Well folks, it finally happened. The screen in your pickup truck… your last bastion of peace from the chaos of unskippable advertisements… now plays popup ads. Not even subtle ones. We’re talking full-dash, head-unit-commandeering infomercial panels in your RAM 1500, like you’re driving a Times Square billboard on wheels.
I’m going to start pointing to this when I explain to people why I want “dumb” machines.
I don’t want AI to “summarize” my google search, I don’t want ads distracting drivers, I don’t want a washing machine that needs updates, I don’t want my TV to look at me, I want a submissive little machine that does task X.
This is why my old shitty 2001 accord will always be best.
Bill Burr calls it, “driving an iPad”
Scammy ads for scammy people driving scammy cars.
They’re the first victims of what will inevitably be rolled out to every new vehicle.
This is just terrible. Every aspect of life doesn’t need ads. I don’t care if it makes a company money or not.
GM was talking pretty publicly about doing this a couple years ago and there was a mild dust up over it. They also mentioned enthusiasm over the potential revenue to come from mining and selling driver data (which got them sued) . Last I heard about it was late 2023 or early 2024, so it seems their new data team.has been busy.
Don kid yourselves though, if GM is doing it, everyone else is or will be.
The field that marketing companies truly excel at the most is advertising their own services. Researching the effectiveness of advertising is difficult because most of the information is presented by the marketing companies themselves. However, most scientific studies agree that advertising through environmental means is ineffective and sometimes can even be harmful to brands.
Marketing usually aims to take advantage of impulsive purchasing behaviour by inundating the potential purchasers environment with advertisement. However, this isn’t very effective, most people automatically filter these kinds of ads, or worse are actively annoyed by them. Effective advertising activates the buyers impulsive behavior by engaging with them emotionally, which is why ad space for podcasts and other types of para social relationships are more effective.
I’d say the vast majority of data scraped from personal devices are utilized as tools to market the idea of advertisement to vendors more than they are used to actually market products. Imo marketing is useless for most types of businesses, and is mostly a field of self perpetuating scam artist.
Apparently it’s mostly about familiarity. Even if we are annoyed at the time, we will often forget about it completely between then and shopping. By the time we are in the shop, we just have a vague sense of familiarity with the product. We instinctively buy the more familiar, as the “safer” option. It takes conscious effort to overcome this (which most people don’t have to spare).
In saturated markets, this leads to a zero sum situation. Every customer you get is stolen from a competitor. Apparently the tobacco companies actually loved the UK ban on tobacco advertising. Their ads were intended to counter the ads of their competitors. None of them were roping in new smokers at a high enough rate to matter. The only ones winning were the ad agencies.
Everyday, I wanna ram my car into a building and hope I run over the CEO in their office.
Now the hardest part isn’t ditching and risking my way of life, but choosing which CEO to ram 🤬
I would raise such hell at the dealership if anything like this happened to me.
But I prefer my cars with NO INTERNET, no touch screens, and very low tech (easier to fix).
I would raise such hell at the dealership if anything like this happened to me.
“Oh sure, bring the car back in. We can have our technician look at it. Just need a $200 deposit and $80/hr for labor.”
I hate pick-up trucks. I really do.
Never buy a new car
OH. And espn thought of this in 2011
2022 model and about every three months I’ll get one for Sirius XM or something related to that. It’s only when the vehicle starts up and initializes. Its annoying but Ive been on the Internet since the late 90’s, my ability to practice the 5 D’s: dip, dodge, duck, dive and dodge for popups is muscle memory.
I’ve been on the internet since the same time and the ability that I developp is to install blockers for all that shit. No car will make watch ads, I’de rather walk.
You dodge twice?
For reference, for anyone who isn’t familiar with the 2004 movie Dodgeball.
If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.
Are you kidding? Always dodge twice!
I… will. Thanks!
How is this street legal? Can’t use your phone but can have popup ads?
It’s okay cuz it makes some rich guy money
I’m concerned it’s not making that person enough money.
Oh no don’t worry it’s fine cause it’s only at start up. If we just keep moving the bar of what is acceptable everything is fine.
Driver distraction is a leading cause of accidents, including fatal ones. This is a total dealbreaker, should be illegal, and should result in Chrysler getting sued into nonexistence.
Apart from how insane it is to put obtrusive ads on a car dashboard, having to link your phone to your car and then call a phone number to opt out of touchscreen display ads is 🤯
There is going to be a reason that they’ve set it up like that.
Someday in a few years there will be an accident in the opt out service that routes 95% of attempts into a 500 error screen. All they have to do is underpay and never check on the server admin for that service for years until they don’t care.
It wasn’t asking them to pair their phone to call the number to opt out, it was asking them to pair their phone so they could call the number to buy parts for their truck. You’d have to manually dial the number to opt out.
When calling that number, the caller will need somekind of proof that they are in control of the car that they are trying to opt out of ads. Afaik, the easiest way to accomplish that when requiring a phonecall, would be pairing phone and car. But obviously Stellantis is not going for easy with this setup, so this is purely speculation on my part.
At that point, I would opt out with a hammer.
My 2025 ram has never done this… not saying it won’t ever but… we’ve heard the same stories about all the manufacturers.
2024 Ford, you can disable all the remote connectivity in the head unit. If you don’t trust that disable it in firmware with an ODB cable and some pirated software.
Modern problems require modern solutions
I mean, it works until it doesn’t. I’m trying to imagine sitting on a six-figure car note, trying to DIY a solution for the annoying pop-up you can’t manually disable, and accidentally bricking your car.
Seems pretty stupid to drop six-figures on a utility vehicle
Remote connectivity can be disabled in the head unit using the normal interfaces. If you aren’t comfortable modifying your vehicle you don’t have to.
If you want to go the extra mile. Deactivate the radios in firmware.
