inside Odyssey, Homer repeatedly described the diffuse light of a new day as “pink dawn”. The dawn of subscription-based car features is upon us, but instead of pinky fingers, here are the lucrative fingers of spreading profits to take what they can from your wallet . Toyota Join the fray with an update to key-based remote start for vehicles going back to 2018. Car shopping site CoPilot wrote about this during the summer when discussing the new RAV4, but the problem flew under the radar until Reddit user decided to read the fine print in Toyota’s marketing materials for the automaker Remote Connection Suite. A bit controversial, like Toyota confirmed CD driver, Toyota is creating a key-based remote starter of its Remote Connect services. Toyota will ask owners to pay a subscription to use the remote start function on their key after the trial period ends, which lasts from three to 10 years.
We should have explained that there are two ways to remotely start a Toyota. One is to use a fob, a chip in the key that sends a radio signal to a chip in the car to tell the car to start. This relies solely on close communication between the key and the car; usually, as long as chip fob, fob the battery, and the car chip is working fine, all should be good. But that’s not the case here, which we’re going to get to. The second way is to use Toyota’s Remote Connect service suite which costs $8 per month or $80 per year. These services work over a cellular or wi-fi connection and include remote starting, finding your vehicle in a parking lot or finding a PHEV charging location, monitoring teen driverand lock or unlock the vehicle.
Remote connection has two levels depending on the vehicle’s trim, Audio Plus or Premium Audio. Remote Connect comes with a one-year trial, but is based on written material of the car manufacturer, the Audio Plus keyboard will operate remotely for three years on select vehicles with a 2018 through 2020 model year, and some 2020 model year vehicles will function for 10 years. The Premium Audio fob will run for 10 years on select models from 2018 to 2020. It looks like owners can get the functionality for a period of two to 10 years even without a Connect subscription. remote, but since the remote start information only identifies models up to the 2020 model year, who knows.
Since this applies to vehicles back in 2018, there have been owners aware of the situation. If you are wondering how application-based systems affect key-based systems, forum thread on Toyota Nation on this topic explains that the remote start function is built into the vehicle’s data communication module, “just like they designed the remote start for the app first and then had to make it work.” right from the fob.” So the effective fob must ask the car to start. If there is no registration, the vehicle may say no.
As for why this only goes back to 2018, it’s because 3G electronics in earlier models are not compatible with LTE networks. To avoid having to update those vehicles, Toyota has decided owners of pre-2018 Toyotas won’t need to register to use the fob-based remote start feature.
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