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.”

    • Soggy@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      Remote start of any kind is a luxury and it’s wild to me that someone would defend internet car controls as any way important or even desirable. That’s what I’m talking about. Physical keys work totally fine and add like two seconds of time to the process.

      • Squirrelanna@lemmynsfw.com
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        24 minutes ago

        Not when your door is frozen shut. I wrote another comment detailing my personal struggle as a second shift worker during the polar vortex in -40 degree weather. The guideline was five minutes before you began to risk serious damage, and that was about the length of my walk through the lot. Have you tried opening a car frozen shut by a literal sheet of ice while standing on another sheet of ice while your joints are already starting to stiffen from the cold despite the layers of winter clothing you’re wearing? Remote start stopped being a luxury for me when the Midwest winters started getting deadly cold.

      • kameecoding@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        Remote start of any kind is a luxury

        Who said it was not?

        Physical keys work totally fine and add like two seconds of time to the process.

        YOu know except for the fucking case I described where you don’t live in a house so the keyfob might not reach so you need some other way to connect to the car to be able to remote start it.

        it’s wild to me that someone would defend internet car controls as any way important or even desirable.

        not my fault you struggle with social skills and can’t relate to other people

        • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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          1 hour ago

          I mean, his point is still valid. Take the 2-3 mins it takes to go down and start the car.

          We managed before so let’s not pretend that wireless fob are necessary.

          • Squirrelanna@lemmynsfw.com
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            35 minutes ago

            Counterpoint: During the polar vortex everyone was told that staying outside in the -40 or lower temperatures for more than five minutes risked frost bite. I worked 2nd shift so I was getting out dead of night at the coldest time, walking to the back of the lot to a car covered in a sheet of ice that simply did not allow me to even open the door to physically start it. That’s a 4-5 minute walk already to a car that I can’t open, who knows how long to chip away ice I can’t see, sometimes can’t even reach leading to struggling with the door using brute force trying to get leverage standing on icy pavement just to FINALLY enter my car, which is still -40 inside.

            Or I could have had remote start and skipped the potentially lost fingers. Thank goodness I had coworkers who started staying behind to help those that didn’t.