[AdamJacobMuller]

The service costs orders of magnitude more than what their actual costs should be.

You can have an LTE connection for probably around 10c/month/sim at the scale of Mazda with tiny amounts of data (plenty for, say, 100 remote starts/month).

[luuurker]

Not defending subscriptions, but it's not just data. You need developers for your apps, you need servers, the service needs to be secure, etc. On the data side, as soon you have data, other services also start working, like live traffic info and so on.

Again, not defending these expensive subscriptions, just pointing out that it probably costs more than 10c a month per car to keep all that stuff running.

[AdamJacobMuller]

I agree, it's more than 10c/month.

Charge me $10/year for the service and I'll happily pay it, that should cover all your costs at a scale of millions of cars.

[DCH3416]

Eh. Consider the sheer volume of vehicles Mazda for example sells globally. Even at a dollar per unit the gap would more than make up for that.

Plus, a cellular connection provides direct customer information that Mazda or whoever now no longer have to pay for in terms of market research. They can now just know the usage of their vehicles and tie that in with whatever data sources they want to.