A lot of people in car forums are super upset about this and angry with their specific automaker. But of course, it is happening to all of them that haven't moved off of 3G.
A few years back I got a handful of letters about getting my Nissan LEAF's radio updated from 2g to 3g. They wanted to charge me $200 USD for it. I didn't bother and it's ended up resulting in very little change for me - Mostly features I didn't really use.
It's nice to know what just a few years later I'd be facing the same problem again.
In the Leaf's case, anyone with your VIN (ie anyone who can walk up to you car and look through the windshield) could turn on your car's AC over the internet and run the battery down. Whoops.
I've been told that on my Subaru, if I subscribe to the services that need it, they will do the upgrade for free. But if I don't subscribe, they won't do it at all. I'm fine with that, I am unreasonably against subscriptions, lol.
This reminds me of all the 90s luxury cars with analog cellular phones integrated into the center consoles quickly becoming useless in the 2000s. Except worse considering how much these systems are integrated into some cars.
Not to be dumb - but I don't want my car to have cellular connectivity, so this opens up more car purchase options for me once 3G goes dark. Granted, that's a tiny influx of new customers, but still, there's at least 1 new customer as result of their decision to still use 3G.
In the EU new cars now are mandated to have an automatic way to call the emergency services after a crash, I wonder if the governments have a clause about what would happen if 3G is turned off (I guess they're not planning to do that for a while yet).
If I were in power and I genuinely cared about saving the planet, I'd figure out how to make cars without this auto-emergency-dial system more expensive to insure; that way, people would look at newer cars more favorabily, and I'd incentivize electric cars as well. But hey, luckily the car lobby is still pretty strong in the France and Germany!
Why use such an indirect and backwards method? If you were in power, you could just tax non-green cars, rather than promote cars that become useless in 5 years when technology moves on.
It's a balance between doing what you want and screwing people hard enough to get voted out or violently deposed (transition mechanism depends on the system of government in question).
Sure, but second point is that it's dumb to assume "smart" or "connected" cars are more green. If they are being obsoleted much faster than "dumb" cars, then whether or not they are electric makes little difference in the grand scheme of things.
3G has been mainstream in the US since the mid 2000s. Granted it depends on when you purchase your car, but getting almost 20 years out of the technology is pretty good. Most cars will be scrap after that long. I'm not sure where you came up with 5 years.
Did you miss that cars are still being made that are 3g-only? And I’d be willing to bet that cars didn’t have 3g modems until long after 3g was first available.
It's nice to know what just a few years later I'd be facing the same problem again.