I used to think I paid too much for my 2018 Savana. Now I wonder if I paid too little.
As part of the move toward electric cars, most automakers are copying Silicon Valley’s playbook and making drivers pay monthly or yearly fees to unlock new features. Sometimes those features are fairly basic, like a remote starter; in other cases they’re more advanced, like autonomous parking assistance. Accessing them typically requires just a few taps on a car’s touchscreen or its related smartphone app, the same way you might subscribe to anything else online. It’s part of why the new generation of cars is often described as “smartphones on wheels”: Cars now offer various downloadable apps, automated driver assistance, and even integration with platforms such as Spotify and TikTok. But more digital features that connect your car to the internet provide openings for data theft, tampering, and other cybersecurity risks that simply have not existed on the roads until now.
Car hacking may call to mind action-movie-like scenes of millions of Teslas being remotely seized by terrorist groups and commanded to drive into hospitals. That’s thankfully far-fetched. The bigger risk is to personal and financial information related to various digital add-ons and connected features, which are essentially unavoidable with modern EVs—as is the requirement that you pay for them over time. Mercedes-Benz will unlock more horsepower for up to $90 a month, BMW lets its cars’ safety cameras record 40-second snapshots of video for $39 a year, and Ford’s BlueCruise hands-off driver-assist feature is now $75 a month.
Of course I don’t use a “smartphone on phone” either, so I might be an outlier.
“As part of the move toward electric cars, most automakers are copying Silicon Valley’s playbook and making drivers pay monthly or yearly fees to unlock new features. Sometimes those features are fairly basic, like a remote starter; ”
That’s appalling, especially in light of the outrageous prices now being charged for new vehicles.. I would take my brand new car back to the dealer and demand a refund.
PRNDL, via subscription only.
Hey, that’s similar to my flip phone. I have talk and text only. I don’t have a data plan, so no pictures, surfing the net, no nuttin’.
I can text pictures, but no net. I don’t have a gps either.
Looks like we’re neck-and-neck in the Luddite Race, Kate. ;o)
I do have a land line. It’s two tin cans and a string. Pick up a can and call me sometime. Stewed tomato cans work best.
Oh, wait… that would be an International call and the string just isn’t that long. Nevermind…
It gets better. My previous Ford e-350 was initially owned by a Hutterite colony. They disabled the speakers and we never did figure out how to fix it, so for years I drove that thing across the continent with a transistor radio on the console.
You win :o))
Wow … sounds like my first car in 1975 ! That’s rugged dedication.
New sales model: Car is free but you have to watch unskippable ads before the car will start and every three minutes thereafter.
You will own nothing…
My Sorento is a 2017 and so most of the noxious stuff is missing. I will give it up when its frame rots out.
Its a pretty trendy thing to sodomize customers with add-on subscriptions or the product they bought is not as-advertised. It isn’t just cars, for sure.
But more and more people want self-driving, lane-correcting, auto-braking stuff so they can f*** around with their phones when they should be driving.
It’s true. My 2018 Nissan has all kinds of automated “collision avoidance” crap that I don’t want and can’t seem to circumvent. The most noxious is what they refer to as “intelligent cruise control” which brakes as you approach the car in front and lags when you re-engage. The dealer looked at me like I had two heads when I asked if it could be permanently over-ridden. It’s so bad, I never use cruise any more.
My 2020 Kia gets c.10% worse fuel efficiency when cruise is on. The engine revs higher all the time.
For a while I used Intact insurance’s “monitor your driving” app under the promise of getting “up to” 25% lower rates for safe driving. It kept giving me penalties for too hard acceleration or braking at times I felt were required to be safe. After a few months I turned it off.
What is “cruise control”?
A brick resting at just the right angle on the accelerator pedal, Robert.
A 15 pack of Pilsner on the accelerator is the best cruise control.
As the cans get emptied, you go slower.
It’s a device that allows you to drive longer without knee surgery.
I drive a 2018 Subaru Outback with the 6 cylinder engine. The cruise works well. If I come up on a slower vehicle the cruise automatically slows me down accordingly so I don’t rear-end the vehicle.
At that point, I can either pass to vehicle ahead or click off the cruise for awhile and drive manually. It’s not really a problem.
I do not like that the GPS unit tracks me. But … if the government needs to know where and when I go out to pick up some bread and milk, so be it. They have to have something do to don’t they?
The wife got a new Qashqai in ‘18, stickshift, cruise not available. In Grey or black.
Hmmmm. I worked as a Nissan service advisor until 2020.I am retired now. I hated that system too but my memory says there was a way to have normal cruise control. However, that ability ‘may’ have been on subsequent model years. Not sure. Check with a different Nissan dealer service department. Your dealer may not be well informed.
I totally agree! But then I think everyone should have to do the following driver’s test which I did at the age of 16 to get my driver’s licence.
I was 16 (1968), it was my second “go” at the test. It was sometime between Christmas and New Year’s and I had to parallel park, going uphill on the MacDonald Hill in Edmonton (so snow and ice at that time of the year). I aced it. The driving examiner was NOT happy about giving a 16 year old a “pass” but as I had aced that part of the exam, he had to do so.
By the time I tested for my DL at 16, I had 8 years driving experience.
“By the time I tested for my DL at 16, I had 8 years driving experience.”
I’m going to guess that you were a farm girl, then…
Brakes come extra?
I have an OLD Tacoma with no computer crap in it, and a land line. Got rid of the “smart” phone a couple of years ago.
Oh, and to virtue signal even more, I am in my mid sixties and my old Tacoma is the 3rd vehicle I have owned.
Carbon footprint!
I’m still driving my 2006 Toyota Tacoma. There were a few years I seriously considered buying a new one to replace it, but I couldn’t quite afford it and there always seemed to be new “features” that I saw as drawbacks rather than advantages. The last time I talked to my local dealer was just after they stopped selling manual transmission trucks (without a stiff customization fee), so I stopped considering buying new. The basic truck features still work fine, although the 2006-era fancy features like the built-in digital compass/outside temperature readout died after about a decade — it was several hundred dollars to fix, so I never bothered. The CD player died about five years ago, so I replaced it with a Bluetooth-equipped unit so I could get rid of all the CDs and play music from my phone. It’s not 100% reliable and sometimes just decides to quit until next time I start the truck, but for local travel it works well enough. (It’s permanently set to Beijing time, however.)