Halfway through he describes this as malicious compliance with the “right to repair” law. Apple and others are making a mockery of the law.
They lock the parking brake behind a paywall on the scanner, so you have to pay a subscription fee. Chrysler has the parking brake service mode on the vehicle for users. VAG, BMW, Nissan, Toyota, GM etc all do it. It just make servicing more expensive for consumers, because the cost all gets passed down.
Why is the parking brake involved with the computer at all…
It’s an electronic parking brake. Those are common now because a small switch takes up less interior space than a lever for a cable-actuated parking brake, and the computer can disengage the parking brake if it detects that the driver is attempting to drive with it activated. The computer is involved in brake pad replacement to tell the parking brake motor to open to its widest position to accept new pads, and calibrate itself to their thickness.
This requires a special adapter and software subscription rather than a button on the infotainment screen because Hyundai is engaging in rent-seeking and perhaps trying to direct business to its dealers.
So if your brakes go out and you try to use the parking brake for a slow stop it won’t do anything anymore?
Correct, though the car in question here is electric and will almost certainly use the motors to slow the car to reuse that energy. The motors should be able to stop the car even if the hydraulic brakes fail, and probably more effectively than a mechanical parking brake.
Every vehicle I’ve had with an electric parking brake operated the same way. Hold the park button while moving and it starts clamping the parking brake down, let off the button and it starts to release. So you can basically PWM the parking brake in an emergency.
apparently some do and some don’t. or they require a particular cheat code when pressing the button, idk.
the point is, you can’t trust your parking brake to be an emergency brake anymore, you press a button and hope something happens
CapitalismProgress!
Because OEMs have all decided that the mechanical one was insufficient…
Must be newer VAG vehicles then, mine definitely needed a scan tool to put on service mode. Though it’s also pretty old. I had a newer Mercedes and that had a hidden service menu that allowed me to do the brakes.
Probably like Chrysler, they were in bed together at one point. Just like merc, Chrysler has the junctions for network, similar aux battery, and so on. Most Chrysler you can just stomp the gas pedal 3 times to reset the oil light in addition to the instrument cluster shortcut.
Chrysler had hidden features before the merger too. The key dance showed drivetrain codes on my 300M. Holding specific buttons showed climate control codes
Yep, obdeleven let’s you go into the basic settings because most of the times they have the passwords in the app. On the newer cars, especially audi, the service reset (not the oil reset) is behind a paywall. Maybe depends.on the scanner, but the autel and topdon ones need an additional subscription, along with Nissan, Chrysler etc
Eww, microtransactions every time you want to do anything? Fuck that.
you are on lemmy pointing media bias as novelty? next you are going to shock us by telling us Reddit is mostly bots and sad power crazed admins
No…?
Is it possible to retrofit a used “computer” vehicle and remove all digital tech to make it electromechanical again, where the owner has complete control of what they purchased?
It’d be easier to simply hack the software and reprogram it to just act normal
Duck their software licenses. I buy a car, I pay for it, it’s MY car and I will very much decide how to use it
Possible? Yes. Practical? No. You can’t just cut the harnesses out and suddenly it’s a different engine, you’d have to replace what you deleted with something and that something might not exist yet because there’s no money in developing it.
they dont charge those paywalls to dealers, this is just a way to force consumers to service their cars with expensive partners
It’ll be reverse engineered and a tool on AliExpress for $50 within a few months. Dealer software will be cracked.
Then it’s just an arms race between the OTA updates and the pirates.
“All” digital tech?
I don’t think most people realize that any powertrain new enough to even have fuel injection is going to be a “computer vehicle” in some capacity. How are you with carburetors?
That’s not really true. The first fuel injection systems were mechanical. The first one of those used in a gasoline-powered 4-stroke car engine was in 1955. Bosch mechanical FI systems were common in higher-end European cars from then on. Digital electronic fuel injection controllers weren’t common until the 1980s, though there were some EFI systems controlled by what were essentially crude analog computers as far back as the late 1950s. I know that Volvo had such a system in the late 60s since I owned one. It was extremely reliable.
I’m great at carburetors. Especially the Holley 4 barrel carb. Trial and error made me good at it. I had the freedom to try. We no longer have that. So, yes, all digital tech. Just electromechanical so we can save huge amounts of dollars by not getting involved in the “repair industry”. Transmissions are a different beast but if all the “Chilton’s’” auto repair manuals have not been secreted away and completely destroyed then I at least have a fighting chance to figure it out.
Haltech ECU, but the BCM controls the other parts of the vrhicle like locks, windows, seats, radio etc it’s possible with a lot of work.
Yeah we definitely need open source vehicles/transportation initiatives for everything: trains, trams, hsr, cars, etc
But who will lobby for such initiatives?
Cruise missiles too.
And that’s when I switched a while ago from a modern Bentley to an “ancient” mechanical car from a past long forgotten. Every electrical gadget is local, and it just has android auto (dedicated isolated phone just for the car) with a fake google account for navigation. Everyone thinks we’re broke lol, but I’m so fed with this shit. Even a silly backlight went from 5 bucks for a replacement-bulb to 1500 bucks for the whole led-package. Parts alone, add the mechanic and the many hours needed.
Heard that all brands do this shit though. Like even disabling things remotely that are there but you didn’t subscribe to. This is bonkers.
even disabling things remotely that are there but you didn’t subscribe to. This is bonkers.
I don’t understand the consumer outrage about that though. It is like paying to unlock satellite TV reception (even though we are receiving the signals the whole time).
It is like paying to unlock satellite TV reception (even though we are receiving the signals the whole time).
It’s reasonable to charge for this because the value is in copyrighted content and a service that costs the provider money to operate. The same would apply for satellite radio in a car or an internet-based streaming service. It is not reasonable to charge for access to the adaptive suspension or seat warmers that are already in a car a customer bought. That breaks the traditional model of ownership.
An interesting middle ground might be to allow the owner to install arbitrary software on the car, and charge for the OEM adaptive suspension app. I think I would like a world where things work like that; OEMs would whine about security to no end.
I think it should be legal to attempt to decrypt satellite signals without paying; if the satellite service is designed well, it won’t be possible. All the anticircumvention laws should be repealed.
I’d argue that I bought the car, if they are maintaining a cellular connection to the vehicle to collect telemetry data, I should be allowed to access it as well (I own the car), alternatively they could let me pay for the data connection and not collect stuff.
Because, it’s already built into my car, i already paid for the car, the whole transaction is concluded. Paying in hindsight for a part of it, that is already there, is not really justified at all. If they built the car without one, and would have to add it later, then it would make sense. So if it would be more expensive to have my car explicitly built without this feature, why does it suddenly cost money when i decide i want it later?
The signal-broadcast all around everywhere and just YOU paying is simply for the fact they they can’t route them specifically to just YOUR house. It might sound equally unfair but it’s a clear distinction based on technical impossibility.
The right to first sale should mean that the owner owns and controls all services installed in the product. And any DRM in the way of that, or that obstructs the right of repair, should be illegal, and the manufacturer held liable for including it in a product.
Absolutely. But, as usual, we all let it happen, it will happen more, and in the end it’s the total default for everything. Capitalism always wins over ignorance or apathy.
And your vehicle’s features weren’t lock behind a paywall in the pass because of enshitification. You know consumer rights and so on. If Rich people like you like paying then drive your rolls royce and Bentley, there are more poor people like us. Soon I’ll have to pay to masterbate my fucking cock somehow for the cooperate overlords.
Why the attack? I’m against this. I might benefit from capitalism but i must not like it. And I do not. It’s a shitty pyramid-scheme resulting in exactly shit like this. Many brands (that i know of…) do not put physically already existing hardware behind a paywall. Yet. But in the end, they all will do, because people don’t care, or worse: don’t see the implications it does and just accept.
As said, i now drive a pre-enshittification-car with no such shit. Might they still exist somehow in the future.
The best (worst) example I’ve seen in recent memory has been seat warmers. BMW and other manufacturers tried forcing a subscription on people just to use the seat warmers that are (1) already present in the car, (2) already wired up with buttons in place, and (3) cause no additional outlay of effort on the part of the manufacturer once they’re installed. There’s no valid reason to charge a subscription for something like that beyond straight greed.
It is like having a grandstand at a football stadium which costs extra to use. Do you resent that?
Do you resent the satellite TV example I gave earlier?
You don’t own the stadium, and you don’t own the satellite. So they’re really not the same as a car, which you do (nominally) own.
Satellite TV is a service that requires constant upkeep by the companies which costs money.
And your football stadium is a bad analogy.
I resent that the cost to the car company to install seat warmers is the actual installation of the seat warmers. Running them costs ME money in electricity generated by gasoline I bought. It costs them nothing to run them but i have to pay a subscription to use them on top of paying to power them?
The football grandstand continues to cost the owners in maintenance and space that they own. You pay for the privilege of using something that is not yours. I bought my car, I shouldn’t have to continue to pay for the privilege of using something I already own since the equipment is already there and doesn’t require any interaction with a remote service that would make sense to charge for (navigation, satellite radio, etc…)
OK I accept the analogies are not good equivalents.
It is not necessarily true that everyone has already paid for the seat warmer hardware. The car may cost the same as if it didn’t have the hardware installed. Certainly the owners were happy enough with the car price to buy it without seat warming option.
The manufacturer may find it cheaper to just install it for everyone and wear the cost in the hope that enough people will pay for the warmer to be enabled.
Of course it is possible that everyone pays for the hardware anyhow but it is not necessarily the case.
If you buy an object, you pay for all the components that come with that object. If they didn’t charge for all the components that’s on them. As others have said, heating elements don’t require any continued support from the manufacturer. It’s a button and some wires and a control module. Should they be charging for window defrosters too? There is literally 0 explanation for this that isn’t corporate greed.
Of course it is possible that everyone pays for the hardware anyhow but it is not necessarily the case.
It is necessarily the case. No company incurs the cost of making something, delivers it and then just hopes that someone pays for it. You literally can’t do business that way.
Of course you can do business that way. If the heating costs $x, and half the customers pay for it but $5x is charged then that is a profit.
The alternative would be to make two sets of cars (with and without heating). Or four sets of cars if another similar optional feature is shipped like this. Or 8 permutations if there are three features etc
It can certainly be cheaper to install them by default even if not all customers pay to enable them. ie it is mathematically possible that their system is cheapest for both the manufacturer and the consumer. The alternative would be no different for us cold-bummed drivers but possibly more expensive for the toasted-tush drivers.
This is such a weird hill to die on for someone who claims to be pro-consumer
You make it sound like football team loyalty.
I am pro-fairness, not pro-consumer. I don’t think the consumers are justified in their entitlement in this case.
Oh look another Rossman PSA to show us how evil some company is. Also, the sun rose today.
I stopped giving this guy credence after his series of videos on how “dangerous” onewheels are (I now own 2, and…GASP also drive a Hyundai with an EPB). I don’t fault his motivation, but his propensity to assert that edge cases are likely mainstream is just far too much to be taken seriously.
Risks exist. Be informed.
Sounds to me like you haven’t had a board ghost into a stranger’s car. It’s fucking terrifying. Ask me how I know.
Risks exist. Be informed.
He is revealing the risk, he is informing. He is indignant that it is a risk which is deliberately obscured by the manufacturer. It is not a traditional risk most buyers would expect and the manufacturer is exploiting that.
It is reasonable to expect to DIY your brake pads without this exorbitant price.
Good faith trading vs bad
Lol all this talk if risk mitigation mingled with an assertion that one should DIY one’s brakes, and no mentions of qualifications or safety.
It’s foolproof!
One wheels aren’t shit for being dangerous, they’re shit for bricking the device if you try to replace the fucking battery, as well as other anti-consumer practices.
Which is why I VESC’d mine.
Literally not the point. Companies being predatory, and using literal misinformation, and deception tactics to bend the law and screw up consumers to drive consumption is the point. Good for you being a brainless consumer who is totally fine being cucked by the “rent your hardware” industry, the many of us prefer to actually own our tools.
Lol you do you then. Lingo like “cucked” speaks literal volumes about your character, and… fuckin’ ew.
This isn’t a new thing. Almost every car that has an electrical park brake advises you to use software to change change out your rear brake pads, as when you release your Electric Park Brake (EPB), the EPB motor doesn’t wind back enough, to give you the space required to install new pads and/or rotors, it only winds back enough to release pressure off the piston pushing the pad, which this has been in production cars since 2001 (some cars have brake maintenance modes which can be activated without software, Mazda first comes to mind with this). This whole Hyundai/Kia deal reminds me of Volkswagen back when they were intoducting proprietary software for vehicle maintenance, which led to a guy getting mad and making his own software that does everything the factory software does for a fraction of the cost and arguably better (Rosstech/VCDS) which I feel will happen soon with Hyundai. But being mad just at just Hyundai for this is the wrong mindsent, almost every car manufacturer does this and for a long time, and needs to stop. Even for dealerships this is horrendous because it uses a always online software that if you live somewhere with bad internet or GPS connection, stops you from even just resetting the service interval, which as usual is explained as being a good thing for “safety reasons” by the manufacturer.
The new thing is that the user bought a professional scan tool and license and he still couldn’t do anything because he didn’t have a business license. Hyundai said the software was “not for DIYers”.
He shouldn’t even have bought that. Most manufacturers give the diagnostic info to 3rd parties who build consumer tools. That’s how things like iCarsoft support a lot of these dealership tool functions.
Also J2534 is standard. He didn’t HAVE to buy a Hyundai recommended one. There are cheaper ones.
The problem is you’re blaming the consumer instead of the manufacturer.
This is not a consumer tool. There are several consumer tools available for much cheaper. He bought into an enterprise solution and wondered why it was expensive.
Most WORKSHOPS don’t spend on manufacturer specific software. It’s for dealers and specialist shops.
Why do you think businesses should have access to tools that consumers don’t?
What’s stopping people from disconnecting the EPB and manually connecting a battery to the motor to wind it back?
More up to date info here: https://hackaday.com/2025/11/15/hyundai-paywalls-brake-pad-changes/ You can do it with just a $300 bidirectional scan tool from Harbor Freight.
And the OOP responding about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ioniq5N/comments/1ojjp6m/comment/nonp97y/
I guess that’s one way to make people give up cars in favor of public transportation.
Making them unaffordable for the majority by jacking up car insurance prices, seems like a super efficient strategy.
You must not be american. It is literally not an option here.
that’s just sad. I have about 4 bus stops within a 5 minute walk. a bus transfer station (with maybe 30 different routes) 10 mins away, and a train station also 10 mins away. I feel bad for americans having to rely on a car :/
You stop at a bus stop here and youre getting stabbed or robbed. They’re very unsafe.
Why would they be American?
Please accept my most sincere condolences.
I guess it’s great advice if you live in New York or Disney World. I have a forty minute walk to the nearest bus stop and depending on where I want to go in town and how many transfers it takes, it might take me 2 hours to get somewhere in my mid-side town.
Meanwhile, I can reach anywhere in town in twenty minutes by car, and I can carry $800 of groceries in my trunk. And I don’t freeze my ass off in the snow.
…And the cost of that convenience is now $2000 and a bunch of spyware.
TL;DW; he bypasses the whole 2500 dollar software thing by using common sense that the caliper only has two wires in it so you just need to feed a positive and negative power line to it from a low voltage power source and it will extend or retract the electric caliper as needed.
While I agree with you that there’s an easy fix, it wouldn’t cost them anything to make holding the handbrake release switch enter maintenance mode.
Also, wait until they release a face lift with new some arbitrary signal to control it.
Yeah, i watched the video and the dude just yap and yap and yap non-stop, and the actual content is only at the front of it.
That trick works with all EPB, you can also take off the motor and turn the mechanism yourself, that’s how all backyard mechanic does it for every car with EPB without buying the tools meant for workshop. There’s nothing special to it. Dude could’ve save a lot by send it to dealership instead.
Edit: also all car with EPB works that way, this is not uniquely hyundai, you need a scan tool to retract that piston, or you do it the way backyard mechanic do. There’s like so much unnecessary drama here.
How’s that boot taste?
you can also take off the motor and turn the mechanism yourself, that’s how all backyard mechanic does it for every car with EPB
I’m a mechanic and no, you cannot do that
What’s the odd, i’m a mechanic too, and yes you can, you just don’t know about it.
I dunno what that link is but no, you can’t. There’s no way to turn them.
The drama is that this is an entirely unnecessary step that adds extra work for the technician/owner that wants to change rear brake pads/rotors, which are a wear item.
I’ve been doing brakes on mine and my family’s cars for over a decade. It’s dramatically cheaper to buy pads and rotors and swap them myself, and if I do it myself I know that it was done right and there’s antiseize everywhere it should be. So now in addition to all the work of jacking the car up, removing tires, removing the calipers, depressing the caliper, cleaning the hub, coating the hub with antiseize, cleaning the guide pins, reinstalling and torquing everything to spec, I now have to get a battery/transformer/charger and wire into a sensor to tell the stupid fucking computer that the pads and rotors are new. Why can’t the computer use a position sensor to just detect that there’s now thicker material there? Why isn’t there just an option in the maintenance settings that you can press to say that you’ve done the work and to reset the maintenance interval? Fuck this shit, doing brakes is already a time sink if you live in the rust belt, and this system adds nothing but an extra cost or extra work to the person performing the work. There’s no safety gain from it existing, it’s fucking stupid.
For us technician? It’s a very quick work. For you guys? It’s an additional 30min per side, give or take, and for a job that you’ll be only doing once per few years if you don’t drift. Rear brake wear significantly slower than the front, and this is a rear brake issue. That’s the drama. You guys are crying about additional work for something that you do once a few years.
also all car with EPB works that way, this is not uniquely hyundai
partial bullshit… it’s definitely a trend but 2 years ago I did the breaks on my buddy’s Ford Explorer 2021 (not 100% on the year). It had EPB but also a dash sequence to enable maintenance mode
Hyundai is not the only brand for sure but the paywall is just unnecessary bullshit
Well maybe not all, but how many out of that 1 model have that maintenance mode? I work on many, none of them have it. Honda, toyota, subaru, vw, even chinese brand like geely, all required a scan tool. The good news? A generic scan tool is enough to set it, doesn’t have to be an expensive proprietary tool made just for that specific model that come with those bs. The bad news? Car maker only release it to aftermarket scanner after a few years or so, like the hyundai ionic 5 here.
And even then, like i said, you can just unbolt the motor and turn the piston. 20 years in this industry, this is the first time there’s this much drama on basic shit like this.
It’s weird how many negative Hyundai news you get from the US, it’s almost like they are threatening all the established players in the market.
Meanwhile you barely hear about the toyota engine fuck ups or the fact that they being stolen en masse.
