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.”
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.
We managed before remote start, we still can manage now.
What will happen is that more manufacturers will follow suit, until it becomes the norm and every manufacturer does it.
So be ready to be inconvenienced or be ready to pay.
To moment we stop acting like these things are necessary in the real sense of the term is the moment we can find workarounds. Because we know damn well that this practice won’t be legislated.
I sympathize with everyone that lives in cold climates because I do too and it fucking sucks having to heat the freezing car, but be ready to live without the feature because it will definitely be behind a paywall soon enough.