Mazda recently surprised customers by requiring them to sign up for a subscription in order to keep certain services. Now, notable right-to-repair advocate Louis Rossmann is calling out the brand.
It’s important to clarify that there are two very different types of remote start we’re talking about here. The first type is the one many people are familiar with where you use the key fob to start the vehicle. The second method involves using another device like a smartphone to start the car. In the latter, connected services do the heavy lifting.
Transition to paid services
What is wild is that Mazda used to offer the first option on the fob. Now, it only offers the second kind, where one starts the car via phone through its connected services for a $10 monthly subscription, which comes to $120 a year. Rossmann points out that one individual, Brandon Rorthweiler, developed a workaround in 2023 to enable remote start without Mazda’s subscription fees.
However, according to Ars Technica, Mazda filed a DMCA takedown notice to kill that open-source project. The company claimed it contained code that violated “[Mazda’s] copyright ownership” and used “certain Mazda information, including proprietary API information.”
The problem is the cell modem in the car, which is hard to replace. Cars last a lot longer than phones do. When whatever network that the car uses shuts down, then you can’t remote start your car. That’s a marginal cost that the car company has to pay for.
I was wondering, what makes the modem that hard to replace?
I get that the embedded systems in cars are complex works of engineering, but I don’t see why there can’t be some sort of standardized physical interface akin to OBDII to be used to ‘upgrade’ the modem.
Nothing, except right-to-repair, or rather the lack of it.
It could just use a standard USB or mini pci-e modem and make it super easy to replace. If the were concerned about unauthorized use, they could easily make it so that a key stored in the cars TPM is necessary for the modem to connect to the tower, making the modem a commodity field replaceable part.
But they choose not to. They choose to make a proprietary part that only works in their cars and is only manufactured by them. They make it so the car won’t recognize it if it isn’t activated by a dealer shop computer.
Then, when the technology it’s based on is obsoleted, either they decide to make a proprietary part to sell you and only they can install…or they say “Wow that sucks. I guess we could knock a few hundred off a new car for you then?”. More than likely, it’s the latter. You probably already had your car for a few years and the honeymoon phase is long past. You don’t even care if it gets a little ding or scratch anymore. They know that.
Or…now hear me out…they could’ve just been using RF fobs for remote start that’s point-to-point, instead of enshittifying fucking remote start by making it rely on a third-party.
But then they wouldn’t need you to install an app that needs a million fucking permissions. To start your car remotely. Something that a postage-stamp sized PCB has been doing since ET was in theaters the first time.
Support right-to-repair when it’s on your ballot. Auto manufacturers put a lot of money into lobbying against it every time. And it’s usually fear-based propaganda that isn’t grounded in reality at all. The fact is, they made the system this way, on purpose, to protect profits and for no other reason. Fuck them. Fuck them right in the tushie.
There’s another angle to this, too. If the cellular modem is easy to replace, it would also be easy to remove, cutting off one of the big reasons why the car manufacturers want it there: data that they can sell.
Which makes this whole topic even more frustrating because that connection is worthwhile for them to have even without the customer paying for the cellular subscription because they are selling the data but Mazda is still greedy enough to want an extra $120 a year for something that could have been included as an afterthought.
You just reminded me that’s it’s illegal to have a tracking device on someone’s car without their knowledge. If you buy a car second hand and they are tracking you , then that’s probably against the law.
The main benefit of having a remote start app is that you can use it from far away like when you’re inside of your workplace where a fob won’t work.
And while that’s very convenient, I’m sure that’s the reason the app always wants to know my precise location. So it can remind me that the train I’m on isn’t at the station my car is parked at. As if I’m unaware.
It’s possible, but it costs money to design the hardware so it’s accessible, it has to use a connector which has to be robust against vibrations (is m.2 robust?), then there needs to be a standardized protocol to communicate with the card. Does the car computer need to know how to authenticate against the cell network or does the card? Is it industry standardized or specific to the manufacturer? All kinds of things need to be designed and car manufacturers have no reason to invest in they.
Cellular generations will last as long as most people will even keep their car. That’s not really a concern. My A4 has the 3G antennae replacement as a recall they’re doing for free. What a company has to pay for is planned on implementation. Bonus niche perks used to be a reason why you went with one company over another company. Now everything into a subscription because it’s free income.