Imagine pulling up to a red light, checking your GPS for directions, and suddenly, the entire screen is hijacked by an ad. That’s the reality for some Stellantis owners. Instead of seamless functionality, drivers are now forced to manually close out of ads just to access basic vehicle functions.
Oh HELLLLL no. I hope my 2012 Subaru will last until I'm either dead or too old to drive. I don't even want to have these damn screens for the usual shit you have to do on them. I want to be able to do everything with physical controls, no eavesdropping, and no dependence on a fucking app or touchscreen to operate anything in my car! I will drive my car while wearing mittens! shakes fist
This is why we need government that isn't in the pocket of corporations.
We need something like lawmakers having to disclose their tax information annually. If you want to be in office and make millions you should be willing to put your morals on the review table.
they would have you watch ads without seatbelts and without air bags.
No, they would require you purchase these because their business can’t sell their products without them, but they’d make you pay a subscription for them to keep working, and when you stop paying the subscription, the car stops turning on until you pay your monthly airbag and seatbelt fee.
This is why used cars are so dang expensive, it seems like automobile quality has been in a free fall since 2008. The end user experience gets worse while the price goes up.
Early 2000s jap cars are unkillable, surplus of parts, and are not tracker spyware nests. Great little things for sure. My 90s turboed volvo is a far more temperamental beast, but I cherish her quirks :)
Right now my car is an 84. With a back up 86 truck. I used to have a 2011 subaru, but hit an prairie antelope with it. If I had my pick I think 1990-2008 Japanese cars are the sweet spot.
The TVs aren’t a bad value. Gotta get back the the jailbreaking days. If someone released a custom firmware for my Roku tv that made it dumb I would use it.
I've known several Jeep owners over the last decade and those that weren't buying it strictly for the 'Jeep clout' as an actual vehicle/daily driver had constant issues, while under warranty, and dealt with issues even trying to get said warranty work done.
Like that wasn't enough for me, on top of that I had a mechanic with his own shop that said he'd never touch another Jeep because of how horribly they are designed to work on. Anything from ease of access to work on the engine to bolts stripping out because they were overtorqued during assembly and made with shit metals that would sooner melt than come off in one piece.
Now this? Yeah, hope they go bankrupt. This is just as bad as BMW and their 'pay a subscription for seat warmers' bullshit.
dodge in general did not do well on realiability, Thing is they have neat engineering. So I loved the grand caravan but they killed it to try and get folks to pay toyota prices for their shit and its like no. You vehicles have to be ten grand cheaper so that you amoratize the repair bills.
The dodge caravan was my teenage car. I loved it. Big. Ugly. No one wanted to drive with me and that was perfect because they also would have tried smoking in the car and I'd have broken out in hives. I miss you, dodge caravan.
You know, I've got to give their marketing team props for managing to sell a vehicle with the engineering quality of a Saturn to people with more money than sense for a whole ass order of magnitude more than it's worth. Game recognizes game.
Its not marketing it's that they extend credit to anyone who comes through the door. 550 credit score? No problem sir, here is your $62500 RAM 1500, loaded with options. If you can't pay $1000/month for a Kia why not splurge and not pay $2000/month for an optioned out truck?
Yeah I've never heard anything good about jeeps in general. Now they are being run further into the ground by trying to become a luxury brand. At least when it was just a shitty jeep, it was still a somewhat cheap shitty jeep.
When I was young, you (supposedly) could still buy WWII-era original Jeeps disassembled and packed into crates in cosmoline. I always wanted one of those but never had any desire to own a modern one.
I completely crossed off all GM cars due to lack of CarPlay. I am boycotting Tesla. I don’t trust BMW because they tried to make heated seats a subscription. Now Jeep and Stellantis?
Japanese manufacturers are not perfect but seem to be the least interested in doing this kind of anti-consumer nonsense, at least for now. I have been happy with every Mazda I've owned in the last decade (3 in total) for what it's worth.
Yup, Toyota has been solid for me. Though admittedly, they’re also one of the worst in regards to data privacy; You should assume that every single thing you do in a Toyota is being recorded and sent back to a Toyota server for ad/tracking purposes.
I just wish Mazda had a good EV. Their EVs just aren't that good at the moment. I leased a BMW iX a few months ago, but my old car (which I still have) is a 2012 Mazda 3. Love the EV experience and I don't think I'll buy a gas powered car ever again.
my 2008 BMW is the last without a computer screen and none of that stupid knob and I had to seek it out but it was absolutely worth it. Bonus that I can actually work on the car my self!
Toyota Sales here
Boy do I have some BMW Heated seat subscription crap to sell you
(Its not quite as bad as BMW. But one thing that really irks customers is the remote starter is restricted to a subscription service. unless you're one of the lucky ones who got a vehicle that installed the wrong part/fuses. in which case you can still remote start your car with the fob. its still very finnicky)
Mercedes also includes a number of items as a subscription in some countries. Some stuff is app related. Others are things like getting full use of your rear-steering wheels and unlocking extra horsepower.
Elon may be going down a conservative rabbit hole these days, but this is the sort of thing Tesla would never ever ever do. And things like using the telematic system to sell your location and speed to insurance companies. Never happened on a Tesla.
You may not like the guy, but the cars are fucking solid.
Tesla's have their own privacy issues, and build quality issues . Tesla's staff have been caught spying on their customers and sharing sensitive images of people .
Oh, he's just going down a rabbit hole! He's going on a cute little adventure where he does a fucking Nazi salute in front of the whole country, then proceeds to recklessly dismantle huge parts of the US government, but it's all just part of his magical little journey! Teehee!
The site is still there, but the comment sections are no longer fun nor do you find intelligent feedback as frequently as you could in the early days. Last time I was poking around there, the mods were upvoting climate denial comments. So much for science. (source: low uid)
In USSR, despite all its downsides, there was a huge upside - magazines like "Техника - молодежи" and various educational brochures of the practical kind, aimed at explaining how to really make something.
And also a certain culture of hobbies associated with that, I guess all the energy from boredom went there.
So - I've read about competitions of hobby-crafted cars then. Like 20 guys would make some (like half of it would be something used in usual Soviet cars, think Reagan and the 10 years joke) parts of a car in their garages and apartments (and even at work, if they worked on some factory, for example ; in general workplace in USSR was, eh, a bit more permanent of an association, so the border between personal life and work, including tools, was fuzzy), then assemble them.
I think that could even be registered as a legal means of transportation. At least from what I've heard there is (or was) a surprisingly liberal part of Russian laws, allowing you to register almost anything as a car and get a number, with some criteria passed. Maybe these two things are related.
This is just one of the many reasons I have no interest in new cars. If it needs an internet connection then I'm not buying it. There are very few things I need my vehicle to be able to do and having access to internet isn't one of them. I don't even like that my truck has automatic wipers - I vastly prefer the traditional ones. Hell, I don't even need the radio.
Not a chance. The new ‘infotainment’ clusters integrate necessary features like climate control to prevent aftermarket replacements in most vehicles. I honestly don’t know if any manufacturers even use the single and double DIN standards anymore.
Mazda is supposedly one of the last major automakers that has mostly physical controls in their cars. Definitely at the top of my list for any future car purchases.
Despite no longer sticking to the DIN standard, and climate controls being integrated into the infotainment system, there still exists a big market for aftermarket infotaiment systems, they just have to be engineered for the specific make of car you have. But they can be bought for most cars that have infotaiment systems that are now outdated
Jeep is a Stellantis product. Literally the worst quality auto manufacturer in North America. They are circling the drain and jacking up the prices on their vehicles and making Pikachu faces when they don't sell. Their only customers are people who don't know how to research their purchases, and putting advertisement hell into their cars is another example of that. I suspect they will not be in business a decade from now.
What's confusing is that some great auto brands from Europe are under Stellantis (Peugeot and Citroen at least)
And they're actually not doing a shitty job in designing or selling their vehicles. It's mainly the Chrysler brands or basically the US brands under Stellantis.
I seriously hope the shit happening in Chrysler doesn't come trickling down to the other brands
I had two Jeeps, first was originally my dad's. It was an old shitbox. The other one was a somewhat old shitbox. 1998 & 2010. We dumped more time and money into them than I'd care to admit.
I was looking for a car a few months ago and was looking at newer models, used, but mostly less than a decade old. Then I started reading about all the tracking and such.
I gave in to my inner teenager and bought a 2001 Porsche 911.
The entertainment center can connect via Bluetooth but there's no Android Auto, no navigation. It has Sirius XM but I never had a subscription to it and never will.
I might add a backup camera but that's it. My phone is more than enough tracking, even with as much of it shut off as possible.
A previous owner mounted one where the cigarette lighter was. I'm going to replace it soon since it doesn't really fit - I can't charge my phone in the holder.
Maybe I'll finally learn FreeCAD and print my own.
There are no high end middle class cars now. Used be if you got an audi, merc, beamer etc. You were part of an in group where youngot extras. Now you spend 80K and they want you to subscribe for cruise control and AC. Lambourghini and porsche dropped back to entrr the market and only brought their badge.
FAKE NEWS!!! Why would you want to pull an ancient lever mechanism if you can do it in a few taps on the touch screen. Sure, unless you have a premium subscription, you'll have to watch a short video from our partners, tailored individually just for you.
The ad they show is an ad for their own extended warranty package and it says that "Odometer must be less than 36000 miles to purchase" Anyone wanna take bets for whether or not that will actually shut up once you go over 36k miles? (I'm betting no)
We're really deep into nightmare territory with the kind of stuff companies feel its ok to do to customers..
"Check Engine light on again? Check out the new 2027 Jeep Wagoneer! You'll definitely get more miles out of the new one compared to the 2025 model thats now broken"
Could be like some of those TVs that have baked-in ads. So if you don't have a data connection, they'll just play the default ones.
Edit: I imagine that the car to prevent you from unplugging the antenna would probably do the classic, "I haven't had a data connection in X amount of time, therefore I cannot verify the security of the device, so we're going to prevent the use of autoplay."
You don't need to be allergic to advertisement to want avoid shit like this. The fucking audacity of companies these days. There is no place they won't try to shove these damn things to the detriment of every product, service, and personal moment. If they could put screens under your eyelids you'd have to watch drug ads one blink at a time and your dreams would be sponsored by AT&T.
I don't recommend anyone buy a Jeep, not because of the ads but because they're built like shit. Quality has been in free fall for decades while prices have skyrocketed. Death wobble issues (Wranglers), motor reliability out the window, rust, more rust, just not worth it.
I owned a 94 Cherokee and I loved it, and even though that 4.0L straight 6 had problems at least it would still run with bad piston rings, mysterious battery drain and holes in my radiator. The new ones just can't compete.
I dunno man. Harrison Ford made it sound like it was more rewarding than raising children and more important than world peace. You gonna turn your back on what seems to be something more fulfilling to Harrison Ford than religion just because it's an inferior product and it's pushing ads in your face like a free playstore game?
I bought a 2025 Kia Sportage before the new Trumpflation taxes went into effect. No ads at all. I would have been pretty damn mad to see ads. Weird that Jeep has decided to self destruct.
There's exactly zero chance I'd buy a car that showed me ads.
There was already zero chance I'd buy a Stellantis vehicle anyway after buying a brand new 1999 Dodge Durango that started rusting out sitting on our garage.
And while they did the bare minimum to remove the rust, but they didnt stand behind it. There was no way we were keeping it or buying anything else from them.
Meanwhile I used to drive a 99 Chrysler 300m and I swear it was one of the best vehicles I've driven. It only died because as an idiot 19 year old I thought the engine temperature gage could wait a day because I had to move into college.
That said it was the last car Chrysler made worth shit
Sounds like the Jeep corporate execs should be charged with all the crimes that result from road rage incidents involving people who own Jeep products.
Yup. Keeping old cars going on fossil fuels is so much better than millions of new cars being built every year, and in order for them to be built they ship them around the world to seperate facilities. I could go on and on
Because I've seen what people do with their vehicles. I bought my car new 13 years ago and I've been able to make sure it's been properly maintained the entire time and no one else's crud is all over the interior. I intend to keep it until it falls apart. Prior to that I had a truck I bought used and got maybe 5 years out of it before the transmission died with only medium mileage. I had maintained it but who knows what the person before me did with it.
That said if nothing changes with all this touchscreen infotainment shit I don't know what I'll do. I've hated every new vehicle I've been in the last few years.
Please do. But keep in mind, when I invariably get jump-scared by your infotainment system and crack my head on the car ceiling, I'm going to turn your revenue stream into my personal early retirement pension.