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.”
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.