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Stellantis Is Spamming Owners' Screens with Pop-Up Ads for New Car Discounts
- gdulli 11mo agoTrying to estimate whether I'm old enough that when I buy the last car of my life, there will still be ones without screens to choose from.
- floxy 11mo agoblack construction paper?
- SoftTalker 11mo agoAll new cars have screens since reverse cameras are mandatory. You’ll have to shop on the used car market.
- gdulli 11mo agoOh really? My current car is over 20 years old so I'm way out of the loop. I guess I'll hope for options with smaller screens that control fewer of the functions.
- SoftTalker 11mo agoKeep that car as long as you can. Modern cars are shit. Peak of cars was probably 1990s/2000s.
- chneu 11mo agoYou could still buy some rad cars into the '10s but you generally had to go looking. The fiesta st is a decent example. An economy car, so very simple, but with a sports package. The only "smart" features, like traction control, can be turned off.
- sudonanohome 11mo agoYou forgot to mention that ST is a manual transmission car, not for everyone
- qball 11mo agoThe attitude that the computers should always be subordinate to the driver also extends to the transmission.
- sudonanohome 11mo ago100% manuals are the way to go if you want to feel like a driver, not a passenger. I love my manual Jetta Thing is, people are lazy. US market is automatics only. Can't make people understand what the clutch is or why slushbox is bad for fuel efficiency. No one cares. Gas guzzlers are the national idea My kid learned to drive a manual in 15 minutes. Too much effort for US drivers!
- ErroneousBosh 11mo agoI honestly can't say I notice any difference between driving a manual or an automatic car. If we were in a car right now and I was driving, I'd have to look at the gearstick to tell you if it was auto or manual. I genuinely don't get the USian obsession with driving manual gearbox cars being somehow "elite".
- sudonanohome 11mo agoWhen you have a small fuel efficient engine, you can tell and feel the difference. With a V6 under your hood, you probably don't care. US is mostly big engines
- qball 11mo agoYou will still care that you're wasting a bunch of your engine's potential, even with a V8. Autos (not DCTs) don't generally let you rev the engine as high as manuals do, they don't really let you take advantage of engine braking, and they may ignore your command to manually shift them into a lower gear at will (DCTs can do that too).
- userbinator 11mo ago1960s/early 1970s for me.
- ErroneousBosh 11mo agoMy daily is a 1997 Range Rover. My next daily will likely be something with approximately the same level of technology. There are about ten buttons on the dashboard, of which the only ones I care about is the rotary knob that turns on the headlights and the button that switches the heater from "normal" to "EVERYTHING UP FULL ALL ON RIGHT NOW FULL BORE MAXIMUM EVERYTHING WE ARE GOING TO AIR FRY A POLAR BEAR ON THE BACK SEAT". There's an LCD screen. It's the size of my thumb, and tells me how many miles it's done (only 190,000 - it's my low mileage one, my other has done 270 and there's a guy on my forum who's rapidly closing in on 600,000 miles in his), what gear it thinks it's probably in, and occasionally it uses this LCD to lie about the gearbox overheating because water got into the plug for the sensor when I drove through a river and it came over the bonnet. It's not very fast or very efficient, but it does everything I need a car to do, and I have a full factory service manual for it and easy access to spares.
- genter 11mo agoThe screen doesn't have to be obnoxious like this, though. A Chevy van has a small screen embedded in the rear view mirror, which is impossible to see when not in reverse.
- kjkjadksj 11mo agoPeople drive 70 year old cars today. Just buy a sensible car from sometime before the 2020s, keep up with it and put on 400k miles on it.
- queenkjuul 11mo agoMy 2016 Corolla seems to be the last year without a SIM (it does have a screen but whatever it just shows me what's playing on the stereo), but despite a Corolla being bulletproof and me rarely driving anymore, i do still wonder whether i can get away with this car forever or if I'll have to buy some spyware carriage someday
- whartung 11mo agoTo be fair, I have a 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee. It was the first year of their then new model rollout for the GC. It was (as I understand it) the last of the Mercedes JGCs. I love this thing, it's a "cold dead hands" kind of car for me. Only has 120k-ish miles on it. I won't say it's my last car ever, I just have a hard time visualizing swapping it out for anything. It starts, all the buttons work, it's cosmetically 95%. The single biggest issue is that last year it was down for a couple of months simply because of parts availability. It's not unreliable, but it's swapped a few things (water pump, radiator, A/C has had work twice, guess it's a bit notorious in the community). Purchased in 2013, it's a 12 year old car. But waiting months for suspension components (air suspension, which I adore) was a real drag. Even with a dealer supplied rental. That would be the thing that sends me over the edge long term, I think. It'll be a shame when it happens, I love the car. The dealer wants to buy it every time I take it in for routine maintenance.
- sudonanohome 11mo agoSo your 12 yrs old truck with only 120k miles got: - radiator replaced - water pump replaced - AC repaired (twice) - suspension rebuilt And that's considered to be a "good" truck? Good lord I'm happy we don't get such garbage sold here in Europe
- genter 11mo agoYeah, it's not as if Mercedes (who made the vehicle he's talking about) or BMW are German.
- sudonanohome 11mo agoMercedes or BMW don't sell "tough trucks" lol. They sell luxury goods, which people know to avoid when they care about reliability The thing is, jeeps are even beating the BMWs when it comes to unreliability. Yes Mercedes built that garbage for the US market because US market eats that crap. Then stellantis took it a step up and removed reliability from their vocabulary entirely - more profitable that way. I'd pick a modern VW over American garbage all day any day. But sure, keep yourself convinced about exceptionalism of American SUVs.
- venturecruelty 11mo agoWhat if, instead of just attempting to retreat into a shrinking world that will eventually disappear, we all collectively worked together to fix things?
- CGMthrowaway 11mo agoMay I present Coretti Cruisers restomods. Prime example: https://x.com/washghost1/status/1994198208545714472 https://x.com/washghost1/status/1994198208545714472 Cost roughly $150K
- winrid 11mo agoCurrent gen base model Chevy vehicles don't have smart screens, just some basic UI for the reverse camera/radio etc.
- Bender 11mo agoI never owned a car with such a system. Do they at least give you a way to install uBlock and NoScript or will that brick the car?
- technothrasher 11mo agoYou're joking, right? The systems are locked up tight. I did manage to hack into my Porsche Macan's system so that I could turn Apple CarPlay on (it's disabled in the Macan, but supported by the system because the unit is shared with the VW Atlas which has CarPlay), but it involved a pretty complicated jailbreak.
- Bender 11mo agoYou're joking, right? Only 3.1415% joking. I predict people will eventually get credits for saying things like, "Brought to you by Carl's Jr." in their car, bonus if the kids also repeat it. But seriously I figured someone would have found Easter-eggs by now that allowed some form of super-duper-root similar to windows god-mode. I am honestly surprised that car manufacturers have not been sued into oblivion for adding distractions.
- sowbug 11mo agoI had an old Prius with a nav system that disabled all the controls when the car was moving. But it also had a full-screen page of legalese that you had to dismiss every time you started the car. So Toyota's lawyers were OK with drivers reading a legal contract, but not with drivers pressing a couple buttons to get where they need to go.
- Y_Y 11mo agoDrink verification can to continue journey
- technothrasher 11mo agoThere's less attack surface on these systems than your typical windows install. The only reason I was able to hack the Macan is because they'd left a debug avenue open such that you could plug an ethernet adapter into one of the USB ports and use it drop a shell, and then exploit a bug with handling of a certificates to get privileged access. I was more surprised they'd left that USB ethernet avenue open than that there was a certificate handling bug. I believe since I did it, somebody found another way in by inserting a malicious payload into a USB firmware update image.
- firefoxd 11mo agoI remember many years ago thinking, "if they can have a add a SIM card on a phone, why not add one in your car? Imagine an Internet connected car?" What I didn't think about was this would be an opportunity for ads and subscriptions. And everyday you'll own less and less of your car. I'm shopping for a car right now, I may have to just put a fresh coat of paint on my old one.
- toomuchtodo 11mo agoIn most vehicles, you can pull the cellular capability (either a physical sim or the RF component). You'll lose telematics, but will also lose this.
- qball 11mo agoSo nothing of value is lost.
- hluska 11mo agoIf you consider updates to be zero value, sure.
- thereisnospork 11mo agoOf course I do? Across all my utilitarian devices, e.g. phone, desktop, laptop, I already find updates to be a large net negative except for the vague and nebulus 'security'. If a car 'needs' updates then it isn't doing its job. I can't imagine the expletives that'll come out of my mouth the day I'm running late for a meeting and my car won't start because its in the middle of an update.
- qball 11mo ago"Car won't start because the radio failed to update" and "insurance company tracking and other telemetry" are not just zero value, but net-negative.
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- hollow-moe 11mo ago“Ok", "Remind me later", "To opt-out, call..." The jokes write themselves in 2025
- hereme888 11mo agoI had already scratched Jeep off my car-buying list years ago. Now the bulk of car-buying research is not "how good is it?" but "what are the purposefully in-built annoyances? Can I hack them away?"
- sudonanohome 11mo agoYou won't have any options for non garbage vehicles pretty soon. It's more profitable to sell you garbage and than sell you the maintenance on the above mentioned garbage while getting a steady trickle of revenue for ad impressions. Ford pulled focus/fiesta lineup from US ignoring great sales (despite widely known DCT issues) just so they can focus on selling the garbage SUVs and pickups, highest margin cars. But hey, no CAFE regulations to follow, can pollute as much as you want. Jeep quality is a joke - they would've been sued out of existence with trucks like that in Europe. When I first saw the Jeep Gladiator photo I through it was a joke/meme. Corporations do truly control everything in US. They'll sell you garbage overpriced trucks, convince you to feel happy about them and laught all the way to the bank while raking cash for all "dealer maintenance" required to keep such garbage on the roads. And then they lock down all the maintenance behind encryption so you can't replace a battery without going to the dealer for the unlock code. Please speedrun your late stage capitalism asap, it's getting harder and harder to watch
- general1465 11mo agoTechnically you are correct, practically you will get into question of "who pays for the internet in the car?" and if customer refuses to pay (like in VAG case) then you will have just a car without an internet.
- morshu9001 11mo agoI got a Honda, it's fine
- razingeden 11mo agogreat sales yeah (7bn+) but those dsp6 recalls on the fiesta cost ford about 2 billion. id buy another one. (in manual.) i dont know how many other gen5 fiesta owners would walk down the aisle with that car again tho i think the dsp’s kind of cool. still have a 2011 in a barn somewhere. its on engine #2 and transmission #2 at 124,000 and thats not even counting all the bad grounds, bad caps, electrical squirrels ive been able to track down and fix. it wasnt that bad to deal with, but i totally empathize with anyone who doesnt remember theirs fondly or want to go out and get another one just like it
- hedora 11mo agoThe last (hopefully only) Stellantis vehicle we owned had trouble with its transmission’s network connection. “Nothing stops a Ram, except routine driving”. I’m completely unsurprised they’re pushing spam to the dashboard. The crazy thing is BMW has been doing this well for years. They should have just copied the playbook. There’s a little shop icon in the app where you can buy digital services, swag and schedule dealership appointments. Sometimes it has discounts or track day invitations in there.
- general1465 11mo agoImagine you will buy a house and somebody will have so much gall to slap a billboard on the side of your house. Repeatedly. Would you tolerate this behavior? Obviously not, then why companies thinks that it is OK to show ads on my fridge or in my car? This is outrageous behavior and I hope that some nasty regulation will end this nonsense so we can hear crying of companies how big government is bullying them and hampering innovation...
- Animats 11mo agoJust when you think Stellantis couldn't do anything worse... This is the company that ran Chrysler into the ground. The only remaining Chrysler product is one mini-van. They raised the prices on Jeeps so much that they lost their market. They went the "mild hybrid" route, with such silly things as 21 miles of electric range. The Stellantis dealers signed a joint letter demanding that the CEO be fired. That was done. It didn't seem to help. (I own a pre-Stellantis Jeep Wrangler, and would like to buy a replacement, but Jeep now has nothing I want.)
- apparent 11mo ago> They went the "mild hybrid" route, with such silly things as 21 miles of electric range "Mild hybrid" typically refers to a vehicle with a passively-charged battery pack, not a PHEV that has any material amount of electric-only range.
- tremon 11mo agoWhat does that mean, "passively charged battery pack"? Did we invent batteries that slowly regain charge over time and I somehow missed it?
- maximus-decimus 11mo agoI imagine it means a normal hybrid, in contrast to plug-in hybrids. Normal hybrid will at least regain charge when you brake (and maybe from the gas engine?). You don't actively recharge it.
- apparent 11mo agoPassively charged in the sense that the driver cannot actively force it to be charged, either while driving or by plugging it in (it cannot be plugged in). Vehicles with a stated electric-only range are typically PHEVs, which can be plugged in. Some non plug-in hybrids can be driven in electric-only mode for very short distances, at low speeds only.
- Covzire 11mo agoSaw this in my car this morning myself. I only noticed it as I was getting out and right before turning it off.
- froidpink 11mo agoIs this also the brand that tracks your driving data and sells it to insurance companies?
- SteveNuts 11mo agoEven Toyota does this, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they all do.
- ReptileMan 11mo agoHere is an idea for a project - open source street legal EV car platform.
- Schiendelman 11mo agoUnfortunately street legality requires testing, not just compliance.
- dbg31415 11mo agoAny screen is just an advertising delivery system. Relevant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g
- tonyedgecombe 11mo agoLooks like Stellantis is on my no buy list now, along with Samsung, Microsoft and Tesla.
- zetanor 11mo agoSo, what happens if you accidentally drill through your car's LTE modem while doing an oil change?
- qball 11mo agoIt'll throw a code, just like it does if you forget to put DEF in. It's not a malfunction, they just want you to think it is.
- kotaKat 11mo agoAnd isn't this just weeks after a bad software update bricked a bunch of Wrangler 4XEs? ... Oh, and isn't this the same Stellantis that now requires a fuck-ton of hoops to access your own diagnostics now because of their "secure gateway"? (https://autel.us/security-gateways/ https://autel.us/security-gateways/)
- UberFly 11mo agoI bough a new Honda and Mazda within the last year and neither have any of this kind of nonsense. Both are great. I hope people vote with their wallets. I would never have considered anything from Stellantis anyway.
- dreamcompiler 11mo agoStellantis makes some of the most unreliable vehicles in the world and charges a small fortune for them. I predicted they'd be out of business a year ago but apparently somebody keeps buying them.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- dreamcompiler 11mo ago1. Locate cellular modem. 2. Disable it.
- Bud 11mo agoSame company that is planning to deprive customers of CarPlay even though virtually all of their customers want it.
- qwertox 11mo ago> To opt out, call 1-800-777-3600 You call the number, maybe let it ring one time, and hang up. You did your part to opt out. Then you sue them.
- kylehotchkiss 11mo agoYou signed up for mandatory arbitration in the sales agreement probably.
- venturecruelty 11mo ago"Agree to kangaroo court or be unable to go anywhere forever." I wonder what people will choose!
- qwertox 11mo agoIt's incredible that companies get the right to do this. What a corruption.
- jerf 11mo agoArbitration is still a pretty big money sink for them. If enough people do it then it becomes a problem for them. There have been instances of companies reinstating normal class action lawsuits back into their EULAs because it turned out that forced arbitration wasn't a magical wonderland of cost cutting for them after all. Forced arbitration and especially when they have a clause that forbids class-action arbitration can turn into a huge liability for them even if they nominally win every instance. The fundamental financial maneuver of the modern world is to take modest risks of modest loss and financially engineer it into a smaller risk of much, much larger loss, with a higher expected loss (risk*size) in the end after the engineering than before. Forced arbitration (and especially when class arbitration is banned) is that manuever in the legal sphere. It isn't a ticket out of the risk entirely, it's shoving that risk under the rug and making it net larger. If you and a few hundred of your closest friends put their minds to it you can trigger that smaller-chance-of-larger-disaster scenario and all you have to do is file... you don't even have to win. I won't deny it's an uphill battle but the forced arbitration clauses can be turned to consumer's advantage with relatively modest coordination, you just need to get enough annoyed people together. (I can't help you with this one, I don't have a car with this problem. Your few hundred closest friends will need standing.)
- kylehotchkiss 11mo agoit'd be cool if we had a more consumer-friendly admin who would ban advertising on long-term purchases like washing machines, fridges, cars or require you the seller to tell you about how the advertising works on said things (ad types, whether they are child friendly, frequency, and upfront option to permanently opt out)
- CGMthrowaway 11mo agoYes. This problem of in-vehicle ads definitely stems from the current president, and a different president can and will solve it for good. A multi-step config panel for these ads is exactly what we need.
- estimator7292 11mo agoThe word "admin" in the above comment is short for "administration" which encompasses thousands of individuals across pretty much every branch and department of the government.
- kylehotchkiss 11mo agoExactly, I mean departments like the FTC, CPSC, DOT (these ads are probably displaying while driving at highway speeds, much like the jeep software updates deploy at lol)
- venturecruelty 11mo agoIt's an interesting phenomenon. Something like this happens every week or two, and then these threads basically just become cope, with vague advice that most people can't easily do ("oh, just desolder the eSim contacts, it'll be fine"), as though that is in any way a longterm solution to corporate overreach in our daily lives. What if we all decided to actually work together to fix this terrible situation? Unfortunately, it will involve collective action, and holding companies accountable who are otherwise very averse to that sort of thing. But dear God, we can't keep "why don't you just"-ing forver as the world closes in around us, people. If we want a better world, we are going to have to build a better world.
- drdaeman 11mo agoHave you contacted your representatives and demanded something that would improve the current situation?
- nemomarx 11mo agoSo what's the collective action? Any proposed regulations to sign on to?
- cindyllm 11mo ago[dead]
- Schiendelman 11mo agoFirst you have to pick one thing to work on. Just one. Then you have to find all the people who agree with you that ONE thing is the most important thing to pick, and get help on crafting a message that will stick, develop a theory of change, and work backwards from that theory to actionable efforts the people you recruit can do. It's hard work. I've done it. I am happy to help you do it. Let me know.
- mosselman 11mo agoGetting a pop-up like this would be a sure way to get me to never buy your brand again.
- more_corn 11mo agoNever buy any product from any company who does this. There is a time to put your foot down and that time is now.
- deely3 11mo agoLet's start from Samsung! https://mlq.ai/news/samsung-faces-backlash-after-rolling-out-ads-to-family-hub-smart-fridges/ https://mlq.ai/news/samsung-faces-backlash-after-rolling-out...
- slurrpurr 11mo agoPro tip: if you buy the new car, the ad goes away for a year ;)
- avazhi 11mo agoNope.
- lostdog 11mo agoThis kind of behavior should re-open the return window for the car.
- tartoran 11mo agoI wonder if we're gonna see a class action lawsuit.
- pimlottc 11mo agoFor those unfamiliar and confused, Stellantis is the mega corporation formed from the merge of Chrysler and Fiat that owns Jeep, Dodge, Peugeot, Opel, and many other brands.
- morkalork 11mo agoTheir reputation is verging on the likes of private equity
- josefritzishere 11mo agoReason # 10034 why I do not want a TV screen in my car or truck.
- puskavi 11mo agoi'll never get car that has touchscreen, internet, or adblue.
- GuestFAUniverse 11mo agohttps://www.euroncap.com/en/results/Jeep/Wrangler/34192 https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/Jeep/Wrangler/34192 $50000+ for such garbage? I wouldn't voluntarily sit in such a fish can for more than emergency travels. It's Renault Zoe level safety -> I would pay $12000 max.
- 28304283409234 11mo agoThis is why I drive a 2015 Honda.