Well folks, it finally happened. The screen in your pickup truck… your last bastion of peace from the chaos of unskippable advertisements… now plays popup ads. Not even subtle ones. We’re talking full-dash, head-unit-commandeering infomercial panels in your RAM 1500, like you’re driving a Times Square billboard on wheels.
Well don’t worry your brand new Dodge will last about 5-7 years max. So you won’t be seeing those ads too long.
They’re truly horrible horrible machines. GMC is about the only American brand worth anything and even they suck now.
Honda and Toyota is the way to go anything else and you’re just wasting money.
Sucks they don’t have super duty trucks for people that need those like hot shotters though.
I’m going to start pointing to this when I explain to people why I want “dumb” machines.
I don’t want AI to “summarize” my google search, I don’t want ads distracting drivers, I don’t want a washing machine that needs updates, I don’t want my TV to look at me, I want a submissive little machine that does task X.
Ngl bro but I’ve found some good uses for AI. My kids school gave me 2 bullshit pdfs with duplicate information for their school supplies. I uploaded them to chatgbt and asked it to simplify it by combining duplicates and putting it in bullet format that was easily copy pastable. Did it in 30 seconds with minor tweaking and made my back to school shopping so much easier.
AI is not universally bad. There are some things it does well. The problem is that there are a lot more things it does badly, often in harmful ways, and most people using it have no idea how to tell the difference.
You seem to be using it the right way, with caution and awareness.
and what the fuck does that have to do with predatory companies cramming unneeded avenues of fucking predation into EVERYTHING?!
Here’s an AI summary of your distain for AI:
I’ll begin saying this when people ask why I want “dumb” machines.
AI summaries lack quality, ads distract drivers, you want a washing machine without ads, you don’t want your TV to watch you, you want machines to be submissive.
How did I do?
You did well.
This message is grok generated and posted automatically, clank clank clank.
Feel like ads in cars should be illegal, but the US doesn’t have a government that believes in good things.
If it’s like the other cars with this same shit then it only plays when fully stopped.
And that somehow makes it better?
I never said it was an improvement.
Better, as in less bad, but not good.
Absolutely?
Absolutely fucking not.
My attention is not free and they have no fucking right to my attention.
And second, fuck them for thinking they do.
It’s obviously better not to show ads while you’re driving. How could anyone think otherwise?
The question was if it is better to show ads only when the car is stopped. Your answer is for a different question: should it show ads at all. Being angry at me isn’t going to make Dodge stop this stupid idea.
I’m not mad at you at all. I’m mad at the motherfuckers who think they have a right to my attention.
But to respond - it’s not better, because either option is detestable. I reject both.
You correctly called it that we’re answering different questions. I reject the question you’re answering, because I do not accept advertisements in my vehicle, that I own, as a foregone conclusion. You accidentally’d a step in accepting their bullshit.
I literally would rather threaten legal action, or show up outside their advertising executive’s house with a megaphone to try to sell them some scammy bullshit while they expect privacy. Maybe I’d even read off the advertising I get on the console. (Not that I’d ever buy a RAM truck, but still.)
New Business Idea: Buy unzoned property that can be used to block scenic overlooks around the homes of scummy advertising executives. Put up billboards.
I’d invest in that.
Which will result in even more people not coming to a complete stop if they think they can get away with it, and that will result in more accidents.
That’s not true. Our government cares about something. They care about ads.
And that’s a good thing?
You serious?
I remember a while ago when this started appearing in chargers and they tried to act like it was an accident.
This is the defacto stance of advertising agencies doing horrible things.
“OOHHHH, You mean you DIDN’T want ads on your coffee maker or vibrator??? Our bad. This was a technical error we will fix immediately!”
They don’t admit it’s a mistake, call it an error, or try to fix. They call it a feature.
Vote with wallet
It’s an “opportunity to see special offers.”
They’re aggressive parasites.
Back at the office:
So it seems people don’t like ads on their vibrator which means they are viewing them. Let’s wait a couple of years for the anger to die down then do it again.
“Accident”
When did ads become the one commodity to rule them all. They are used more like a threat rather than information. You have to pay to see them or pay to make them go away. Doesn’t make sense. Have adverts replaced gold as the dollar standard? Weird. I guess they are good for money laundering due to the subjective nature of costs for “production”, “design” and “talent”.
I call on all hackers to defeat this parasitic disease from incorporating our everyday lives only to make money for its creators. Ads are a fucking disease and needs to be contrroled from entering our lives without our permission.
I call on all Americans to start the revolution so we can treat the disease instead of the symptoms.
Stellantis is a Dutch group. If we head to Michigan and get the CEO, they’ll just appoint a new one… Unless you’re suggesting the Americans invade the Netherlands…
🤘🤘🤘🤘
I mean tear down and replace this government so the balance of power shifts back to the people and we can bring the corporations to heel.
I call on all consumers to buy used old vehicles that don’t do shit like this.
And take it one step further so that whoever wants to check on it will see the ads playing even though no ads are playing.
GM was talking pretty publicly about doing this a couple years ago and there was a mild dust up over it. They also mentioned enthusiasm over the potential revenue to come from mining and selling driver data (which got them sued) . Last I heard about it was late 2023 or early 2024, so it seems their new data team.has been busy.
Don kid yourselves though, if GM is doing it, everyone else is or will be.
The field that marketing companies truly excel at the most is advertising their own services. Researching the effectiveness of advertising is difficult because most of the information is presented by the marketing companies themselves. However, most scientific studies agree that advertising through environmental means is ineffective and sometimes can even be harmful to brands.
Marketing usually aims to take advantage of impulsive purchasing behaviour by inundating the potential purchasers environment with advertisement. However, this isn’t very effective, most people automatically filter these kinds of ads, or worse are actively annoyed by them. Effective advertising activates the buyers impulsive behavior by engaging with them emotionally, which is why ad space for podcasts and other types of para social relationships are more effective.
I’d say the vast majority of data scraped from personal devices are utilized as tools to market the idea of advertisement to vendors more than they are used to actually market products. Imo marketing is useless for most types of businesses, and is mostly a field of self perpetuating scam artist.
Apparently it’s mostly about familiarity. Even if we are annoyed at the time, we will often forget about it completely between then and shopping. By the time we are in the shop, we just have a vague sense of familiarity with the product. We instinctively buy the more familiar, as the “safer” option. It takes conscious effort to overcome this (which most people don’t have to spare).
In saturated markets, this leads to a zero sum situation. Every customer you get is stolen from a competitor. Apparently the tobacco companies actually loved the UK ban on tobacco advertising. Their ads were intended to counter the ads of their competitors. None of them were roping in new smokers at a high enough rate to matter. The only ones winning were the ad agencies.
we just have a vague sense of familiarity with the product. We instinctively buy the more familiar, as the “safer” option. It takes conscious effort to overcome this (which most people don’t have to spare).
Sounds like a perfect pitch to sell more ads. Like I said, I would hesitate to actually trust any statistical analysis of the effectiveness of advertising done by the same people wanting to sell more ads.
In a capitalist economy there’s just not a real motivation for researching advertising unless you are a marketing agency. So the vast majority of information is intrinsically biased.
I think it’s more that if you stop advertising, you start seeing a significant drop in sales. It’s an easy experiment to test.
The dark art is increasing sales via advertising. That’s where the marketing people pull off the real bullshit.
I agree that it seems most marketing firms are seemingly scamming businesses at this point. The internet is so saturated with absolute garbage ads that anyone buying ads must be expecting $0.001 return on the ad dollar.
Of course Stellantis was first to do it
“Hey guys our sales are falling through the floor faster than Tesla, maybe we should rework our pricing and reconsider our policies towards buyers to move more volume and improve our imagine.”
“ Uh… nah. How about instead, we put ads on the center console!”
I just got new neighbors out here in rural Kansas. They have two kias and a ram pickup for the man. If only they had a jeep it would be like a nearly complete set of the shittiest vehicles money can buy. Looking forward to exciting things here.
Kia is known for shitty locks, but that seems like a non-issue in rural Kansas? It’s not like they have ads in the dashboard.
Kia pivoted to EVs fast and early because they can’t make a ICE power plant that doesn’t catch on fire.
Gotta carry on the proud Chrysler traditions of shunning innovation and making poor business decisions.
They rolled it out foest with Jeeps earlier this year
Looked at my car radio the other day to see the name of the song playing. Evidently, it was called " injured, get ‘xxxx’ lawyer."
This is just terrible. Every aspect of life doesn’t need ads. I don’t care if it makes a company money or not.
Welcome to the second-to-last stage of capitalism.
It’s kind of sweet that they write that you need at least RAM 1500 to get these ads in your truck, so that the solution simply is to install less RAM in your truck if you don’t want the ads. (I’ve never owned a truck so I don’t know how much RAM is normal, but 1500 sure sounds like a lot.)
Boo. Lol
1.5 gigs isn’t a lot of ram tho! Honestly getting kinda scammed. But people who buy over sized useless trucks aren’t the sharpest people around.
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They were joking.
So were they.
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Found the truck owner
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cool, didn’t ask.
why so hostile?
They already answered that.
Apart from how insane it is to put obtrusive ads on a car dashboard, having to link your phone to your car and then call a phone number to opt out of touchscreen display ads is 🤯
There is going to be a reason that they’ve set it up like that.
At that point, I would opt out with a hammer.
It wasn’t asking them to pair their phone to call the number to opt out, it was asking them to pair their phone so they could call the number to buy parts for their truck. You’d have to manually dial the number to opt out.
When calling that number, the caller will need somekind of proof that they are in control of the car that they are trying to opt out of ads. Afaik, the easiest way to accomplish that when requiring a phonecall, would be pairing phone and car. But obviously Stellantis is not going for easy with this setup, so this is purely speculation on my part.
Someday in a few years there will be an accident in the opt out service that routes 95% of attempts into a 500 error screen. All they have to do is underpay and never check on the server admin for that service for years until they don’t care.
Time to go get a Kei Truck and put an Android tablet in it.
Kei Kei’s delivery service.
I sometimes feel shortchanged as an American (no healthcare, FUUUUCK), but I only get real mad about it when I think about how we don’t get Hiluxes and Kei trucks.
Order a Slate pickup. Buy what you want and only what you want. And add things later as you want or buy that tablet from amazon and a bluetooth speaker and install it yourself.
How is this street legal? Can’t use your phone but can have popup ads?
It’s okay cuz it makes some rich guy money
I’m concerned it’s not making that person enough money.
Oh no don’t worry it’s fine cause it’s only at start up. If we just keep moving the bar of what is acceptable everything is fine.
This vehicle shouldn’t be street legal for regular folk based on its shape and height, software is just a minor detail.
It is so bad. The passenger can’t even fix the nav, at least not in the Chevy I just rented.
This is why I’m not going to buy RAM / Dodge / Chrysler/ Jeep / anything Stellantis owns, and this is why I’m not buying any new car with “smart” / “built-in” junk.
I don’t know of any car that has an actually good head unit. Its either garbage because its a giant touch screen, making it super difficult to navigate without looking (that’s why all the controls in an airplane are different shapes and sizes), or its just a hub for you to run Android Auto / apples equivalent.
Now ads? Ffs…
My Honda civic 2012’s head unit firmware isn’t that bad.
It tells your input source, volume, if your trunk is open, if your tires are fucked, and includes a hookup for a backup camera that only made it into other models, making it ezpz to retrofit.
Could be a lot worse. Wouldn’t touch a modern one with a ten foot pole lmao.
“Front left tyre is fucked.” “Your fucking trunk is open.”
Now that I would not mind having shown when starting the car.
Actually the bastard won’t tell you what specific tire. Just that one of them has low air pressure.
Kind of a dick move since there’s no way the computer can’t tell which tire it is when they’re four separate sensors.
I’ve just been thoroughly unimpressed by all of the American car brands. Crap vehicles with lousy interiors the lot of them.
