this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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All things that have worked just fine on cars for like at least a decade before the internet was ever invented. You are describing the exact functions of a key fob. They can even open the truck without the Internet!
Off topic, but I noticed your username....China Mieville fan by chance?
Beetle fan hahaha. Maybe I had just watched The Mummy or something before picking that one years and years ago
Oh wow I haven't seen that movie in a while.
They make it go through an app and a cloud service on purpose these days so they have an excuse to upsell you on a subscription.
Why would you buy anything that requires and app, let alone a car? I haven't bought a new car in a while, but if it requires and app, I'm not buying it. I bought a pergola, and originally they said I could use an app to turn the lights on. But I made them install a switch instead. Maybe consider unlinking your life for important/expensive purchases?
Because if literally every new car on the market is doing it, you don't have much of a choice.
(Okay, sure, you could resolve to drive old cars forever -- and that's what I do -- but let's not pretend that's possible for everyone. Even if people were willing and able to accept the maintenance/reliability/safety tradeoffs, which many are not, there simply aren't enough old cars for everybody to drive one.)
There are a lot of 2026 cars that don't require a phone app. They may have other shitty internet connectivity features, but they dont' require an app. And the next time I buy a car i will 100% not be getting one that requires a phone app.
Not all brands sell these features as a subscription.
I chased this up with Ford over my car. They said we get them for free for the life of the vehicle, and as long as the 4g it needs to work exists. That's got atleast 10 to 20 years left in it.
Some don’t sell them as a feature immediately. I think Toyota has an 3-10 year ‘free trial’ for some of their services. So one day your decade old car will just behave differently unless you start paying for the subscription.
Crap like this makes me want nothing to do with service connected vehicles at all. I don’t want to have to dig into all the software policies and durations for every brand I might be interested in a model of. You absolutely can’t trust what a salesman says at the dealer. I’ve shown them in writing that what they just told me was a flat out lie on multiple occasions.
The vehicles in my garage are currently 10-57 years old. People replace vehicles far too frequently.
I've never seen a fob be able to set climate controls. Either way, I'd rather control my own cloud for the car through home assistant
The closest I know of is some VWs and Hondas allow certain click patterns to do things like roll down all the windows or open sunroofs maybe.
Accords and Passats I think maybe Jettas have done it for decades.
Same for remote start. Which my 10 y/o Subaru does with a fob and as long as I set the heat to the right settings before getting out, works a treat on subzero mornings.
Some high end models of years and decades past had a fob with a little lcd display that acted as a remote for the heating and cooling.
That's exactly what I use remote start for. Just leave your car set to 68 or whatever and then when you remote start it will come up or down to temp. Even on my cheapass Chevy that's 10 years old I can remote start it (including the HVAC) and also hold the "unlock" to start the defroster. Now I can't actually change the temp the system is set at without getting in the car, thats true, but that's a real edge case for me when I can just leave it set at room temp pretty much year round. Even the seats and steering wheel will heat up if I left that on beforehand. But maybe you do have a real need to tweak the temp and A/C values on the daily where you live, rather than just have the car resume where you left it at, I wouldn't know.