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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

"By including this plan as standard equipment on the vehicle, it helps to provide a more seamless onboarding experience and more customer value,” GM spokeswoman Kelly Cusinato told Automotive News in an email.

"More customer value" clearly worth 125$/month.

You're basically paying > 100 bucks a month for something that allows them to collect and sell your data to third parties.

EDIT: as people mention in reply, I have absolutely zero reading comprehension skills and the fee is actually 1500 for three years not one. Still... I pay less for cellular service with near limitless data and voice.

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> ”more customer value”

They are not lying. The value of the customer to GM increases.

It's a three-year subscription, so it works out to $41.67/month. Still absurd though.

There are taxes too depends where you are. So likely closer to 50. At least calculate that way give oneself an assurance 41.67 is fixed for 3 years. It could be likely they intend to charge maybe 30/mth and then ramp up to 60/mth towards the end. So at the end of 3yrs, it will be 60x12x3 instead of 41.67x12x3. We got official near 10% inflation (unofficial near 20%). I doubt that 41.67 is what they have in mind for coming months.

If you don't make the payments do they turn off the ignition remotely until the repo man shows up?

I am not completely sure, but it appears to be a one-time charge for an initial three-year subscription.

I have no idea whether GM is also making some not-quite-essential but both simple and useful features only accessible with an ongoing subscription, but I have my opinion as to whether it will do so, if it is not doing so already. Plenty of other manufacturers do this.

Seems they do, more or less. I once had a GM vehicle where the OnStar system (not activated) would occasionally fail to turn off and drain the battery overnight. Although, once I discovered the source of the problem yanking the fuse made it go away.

I live in an apartment building with no EV charging capabilities in the parking garage. This is my #1 problem with EVs at the moment.

But your point is well founded too.

Do you own or rent ?

You can make a case to your building governing body to have them installed.

There are solutions designed for this and operate off common area energy and bill at on a cost only basis.

My cellular service is only 3GB/month and charges a few cents/minute for the rare voice call I do, but it's less than $7/month.

Provider?

Get outside North America and you'll find that cellular service can be had very cheaply.

Visible - $25 a month on Verizon network, unlimited data and calls, no throttling. Though...after hitting > TiB usage per month for a few months in a row they did send me a warning, but didn't cut me off

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