I ended up calling and having OnStar cancel my "trial" in my 2018 era truck in 2019, to the point I instructed them to disable the OnStar lights on the mirror and everything. This was a task as they're very annoying and persistent...
Once that was done I originally pulled the daughterboard housing the entire modem but this bricked my compass and GPS. To keep those working I ended up altering the modem itself with a soldering iron per the pdf posted here:
The guy there on that forum did so in an effort to use your own sim with the HMI, but using 0 ohm resistors or just solder bridging the relevant connections is enough to prevent my vehicle from getting online, but leaves the GPS intact. You can test by trying to make phone/onstar/data related actions - it just won't work.
Another good measure is to remove one of the antenna leads, I forget which one is cellular primary, but the other is more GPS/aux. Doing it all this way allows you to still connect your vehicle to wifi should you so desire to, for updates and such.
There are other secrets and tricks to these things, including a git repo I cloned that is now gone from the public internet, where a guy figured out how to solder an EMMC reader to a few points on the mainboard to get and modify the filesystem.
They really go out of their way to keep you from owning your vehicle.
Also bought a device that lets me plug HDMI inputs into the truck, unfortunately some kind of refresh rate or resolution issue prevents it from working properly.
As an aside, if you bought and financed through GM, they may have attached a secondary GPS/cell tracker to your OBD2 port, and used sticky tape to hide it somewhere - make sure to remove that once you're not financed through them as well (it is illegal to do so I believe before using alternative financing or paying it off).
That seems like a lot of work to own something. At that point I will go with an alternative brand that doesn't have those kind of system or subscription. The problem will be when all the brands have something similar.
> if you bought and financed through GM, they may have attached a secondary GPS/cell tracker to your OBD2 port
ALL buy-here-[pay|finance]-here car dealerships put a GPS tracker in your car. Where it's located and how it's connected to your car's electrical system will vary, but they ALL do it using[0] companies[1] like[2] these[3].
"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.
I ran into this pricing a chevy duramax recently. On their site one can "build" a vehicle by customizing packages. I don't really know what this "build" process is for because at the end it just searches for dealers that have inventory with n out of x features one selected, or "request a quote" which is really the same thing. It's a very misleading process in my opinion.
Anyway... I tried removing OnStar and the only way I could do that was to remove all the feaures I wanted and also needed. e.g. towing package, bigger engine, etc... The only way I could "build" one without Onstar was to have a bare-bones model with nothing else added. Ill try again in 5 years or so.
The more I read about car subscriptions and the "connected" nature of current and upcoming vehicles the more inclined I am to keep my current car running until parts for it are literally unobtainable.
I wish I was a rich person who could have stockpiled circa 2003-5 Honda Pilots and Odyssey’s. IMO the perfect family car.
My Pilot had 245000 miles and was fantastic, I had to get rid of it last year. The new car I got to replace it sucks, with the stupid touchscreens and shittier interior.
Like how Apple ruined the MacBook Pro from 2016-2020 (butterfly keyboard, loss of ports, loss of magsafe) and I was holding on desperately to the 2015 model until they gathered their wits again.
I doubt the parts for mine will ever become unobtainable, at least the parts that make it stop and go, as there's a huge aftermarket. Indeed, I suspect the "smart" stuff I've added will become unrepairable first.
(It's a stereotypical American "land yacht" with some performance mods and a bit of computer monitoring --- not control.)
For what its worth, this is a massive pet-peeve of mine.
I forget exactly who does it, TicketMaster, or Axios, or something - will say something like:
> Ok, two tickets for the concert; that's $120
I'm like great. No idea how you came up with that number, but I'm good with it.
Then they'll come back after I'm locked in and say:
> There's also a convenience fee of $30. Your total is $150.
I'm livid at this point - which is totally irrational; because had they just told me the cost was $150 up front - like an idiot, I'd have just said "well, that's the price. Here's money."
Instead, I'm left with a sour taste in my mouth and hate all ticket vendors who I feel pulled a fast one on me.
I'm sure you could make the argument that a greater percentage balk at the $150 number than would walk at $120 + $30, so you make more money. That's fair, but to me it feels like I was tricked for no good reason.
Because Wall Street treats subscription revenue differently than one time income. So if they can put that $1500 on the books split up over three years as recurring subscription, that helps their stock price.
I'm going to guess it's because when you buy a car, you don't buy it from GM. You buy it from the dealer. That $1,500 option can become whatever inflated price the dealer puts it.
While if it's a subscription from GM, it's $1,500 and that $1,500 directly goes to GM.
Because the optics of a car company disabling a feature that was included with the car after three years unless you start paying for it and continue paying for it indefinitely are even worse.
Similar reasons to why things are priced at $x.99 or why car prices are often quoted in per-month payments or why mail-in rebates make you mail something in rather than just give you a discount. Or why the dealer doesn't even mention the mandatory "prep" charge until after you've shaken hands on the deal.
Perfectly rational people may factor everything in properly... but the world is woefully short of perfectly rational people.
They could do that and I'm sure they considered it. In the end, the consumer pays the same price. But I'm sure there are some internal accounting games going on. The $1500 is booked over the next three years, not all at once. So I'm guessing the accountants may have a plan.
I don't want to re-type the story here, but I had a "fun" time getting OnStar to cancel the demo service when I purchased my pickup several years ago. Story is in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21816479#21826049).
The USA really needs better consumer protection laws. In my country that would clearly be an illegal bundled sale and illegal bait and switch. If you advertise product A for X amount, then a customer with X amount in their pocket should be allowed to walk out with product A, any deviation from that should be illegal.
(slightly off topic, but in my country consumer laws also mandate that sticker and advertised prices must be the final price including all taxes. The standard USA practice of stickers/adverts with pre-tax price is also absurdly anti-consumer).
Sales tax in the US is not a Value Added Tax, so putting just the post tax price on the sticker is not actually enough, the sticker would need the pre-tax price too, as some purchases can be exempt from sales tax.
Most VAT based countries have a single VAT rate for the whole country (or possible a country-wide set of rates for different types of products). The United States is not like that. Even if we consider an individual state as the equivalent to Country, each state does not have one consistent sales tax rate.
Typically the state will have one rate, the county can have its own rate, the city its own rate, and potentially even special districts with their own sales tax rates.
That complicates things a lot. For example, if a law required the shown prices to include tax, it would mean that an online website cannot show you the price until you have entered your exact street address. Most people don't want to tell the website where they live just to find out a price that may not be any good.
The variable tax rate means that if the law applied to advertised prices shown on say TV, it would not be possible to have nationwide advertisements that show a price, or even statewide advertisements, or in some cases not even city-wide advertisements. (Unless they set a post-tax price based on what they can sustain with the highest tax rate, which means charging people in lower tax areas a higher price than they would otherwise have charged, just to be able to mention a price at all on TV). Unless the law allowed "between $x and $y depending on your local tax rate" (where X and Y are based on the lowest and highest tax rate for the advertising area).
Most people who want such post tax pricing laws would not be terribly happy with a law that allowed advertising a range like that.
I live in one of the few states in the US with no sales taxes. It boggles my mind when I go to a store in another state, and buy a $0.99 soda, and the total comes to $1.07. I have also never understood why the price isn't including the tax.
How on earth is this related to consumer protection? It's not as if they are forcing this retroactively. They're just increasing the price for a car by $1500 and including more functionality.
They are a free enterprise that can offer whichever products at whatever prices they want. And consumers are free to vote with their wallets.
Is the cost of living in your country, on average, higher or lower than in the United States?
As far as I can tell there are a vanishingly small number of problems where "new laws" are the optimal answer. Increased regulatory oversight generally leads to ossified markets with higher costs. Many of the most reviled monopolies throughout American history got there in no small measure because of government protection in the form of "regulation".
In this case, there are multiple car manufacturers available to Americans from around the world - if this makes GM vehicles more expensive or causes a consumer backlash that damages sales, GM will change their behaviour. That seems like a more responsive mechanism than piling on new regulation to dictate which types of fees are okay and which aren't.
At this point I am really wondering when massive shift to bikes/cargo bikes will happen?
Like... it needs NO fuel or can be charged at home for electric ones, companies literally can't offer other subscription services aside from "free repair" for x$ a month, because bicycle is too simple... Maybe battery leasing, idk...?
It doesn't need driver license to operate, if infrastructure is good, it can be much faster in the city and you don't need to pay a ton of taxes, in many situations you can repair it by yourself
With electric cargo bikes/bakfiets a big chunk of car use-cases is gone, like buying groceries, moving light-medium objects, even take childs to school.
For other 5% of use-cases, people can like... rent a car for a day or take taxi...
I can't imagine how cheap this could be
And for people that can't use them, there are tricycles, carts or duofiets
Aaaaaand you can add a small bicycle trailer at the back, increasing further total capacity.
Of course all this is possible with protected bike lanes AND at least decent public transport like buses AND bike parking. Car drivers will drive without encountering bicyclists and vice-versa, everyone happy, everyone safe, much less stress
Requiring some ongoing subscription service for fundamental features will eventually be the status quo across the entire industry. There's simply too much money on the table to give up.
In this case GM has taken the perplexing case of front loading the requirement at the initial purchase, but I suspect that it was easier and quicker to implement as a pseudo MSRP bait-and-switch increase than to create a more fleshed out scheme like we see with Toyota and BMW.
A product so valuable GM is now literally FORCING people to buy it. If I'm thinking correctly Car Play negates the need for anything OnStar does (that you might actually care about).
“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.
That's some slick words for "Get people to pay for shit they don't want".
And in related news the value of old cars has never been higher.
Government Motors can keep their junk cars and bundled spying service.
“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.
What nauseating corporate speak. I'll translate:
"We are forcing this grabage on our customers so we can drive up the price and remove their ability to opt out of our tracking and spying service," -- which is primed to be used to track driver movements and 'carbon' use (Lol!) and rat back to the nanny state. Just like every electric car.
When I had a vehicle with OnStar, I located where its antennae connected to the controller and disconnected it. The vehicle was fine, nothing else was impacted. It just couldn't communicate with anything anymore.
I originally removed the power, but then most of the "smarter" electronics stopped working.
I ended up calling and having OnStar cancel my "trial" in my 2018 era truck in 2019, to the point I instructed them to disable the OnStar lights on the mirror and everything. This was a task as they're very annoying and persistent...
Once that was done I originally pulled the daughterboard housing the entire modem but this bricked my compass and GPS. To keep those working I ended up altering the modem itself with a soldering iron per the pdf posted here:
The guy there on that forum did so in an effort to use your own sim with the HMI, but using 0 ohm resistors or just solder bridging the relevant connections is enough to prevent my vehicle from getting online, but leaves the GPS intact. You can test by trying to make phone/onstar/data related actions - it just won't work.
Another good measure is to remove one of the antenna leads, I forget which one is cellular primary, but the other is more GPS/aux. Doing it all this way allows you to still connect your vehicle to wifi should you so desire to, for updates and such.
There are other secrets and tricks to these things, including a git repo I cloned that is now gone from the public internet, where a guy figured out how to solder an EMMC reader to a few points on the mainboard to get and modify the filesystem.
They really go out of their way to keep you from owning your vehicle.
Also bought a device that lets me plug HDMI inputs into the truck, unfortunately some kind of refresh rate or resolution issue prevents it from working properly.
As an aside, if you bought and financed through GM, they may have attached a secondary GPS/cell tracker to your OBD2 port, and used sticky tape to hide it somewhere - make sure to remove that once you're not financed through them as well (it is illegal to do so I believe before using alternative financing or paying it off).
This has got to be a big competitive disadvantage, unless a lot of consumers cave at the dealership... or all the competitors pick up the same tactic.
If you're comparing a GM vehicle to its competitor, you will not see price parity, as this $1500 "option" will show up on inventory web sites as part of the price (it already does now).
In general, I don't want companies to fail, but I certainly want to see this strategy fail horribly.
The automotive industry is huge because U.S. infrastructure demands having a car, and also because everyone wants to buy "just the right car" for themselves. But these GM luxury brands might struggle with a big price hike like this.
This is a tangent and I know there’s already a front page story on it but still couldn’t resist.
By God the cars in the US are huge. About a decade or so back mostly pick ups were kinda big but now looks like the default size is pick up and it only gets bigger from there. Even Tesla model 3 for that matter is huge by Indian standards.
US consumers seem to be in an abusive relationship with traditional car companies.
I've heard that the latest thing is that when buying a car from a dealer you have to sign over power of attorney to them. Insane.
Fortunately since they don't have dealers Tesla manages to be an exception to this power of attorney stuff; not needed or asked for, nothing even remotely close. Also they only charge $100 / year (totally optional) for LTE connectivity. And their mobile service including emergency roadside assistance is dirt cheap. Who would pay $1,500 for OnStar?
> 26. Data Collection / Privacy. GM collects, uses, and shares information from and about You and your Vehicle. The GM Privacy Statement describes what GM does with that information. You consent to the collection, use, and sharing of information described in the Privacy Statement and in any revisions to the Privacy Statement, which may be modified as described in that document.
> We may collect information about you and your vehicle, such as name, address, email address, phone number, vehicle identification number (VIN) and vehicle performance data ...
> We may share your information ... with our business partners.
With OnStar, they now to track where you drive, how fast you drive, how you accelerate & brake, where you shop & eat, which friends you visit, what apps you use (over wifi), whether you text while driving, and what you listen to (over bluetooth). The value of this data is probably at least $20/mo per vehicle. GM probably sells this data directly to LiveRamp (formerly Acxiom) and other tracking companies.
I used to have the similar service on a 2016 Volvo station wagon.
But the radio module in that car is 3G, and because carriers have been discontinuing 3G Volvo cannot provide their service to my car.
There was roughly 12 months when it was impossible to upgrade the radio in my older model car. Now the radio upgrade is customer-paid and optional.
My point being, if they require the subscription I’d be careful to confirm the service is guaranteed regardless of the carriers and obsolete radios etc.
[+] [-] ilikenwf|3 years ago|reply
Once that was done I originally pulled the daughterboard housing the entire modem but this bricked my compass and GPS. To keep those working I ended up altering the modem itself with a soldering iron per the pdf posted here:
https://www.chevybolt.org/threads/internet-without-onstar-wi...
The guy there on that forum did so in an effort to use your own sim with the HMI, but using 0 ohm resistors or just solder bridging the relevant connections is enough to prevent my vehicle from getting online, but leaves the GPS intact. You can test by trying to make phone/onstar/data related actions - it just won't work.
Another good measure is to remove one of the antenna leads, I forget which one is cellular primary, but the other is more GPS/aux. Doing it all this way allows you to still connect your vehicle to wifi should you so desire to, for updates and such.
There are other secrets and tricks to these things, including a git repo I cloned that is now gone from the public internet, where a guy figured out how to solder an EMMC reader to a few points on the mainboard to get and modify the filesystem.
Edit: here's a mirror https://repo.or.cz/bosch_hmi_hacking.git
They really go out of their way to keep you from owning your vehicle.
Also bought a device that lets me plug HDMI inputs into the truck, unfortunately some kind of refresh rate or resolution issue prevents it from working properly.
As an aside, if you bought and financed through GM, they may have attached a secondary GPS/cell tracker to your OBD2 port, and used sticky tape to hide it somewhere - make sure to remove that once you're not financed through them as well (it is illegal to do so I believe before using alternative financing or paying it off).
[+] [-] ricardonunez|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|3 years ago|reply
Had me scratching my head for a minute there. I guess it's a thing now, though we used to just call them jumpers.
[+] [-] albrewer|3 years ago|reply
ALL buy-here-[pay|finance]-here car dealerships put a GPS tracker in your car. Where it's located and how it's connected to your car's electrical system will vary, but they ALL do it using[0] companies[1] like[2] these[3].
[0] https://gpsandtrack.com/
[1] https://www.spireon.com/gps-auto-tracking/
[2] https://passtimegps.com/industries/franchise-car-dealerships...
[3] https://logistimatics.com/gps-trackers/car-dealers/
[+] [-] sytelus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] isoprophlex|3 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] eCa|3 years ago|reply
They are not lying. The value of the customer to GM increases.
[+] [-] jaywalk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Goosey|3 years ago|reply
But your point is well founded too.
[+] [-] midoridensha|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bfgoodrich|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] LinuxBender|3 years ago|reply
Anyway... I tried removing OnStar and the only way I could do that was to remove all the feaures I wanted and also needed. e.g. towing package, bigger engine, etc... The only way I could "build" one without Onstar was to have a bare-bones model with nothing else added. Ill try again in 5 years or so.
[+] [-] nazgulsenpai|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] actionablefiber|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scohesc|3 years ago|reply
I've heard that driving a vehicle until everything falls apart is a lot more green/climate friendly than immediately switching to something new.
[+] [-] Spooky23|3 years ago|reply
My Pilot had 245000 miles and was fantastic, I had to get rid of it last year. The new car I got to replace it sucks, with the stupid touchscreens and shittier interior.
[+] [-] prox|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] civilized|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|3 years ago|reply
(It's a stereotypical American "land yacht" with some performance mods and a bit of computer monitoring --- not control.)
[+] [-] throwaway0a5e|3 years ago|reply
(The above is satire, but analogous statements are frequently made in earnest.)
[+] [-] nicbou|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwally|3 years ago|reply
Why not just include it in the sticker price of the car? At a minimum for PR / Optics.
You could argue:
> Its like power steering. You don't have the option NOT to have it, and it costs us money; so its part of why the car costs what it does.
That way instead of people feeling like they're being cheated out of an extra $1,500 on a $50,000 vehicle; they just purchase a $51,500 vehicle?
[+] [-] jwally|3 years ago|reply
I forget exactly who does it, TicketMaster, or Axios, or something - will say something like:
> Ok, two tickets for the concert; that's $120
I'm like great. No idea how you came up with that number, but I'm good with it.
Then they'll come back after I'm locked in and say:
> There's also a convenience fee of $30. Your total is $150.
I'm livid at this point - which is totally irrational; because had they just told me the cost was $150 up front - like an idiot, I'd have just said "well, that's the price. Here's money."
Instead, I'm left with a sour taste in my mouth and hate all ticket vendors who I feel pulled a fast one on me.
I'm sure you could make the argument that a greater percentage balk at the $150 number than would walk at $120 + $30, so you make more money. That's fair, but to me it feels like I was tricked for no good reason.
:shrug-emoji
[+] [-] jedberg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snackenaway|3 years ago|reply
While if it's a subscription from GM, it's $1,500 and that $1,500 directly goes to GM.
[+] [-] smnrchrds|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] listenallyall|3 years ago|reply
Perfectly rational people may factor everything in properly... but the world is woefully short of perfectly rational people.
[+] [-] xhkkffbf|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coreyp_1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SkeuomorphicBee|3 years ago|reply
(slightly off topic, but in my country consumer laws also mandate that sticker and advertised prices must be the final price including all taxes. The standard USA practice of stickers/adverts with pre-tax price is also absurdly anti-consumer).
[+] [-] jsmith45|3 years ago|reply
Most VAT based countries have a single VAT rate for the whole country (or possible a country-wide set of rates for different types of products). The United States is not like that. Even if we consider an individual state as the equivalent to Country, each state does not have one consistent sales tax rate.
Typically the state will have one rate, the county can have its own rate, the city its own rate, and potentially even special districts with their own sales tax rates.
That complicates things a lot. For example, if a law required the shown prices to include tax, it would mean that an online website cannot show you the price until you have entered your exact street address. Most people don't want to tell the website where they live just to find out a price that may not be any good.
The variable tax rate means that if the law applied to advertised prices shown on say TV, it would not be possible to have nationwide advertisements that show a price, or even statewide advertisements, or in some cases not even city-wide advertisements. (Unless they set a post-tax price based on what they can sustain with the highest tax rate, which means charging people in lower tax areas a higher price than they would otherwise have charged, just to be able to mention a price at all on TV). Unless the law allowed "between $x and $y depending on your local tax rate" (where X and Y are based on the lowest and highest tax rate for the advertising area).
Most people who want such post tax pricing laws would not be terribly happy with a law that allowed advertising a range like that.
[+] [-] briffle|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qeternity|3 years ago|reply
They are a free enterprise that can offer whichever products at whatever prices they want. And consumers are free to vote with their wallets.
[+] [-] cal5k|3 years ago|reply
As far as I can tell there are a vanishingly small number of problems where "new laws" are the optimal answer. Increased regulatory oversight generally leads to ossified markets with higher costs. Many of the most reviled monopolies throughout American history got there in no small measure because of government protection in the form of "regulation".
In this case, there are multiple car manufacturers available to Americans from around the world - if this makes GM vehicles more expensive or causes a consumer backlash that damages sales, GM will change their behaviour. That seems like a more responsive mechanism than piling on new regulation to dictate which types of fees are okay and which aren't.
[+] [-] Moldoteck|3 years ago|reply
Like... it needs NO fuel or can be charged at home for electric ones, companies literally can't offer other subscription services aside from "free repair" for x$ a month, because bicycle is too simple... Maybe battery leasing, idk...?
It doesn't need driver license to operate, if infrastructure is good, it can be much faster in the city and you don't need to pay a ton of taxes, in many situations you can repair it by yourself With electric cargo bikes/bakfiets a big chunk of car use-cases is gone, like buying groceries, moving light-medium objects, even take childs to school. For other 5% of use-cases, people can like... rent a car for a day or take taxi... I can't imagine how cheap this could be
And for people that can't use them, there are tricycles, carts or duofiets Aaaaaand you can add a small bicycle trailer at the back, increasing further total capacity.
Of course all this is possible with protected bike lanes AND at least decent public transport like buses AND bike parking. Car drivers will drive without encountering bicyclists and vice-versa, everyone happy, everyone safe, much less stress
[+] [-] _fat_santa|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymousab|3 years ago|reply
In this case GM has taken the perplexing case of front loading the requirement at the initial purchase, but I suspect that it was easier and quicker to implement as a pseudo MSRP bait-and-switch increase than to create a more fleshed out scheme like we see with Toyota and BMW.
[+] [-] SavageBeast|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phkahler|3 years ago|reply
That's some slick words for "Get people to pay for shit they don't want".
[+] [-] ospzfmbbzr|3 years ago|reply
“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.
What nauseating corporate speak. I'll translate:
"We are forcing this grabage on our customers so we can drive up the price and remove their ability to opt out of our tracking and spying service," -- which is primed to be used to track driver movements and 'carbon' use (Lol!) and rat back to the nanny state. Just like every electric car.
[+] [-] rachet|3 years ago|reply
I originally removed the power, but then most of the "smarter" electronics stopped working.
[+] [-] lettergram|3 years ago|reply
Good, go out of business GM.
[+] [-] ilikenwf|3 years ago|reply
I ended up calling and having OnStar cancel my "trial" in my 2018 era truck in 2019, to the point I instructed them to disable the OnStar lights on the mirror and everything. This was a task as they're very annoying and persistent...
Once that was done I originally pulled the daughterboard housing the entire modem but this bricked my compass and GPS. To keep those working I ended up altering the modem itself with a soldering iron per the pdf posted here:
https://www.chevybolt.org/threads/internet-without-onstar-wi...
The guy there on that forum did so in an effort to use your own sim with the HMI, but using 0 ohm resistors or just solder bridging the relevant connections is enough to prevent my vehicle from getting online, but leaves the GPS intact. You can test by trying to make phone/onstar/data related actions - it just won't work.
Another good measure is to remove one of the antenna leads, I forget which one is cellular primary, but the other is more GPS/aux. Doing it all this way allows you to still connect your vehicle to wifi should you so desire to, for updates and such.
There are other secrets and tricks to these things, including a git repo I cloned that is now gone from the public internet, where a guy figured out how to solder an EMMC reader to a few points on the mainboard to get and modify the filesystem.
Edit: here's a mirror https://repo.or.cz/bosch_hmi_hacking.git
They really go out of their way to keep you from owning your vehicle.
Also bought a device that lets me plug HDMI inputs into the truck, unfortunately some kind of refresh rate or resolution issue prevents it from working properly.
As an aside, if you bought and financed through GM, they may have attached a secondary GPS/cell tracker to your OBD2 port, and used sticky tape to hide it somewhere - make sure to remove that once you're not financed through them as well (it is illegal to do so I believe before using alternative financing or paying it off).
[+] [-] neogodless|3 years ago|reply
If you're comparing a GM vehicle to its competitor, you will not see price parity, as this $1500 "option" will show up on inventory web sites as part of the price (it already does now).
In general, I don't want companies to fail, but I certainly want to see this strategy fail horribly.
The automotive industry is huge because U.S. infrastructure demands having a car, and also because everyone wants to buy "just the right car" for themselves. But these GM luxury brands might struggle with a big price hike like this.
[+] [-] vishnugupta|3 years ago|reply
By God the cars in the US are huge. About a decade or so back mostly pick ups were kinda big but now looks like the default size is pick up and it only gets bigger from there. Even Tesla model 3 for that matter is huge by Indian standards.
[+] [-] natch|3 years ago|reply
I've heard that the latest thing is that when buying a car from a dealer you have to sign over power of attorney to them. Insane.
Fortunately since they don't have dealers Tesla manages to be an exception to this power of attorney stuff; not needed or asked for, nothing even remotely close. Also they only charge $100 / year (totally optional) for LTE connectivity. And their mobile service including emergency roadside assistance is dirt cheap. Who would pay $1,500 for OnStar?
[+] [-] mleonhard|3 years ago|reply
> 26. Data Collection / Privacy. GM collects, uses, and shares information from and about You and your Vehicle. The GM Privacy Statement describes what GM does with that information. You consent to the collection, use, and sharing of information described in the Privacy Statement and in any revisions to the Privacy Statement, which may be modified as described in that document.
https://www.gm.com/privacy-statement
> We may collect information about you and your vehicle, such as name, address, email address, phone number, vehicle identification number (VIN) and vehicle performance data ...
> We may share your information ... with our business partners.
With OnStar, they now to track where you drive, how fast you drive, how you accelerate & brake, where you shop & eat, which friends you visit, what apps you use (over wifi), whether you text while driving, and what you listen to (over bluetooth). The value of this data is probably at least $20/mo per vehicle. GM probably sells this data directly to LiveRamp (formerly Acxiom) and other tracking companies.
[+] [-] gonewest|3 years ago|reply
But the radio module in that car is 3G, and because carriers have been discontinuing 3G Volvo cannot provide their service to my car.
There was roughly 12 months when it was impossible to upgrade the radio in my older model car. Now the radio upgrade is customer-paid and optional.
My point being, if they require the subscription I’d be careful to confirm the service is guaranteed regardless of the carriers and obsolete radios etc.