• 22 Posts
  • 1.43K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 15th, 2023

help-circle




  • There’s nuance to this article. The cost is for the connected services portion, which usually includes the fee for the cellular connectivity the car has to enable the services, that’s not free and there is a cost to maintain that infrastructure. Additionally the “workaround” that someone provided still uses those connected services (again, not something that is just free to maintain).

    The shitty part that comes in is that Mazda removed the key fob remote start option from their newer vehicles. That being said though, nothing in the above statements is centered around “right to repair”. If you don’t want to pay for the connected services, then don’t, everything else in your car will still work.

    About the only way you could argue for it is a “bring your own SIM” approach but even then, where would it connect to? Who would pay to maintain that? You’d have to allow it to connect to a custom endpoint, but at that point guess what: you’re paying for the cellular connectivity and the server to host an API on to do what you want. That’s still an additional cost beyond what you paid for the car just like the connected services fee.













  • You’d be surprised with inheriting tech debt. Quite often there’s no documentation, the last person to log in to the system is an admin that quit 3 years ago, but it doesn’t much matter because that’s only for a direct console login which normal users don’t do when accessing the application. With tribal knowledge gone and no documentation, only when you pull the network for a bit do you discover that there was this one random script running on it that was responsible for loading up all the needed data in the current system, when 9 of the other 10 times those scripts were no longer needed.

    In a perfect world you’d have documentation, architecture and data flow diagrams for everything, but “ain’t nobody got time for that” and it doesn’t happen.