess.)
2. Starting a car from a long distance on someone else's behalf so that they can borrow it for some reason.
While I think #1 is most common, #2 overlaps with other "call support to unlock your car" or "disable if stolen"-type features. So it's likely manufacturers are motivated to use cellular connections "because it's already probably there for the other stuff."
P.S.: That said I really don't like the lack of owner control implied but some of those systems.
The service costs orders of magnitude more than what their actual costs should be.
You can have an LTE connection for probably around 10c/month/sim at the scale of Mazda with tiny amounts of data (plenty for, say, 100 remote starts/month).
Not defending subscriptions, but it's not just data. You need developers for your apps, you need servers, the service needs to be secure, etc. On the data side, as soon you have data, other services also start working, like live traffic info and so on.
Again, not defending these expensive subscriptions, just pointing out that it probably costs more than 10c a month per car to keep all that stuff running.
Eh. Consider the sheer volume of vehicles Mazda for example sells globally. Even at a dollar per unit the gap would more than make up for that.
Plus, a cellular connection provides direct customer information that Mazda or whoever now no longer have to pay for in terms of market research. They can now just know the usage of their vehicles and tie that in with whatever data sources they want to.
Remote start is very nice if you park outside during the winter and prefer not to sit in a car that's 20 degrees Fahrenheit for the first 10 minutes of your drive.
Remote start is accidental carbon monoxide poisoning waiting to happen if your garage is directly connected to your residence. I live in an area with brutal winters in Wyoming and just bought a new Ford Bronco, wish I could fully disable it (there's a button on the key fob as well).
Ford's remote start has a 15 minute cutoff without any intervention. Using numbers from a cold-started 2011 F-150 Raptor during a driving test and trapping it in a single car garage, 15 minutes with zero circulation results in ~40-120ppm carbon monoxide* which would still take multiple hours of exposure before symptoms occur. Your bronco probably has lower emissions and with good circulation to the much larger air volume of the rest of the house CO poisoning really shouldn't be a concern. Obviously don't use the feature with the door closed but accidentally triggering it wouldn't be that big of a deal. It also is pretty hard to accidentally trigger from the fob, requiring pressing the lock button and the remote start button twice in quick succession.
* 0.263-0.725g CO/min in a 12x22x10 ft garage. higher number is from testing under load before the cat is warmed up
Staffing isn't necessarily directly tied to profits. Just because a company is financially successful, does not automatically mean that it isn't overstaffed. I'm not saying that's the case here, specifically, just as a general rule.
But it IS as simple as eat less and exercise. And no, not everyone would do it. Everyone isn't doing it. Because people are lazy, want instant gratification, and consequence-free eating habits. If 99.9999% of the people taking these drugs were to cut their caloric intake to something reasonable (1500-2000 calories per day) and exercise for half an hour to an hour a day, every single one of them would lose weight. It's not that they can't, it's that they don't want to.
And whats the problem with that? Our entire world is built upon conveniences. We don't grow or hunt our own food, or travel cross country with our own two feet, or countless other things.
Its not that I can't do those things. I don't want to. I rather spend my time, physical and mental energy on the things that are more important to me. Does that make me lazy?
> Because people are lazy, want instant gratification, and consequence-free eating habits.
At what point does it stop being an individual problem, and a human problem?
This is a global crisis. Can you really not think that maybe, maybe, the human brain and body is not built for our current world?
At what point do we admit "do nothing" isn't a viable solution? At what point do we look around and see HALF of people struggling with obesity and say "okay... something is wrong here".
I'm sorry, what you're saying is directly at odds with reality and I think you're only saying it because you got lucky. You don't have food addiction so it isn't real.
But evidently it is. To me it's obvious. When I look around I don't see lazy people, I see an epidemic of addiction. This feels, to me, identical to smoking. Identical.
This is like saying not being poor is as simple as earn more and spend less. It's simple as. It's not that people can't do this, it's that they don't want to. Hopefully you can see how absurd this framing is.
It is very simple when you realize both these problems are very fixable with elites that care about their people and don’t seem them as things to extract resources from.
Mentioning it only briefly seems a bit Pollyanna to me. Couching this as mostly a good thing is overlooking the terrifying implications it would have in the "wrong" hands. And that overlooks the fundamental notion of there being "right" and "wrong" ways of thinking.
Absolutely. That was the motivation for my writing of my perspective of the study. It was trending on Twitter a couple days ago to the cheerful praise of mostly everyone.
I hoped to express the Orwellian concerns of use of such capability. I'm a bit dismayed at how this apparently isn't an obvious concern.
I've had three RX-7s. A first generation and two second generations. I drove the first until the wheels literally fell off (I was a young, stupid kid that ignored the crunching sounds of the rear wheel bearings falling apart. The rear wheel(s) seized while I was driving down a bridge causing the axel to snap in half. That was an interesting "drive" down the rest of the bridge). The second was a base model second gen that I gave up when I suddenly had two cars because of getting married, then divorced. The third was my favorite. A late model second gen fully loaded. That one eventually caught on fire due to negligence at a tire place. I loved that car.
The third generation never got cheap enough for me to consider one, but oh, I wanted one badly. The RX-8 never really caught me. Plus they had some early issues. That Iconic concept definitely has my attention, though.
I stand by my (100% non-scientific) position that smoking bans would never have gained traction if cigarette smoke didn't smell. When all of this was being discussed in a serious manner, that was what I always heard in the background chatter, well more often than "it's unhealthy." If cigarette smoke smelled pleasant or had no odor, the bans would never have had enough support to get pushed through. I still don't support smoking bans in private businesses. I think as long as the business is up front and only hires employees that are okay with it, they should be allowed to decide whether their customers can consume a totally legal product in their place of business. Is it unhealthy? Absolutely. But the government should allow people to decide for themselves whether they want to take that risk.
Exact same thing here. I reused the thin plastic bags as trash can liners. And I use the new, thicker ones, the same way. I'm contributing exactly the same number of bags back into the environment, they just have a whole lot more plastic in each bag.
It's not about "every day." It's about being able to hop in the car and just go at a moment's notice. Regardless of the distance. In an ICE car, that's a given. In an EV, it's murkier. Much murkier.
Has never been an issue in 4 years of ownership. We can leave at a moments notice any time and get across the country or adjoining countries if we want or need to.
