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.”
I still don’t understand how that stops them from charging a subscription when their stock drops a bit more.
Contract law.
You know that “Terms and Conditions” you agree to all the time that binds you to things. It binds them too to those terms. The terms I posted above were what both car buyers and Tesla agreed to at the time of purchase.
The same courts that continue to allow the sale of “Full Self Driving”? You have a lot of faith in a system that has aggressively and repeatedly shown that it does not care about you.
There are many legitimate complaints about Full Self Drive. I’m happy to respond to you but which specific complaints about FSD are you referring to?
This website is probably a good start. I mainly object to the “full”, the “self”, and the “driving”.
Edit: but that’s not really the point of the discussion right now, my point t was more that: yes, I agree that’s what some written words on a website say in terms of what they promise, but my point is that they can literally just alter that any time and there is less than zero recourse for the consumer to do anything about it. You can’t disable updates. You signed away your right to sue them. You won’t get anywhere crying to the press because the headline “Tesla breaks promise made to customers” is just another day that ends in Y.
I can absolutely sue Tesla.