The author also outlines how to disable them: by creating a user account with Jeep and agreeing to T&Cs and remotely disabling notificaitons. Such centralised control leaves them open to them deciding to re-enable ads in the future if they feel like it.
And also implies an always on connection to the mothership that can push arbitrary content to the infotainment system (which we can be sure is totally airgapped from the CAN bus right? right?)
> “This was an in-vehicle message designed to inform Jeep customers about Mopar extended vehicle care options. A temporary software glitch affected the ability to instantly opt out in a few isolated cases, though instant opt-out is the standard for all our in-vehicle messages. Our team had already identified and corrected the error, and we are following up directly with the customer to ensure the matter is fully resolved.”
So everyone can put down the pitchforks now, unless you are assuming deliberate malfeasance.
ads in a car should not happen, period, even if stopped. just because you're not moving this instant doesn't mean you shouldn't be paying attention.
imagine you get to a stop sign, come to a complete stop, and then an ad pops on right as you're trying to figure out if you should make that right turn
hell, the loud crash bang honk sounds on radio shows and radio ads have been banned in many places for that reason.
I am genuinely curious, why Jeep/Chrysler makes the worst decisions in the car industry over and over again.
Is this incompetency or this is really how they run their business?
I don't know how many years I have known these brands, but they are constantly in the news regarding bankruptcy. I am aware of the history with Mercedes, followed by Fiat, and now with PSA; it feels as though they are the lab rats for all of these foolish decisions and everything that has gone wrong.
I guess I'd hammer my infotainment screen if I'd seen such an ad.
I think in this particular scenario it's shortsightedness. They see this an instant increase in revenue without considering that longer term this will destroy their ever dwindling market share.
Many C*Os plunder the companies they work for, then move to another one. They don't care about the market share of the company they'll leave, no more than bugs care about a tree they are eating. They'll move to the next one. There is always a next tree, until suddenly there are no more trees nearby.
Because no one rewards long-term efforts. You are rewarded for short-term goals and, at best, mid-term ones. In an abstract sense, customers reward you for long-term efforts, but this is something no one will put in an Excel spreadsheet with financial voodoo calculations, except when you are the sole owner of the business.
Could this perverse incentive be rectified in some way? Perhaps by offering much of the compensation in equity that they'd have to hold on to for decades?
I have no idea if this is the case here, but one possibility is deliberate coorporate sabotage. Like planting "bad people" on the board or in key positions.
Either by competition or by hedge funds that want to short it into the ground ("cellar boxing").
The fact of the matter is there’s no replacement for a jeep. Not the grand cherokees and other “fake” jeeps but the gladiator and wrangler have no competition in the segment they’re built for. they can get away with a lot for that reason alone.
this response means you don’t understand the benefits of solid axles in off-road situations. one wheel goes up, the other goes down. google “jeep flex” and point to an independent suspension system that does the same.
Like how statism and nationalism is all the same and we could erase every country on the planet without making anyone angry. One-size-fits-all in everything from headphones to car choices to religion to law.
I like to point out that sufficient stupidity/ignorance can be indistinguishable from malice. Consider it the impact of people living within their bubbles or the result of enormous blindspots.
Jeep was bought by Stellantis, so I'm giving Jeep the benefit of the doubt. I imagine this terrible, horrible, no good idea, was their idea. The people with the money rarely come up with the good ideas.
Stellantis is working as a corporations of corporations AFAIK, and they’re free up to a certain degree. However, they have profit targets, and if you fail you’re closed down, again IIRC.
So, tracing that decision is a bit harder than it looks.
Yes, Tavares resigned recently. Hope they become a better company, but their "Revenue increase program via software enabled cars" and what Jeep did with it doesn't inspire confidence, for now.
I don’t know enough about cars or the Jeep brand, but a common answer to this in the general case is market segmentation. If a company constantly makes decisions that make their product worse for you, you’re probably not the target market.
Perhaps in this case it means Jeep can sell their cars at a lower price. Perhaps Jeep is already perceived as a budget conscious brand. The market segment they’re targeting may care about that.
Kindle does this with their ads. They are targeting a consumer with ~$50 of disposable income to spend on an ebook reader, who would rather pay that little and have ads. I’ll never buy a Kindle because not only do I not want ads on the screen, but they have also neglected their high end device which is the segment of the market where I’m at.
A decade or two ago Wranglers were the cheaper option compared to most pickups. They've been in decline for a while, unfortunately. They seem like fun vehicles.
comparing a jeep to other off road vehicles is not an equal comparison. sure there are other off road capable vehicles but the approach and departure angles, solid axles, disconnecting sway bar, etc.
a tacoma/colorado is not equivalent to a gladiator or wrangler.
Somehow y'all are getting it completely in reverse. Clearly ads in a car is going to alienate certain people, not appeal to them. That's the literal opposite of "diversity" and "inclusion".
You and I both hate the mere idea, but it's certainly an interesting idea and if it finds fans for one reason or another (eg: cheaper upfront price tag?) it's a good product whether any of us like it or not.
It is a car. Most people will spend a good chunk of time and research before they buy a car including researching things like maintenance cost, reliability and resale value.
100% - most people will buy the brand they had before or buy the car because they like how it looks or buy the car because of the price/special financing... probably like 1% of the people will do some serious research, the rest is like "imma pay $850/month, what cool-looking thing can I get for that"
I, on the contrary, see mostly very rational decisions around me. And the sample is pretty large: coworkers, friends, family.
First, people buy the same brand they had if they were happy with it and the price is sane. That's totally reasonable in my book; and not just for cars.
Those who lease do not care about long term reliability, since they replace cars in 3 years while all major components are under warranty. So they are more likely to try new things. Again, reasonable.
I am sure there are exceptions, but I know of no one who picked a fairly expensive car (and $850 per month is a lot for a car) and started with the budget. My 2c.
> First, people buy the same brand they had if they were happy with it and the price is sane. That's totally reasonable in my book; and not just for cars.
This is pretty much what the person you replied to said, just in a different way.
In my surroundings(EU), I see the opposite. Everybody buys their car only after doing serious research. Most people easily swap brands.
For most people, driving comfort (we have more/less kids or aging grandparents, so need a bigger/smaller car) is a primary filter. Next is cost, where people are very aware there is not only the price but also the fuel economy and the maintenance. People know very well the parking spots in the city are limited and polluting cars are not allowed in more and more cities, so also look at small size or good enough eco scores.
There are exceptions: People getting a car from work spend whatever money they can get, and rich people optimizing for status get a BMW or maybe a Tesla.
median income in the US is still an unimpressive 58k and a reasonably well-maintained used-car would still represent a significant chunk of their income over several years. it's a car culture, and people care about that stuff -- they'll shop around.
as to if they can shop and resist marketing -- different discussion.
Every company I've ever been at I've always worked side by side with people from good universities/pedigree. You'd be shocked at how stupid some people are. In fact, it caused a lot of imposter syndrome in me, like ... how did they make it that far? Are they a fraud? Am I? What is happening here.
I've lost respect for entire institutions, no joke. You literally will not believe some of the people they created.
This is very promising, If only the car had some sort of heads-up display that could project advertisements over the entire windshield while you're driving.
Why limit your reach to your car only, it's much better to project the ad directly on the road either with a dlp projector, or a laser + galvanometer.
In fact if you are already scanning the environment with a galvanometer for things like obstacle detection then you only need to point an extra laser to the rotating mirror and synchronise it. So for an extra buck for the laser pointer, you could have something like this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmRfDEhTeYg
Don't give them ideas. The high end LED headlights (Audi Digital Matrix for example) can already project images. My crystal ball's already showing a highway filled with McDonalds and KFC logos projected on the ground, then you getting home and the courtesy light or whatever it's called projecting an online casino ad on your house for a minute.
The marketing team will spin the casino ad as a way increase wakefulness, and the more "thrilling" ads as a way to keep the eyes on the road. You can even have the ads dynamic so that they jiggle when you hit a pot hole or steer the car.
Maybe we could have satellites laser project ads everywhere. Though on the other hand the Kessler syndrome might prevent this. But hey, there's a silver lining to that as well. The large amount of tiny space debris could be used as background to project from the ground. Think, your night sky would be full of ads.
I am in the vehicle glazing/ automotive electronics industry.
Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't switch to making child-sized sewing machines, toy-shaped landmines or fentanyl-laced sweets. It would be morally less damning than what is made in that industry.
It's like deliveroo. You now have a "premium" option so the driver doesn't make 3 stops before you and your food doesn't arrive cold and 30min late. Premium rides where you can see the street by the window coming!
The "priority" boarding on budget airlines is already like that and I'd be surprised if there isn't already a "VIP priority" boarding for an extra fee.
Well, I would assume that everyone having premium would mean that the price would need to cover each delivery going only to one person at a time, which does sound sustainable to me.
In the longer term though, I wonder if we could have mobile (robotically operated?) kitchens, optimized to finish preparing the dish just as they're about to arrive at your doorstep.
• Main-menu is neither the default or top menu, but can be accessed from:
• Top menu -> Other services -> Main menu
• “Cancel purchase” is conveniently located on the touch screen between “Double order” and “Disable purchase cancellation”
• Please use the cancel purchase pin for your particular order which was accessible from within the ads “more info” option, prior to you purchase event. We value your purchase security.
• These instructions, as all others, are included in this very exhaustive and complete service agreement, which you can agree to when you activate this vehicle.
• If you didn’t read these service terms prior to activation, no matter, the next section of these service terms provides instructions for accessing these service terms again. Including these, and the next section’s instructions, if you need to review them.
So happy to hear the designer of World Quester 2's user interface have finally landed a job in the automotive industry. I wonder what happens to the Jeep when you accidentally open up your Space Inventory.
That probably won't happen because it interferes with the fundamental function of the car, which is to take you from the place you started to the place you want to go. It would be annoying enough that the car company would lose sales to car companies whose cars do not do that.
What they might do though is play with the route. Say I tell my self-driving car to take me to the grocery store. There might be several routes it can take. It might infer from the destination that I'm going to buy groceries, and purposefully pick a route that takes me past billboards that advertise for things at that store.
It would be easy for the rider to never notice that what advertising is on a route is influencing route choice because they will be expecting variable routes. They will just assume the variability is due to factors like current traffic.
We could have transport funded by advertising - think of the captive ( quite literally ) market, and the ability to have full surround advertising for the whole of the journey.
If bmw or any other manufacturer was to do that in my car, i would just call over and over their sale man with the 'bluetooth call' until they loose more money by showing me ads than they earn.
In my country stellantis (owner of jeep brand) tried to save by money by hiding that their car's airbag is killing people. Now there's been enough dead that that they can't just ignore it and made a recall but waiting list is very long.
They knew that since at least 2016, 8 years before the recall. They could have done it slowly since then, avoid drivers death and not having people locked out of their car waiting for airbag replacement.
I guess they were working harder on the new Jeep advertisement system.
"Take the number of vehicles in the field, (A), and multiply it by the probable rate of failure, (B), then multiply the result by the average out-of- court settlement, (C). A times B times C equals X...If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
i know it's a fight club quote but man, does a human life has a cost ? young people, mother, father getting butchered by stellantis airbag.
And they are not alone, other manufacturer decided to keep it under the rug, like wolkswagen.
there is the old saying "an eye for an eye", if each time a mother or a kid died because of these airbags you hanged stellantis director's relative, the world would be a better place.
I've been thinking of making a "sentiment database" for car brands where users share their personal, subjective view of a car make/model. I'm sure something like this probably already exists.
According to [1] Jeep is the 24th-best-selling car brand in Europe.
Their sales of 11.4k cars in October put them just between Mazda (12.3k cars) and Porsche (10.3k cars) with roughly 1% market share.
But they are at least competing in the market - some brands like Chevy, Chrysler and Subaru don't even make the top 25.
Of course many of these brands are ultimately owned by the same multinationals. Stellantis-owned Jeep, Dodge and Ram brands aren't doing well in Europe, but their Opel, Peugeot, Citroën, Vauxhall, Alfa Romeo and Fiat brands are selling just fine.
This shows the durability of brands despite the buyouts of the last few decades that have collapsed them all into the same car company. I really do not like this trend, I think it's been bad for innovation and consumers. Real innovation has had to come from outside - from China, such as startup BYD ("build your dream", previously Xi'an Qinchuan Automobile Co).
> Opel, Peugeot, Citroën, Vauxhall, Alfa Romeo and Fiat
All of those had long separate histories before Stellantis. Although when I checked Vauxhall/Opel (basically the same cars except Vauxhall is the UK branding) have been GM subsidiaries since the 1920s!
PSA Peugeot Citroën merger was in 1976.
Daimler-Benz + Chrysler merger was in 1998.
Fiat Chrysler merger was in 2014.
Stellatis was the merger of PSA Peugeot Citroën and Fiat Chrysler in 2021.
But if Peugeot sold 61k cars in Europe, Opel/Vauxhall 31k, Citroen 23k and Fiat 18k the group overall is much better placed in the EU than Jeep's sales of 11.4k would imply.
My immediate response was “they still make those?!”, but they actually still seem to be on sale here! Not sure I’ve seen one in the last decade or so; make of that what you will.
Do they only appear when you stop? Are we sure the ad peddling software is bug free?
Is this a criminal safety investigation matter now, or will we wait until they show up while driving and someone dies because they got lost in some wilderness due to lack of navigation?
> Is this a criminal safety investigation matter now, or...
Not to try to start a political flame situation, but I genuinely think the next 4 years will see a lot of "innovation" and business experiments in the automobile space. Elon certainly won't leave NHSTA alone, when he can instead get his way to clear the path for new Tesla opportunities.
No way that any sort of criminal investigation occurs over something like this. Tesla would love to be able to have extra flexibility on their giant screens.
(Also, it seems very unlikely someone would die due to lack of navigation, but being too distracting due to a glitch seems more likely.)
If lack of navigation led to criminal investigations basically every car manufacturer would already be gone. They are completely unreliable already without this change.
There already is a safety issue right now, as this will make drivers ride away and only then enter their destination into their GPS system. So, it will distract them from paying attention to the road.
In some juridictions I could see it as illegal. For instance in the UK you can't use your smartphone when stopped at a traffic light, you need to park and stop the engine.
I always thought that - "I want to have my car to have airplane mode", would have had a different meaning. One including small wings and small nuclear powered jet engine, with strong retrofuturistic vibes.
Ford's patent on an in-vehicle advertising system [1] contains the following clause: "[the system] further provide the opposite force to a user's natural inclination to seek minimal or no ads. [The system] may intelligently schedule variable durations of ads, with playing time seeking to maximize company revenue while minimizing the impact on user experience".
Car companies know no one wants this. They just don't care.
It's getting to the point where we need a tool (a website?) that tracks the user-unfriendly features in different cars of different model years, so that we can make informed choices at buying time.
As if it wasn’t bad enough they were so out of touch they thought $90k for their Wagoneers was a good base price. A vehicle literally no one was asking for.
With median US income around $43k/year, these geniuses thought there’d be a huge market for these monstrosities (and I am in no way anti-SUV).
This was after axing their Dodge sports cars that were actually selling, and dicking around with the Ram pickup. The bread & butter of their lineup.
But ARU! Listen you c-suite morons, sell the products your customers actually want to pay for. Stellantis’ stupidity is going to bankrupt a lot of dealers if they can’t execute these re-rollouts successfully and finally clear this glut.
And now I see shit like this. Pure, unadulterated enshitification.
How do these ideas not get shot down 2 seconds after they leave someone’s mouth? I guarantee you, not one person who heard such an idea thought it was a good one. It is impossible to witness such stupidity happening and think this will accomplish any business objective or be a good direction for the brand.
SUVs, besides being more deadly to everyone, have higher profit margins, which explains why manufacturers (in the US) focus so heavily on them.
$90k is absurdly high, but everyone will take out a car loan anyways.
Stellantis are really struggling with their vision and direction. Carlos Tavares, the CEO who grew PSA and managed the merger with FCA , utterly failed at his job, to such an extent that he was recently fired (with a golden parachute though). They're up for a shake up, let's see what happens.
> so out of touch they thought $90k for their Wagoneers was a good base price. A vehicle literally no one was asking for.
A premium 3rd row vehicle that's not a GM/Tahoe with those stupid reverse lights? My kids school is full of these. Seems to me like plenty of people were asking for them.
Other car manufacturers should immediately book all ad spots and advertise their ad free cars right there. Ideally they will play right after test drive ends at the car dealership.
So this friend of mine last year visited a Mercedes Benz retailer, and was told "Actually our corporate mission is now to pioneer the electronic butler embedded in the vehicle (as in, oh look, parkings are nearby, and you are near a place where you may want to like to buy something...). If you oppose that, this is the last brand you want to approach".
It's a race. Still maybe not so evident, but declared.
Articles are (re)posted at a rate of like five or ten a day, but many articles will receive zero comments and few articles will have any comments of note. Also, the admins effectively deactivated new account creation a while back.
These days, it's a link aggregation site for two robot "editors". I can't stop chuckling every time I think of how much money it caused its various acquirers to light on fire over the years.
I'd say the countermeasure is like "AdNauseam". You just click "call" every time you see the ad. Rack up their costs until it becomes a net negative to show you an ad.
This will probably cause accidents left and right. May even increase road rage. I know I would just drive my Jeep off into a river if I spent money only to be targeted for ads.
"At some point" is likely not in the near future, at least in the US, as any such legislation will simply be labelled "woke" and "anti-free speech" and it will immediately die on the vine.
> Imagine pulling up to a red light, checking your GPS for directions, and suddenly, the entire screen is hijacked by an ad.
I don’t like this kind of exaggeration because it misses the core issue. And because the argument can easily be refuted, e.g., ads are only displayed when the car is parked.
The real issue is that a car remains operational, and the manufacturer continues to profit from it long after the purchase by ignoring the owner's right to self-determination. It’s not just about distraction from ads but rather about the fundamental business model of manufacturers. They retain control over the vehicle and use it to generate additional revenue—often at the expense of user freedom. Many essential features are locked behind paywalls or tied to subscriptions. The buyer owns the car, but not full control over it—and that is the real problem.
The sentences immediately preceding and following the one you quoted make it pretty clear that this is not an exaggeration:
> These ads appear every time the vehicle comes to a stop. 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.
Objecting on the grounds that it appears every time you stop will just lead to the "fix" of only displaying it when parked. If you still don't want that, target your objection more precisely.
There's such a thing as metonymy, where a word might represent something larger than the specific thing referred to. In common English, people use 'GPS' to refer to the capability of being able to use a human computer interface such as a busybox-backed touchscreen to navigate with the assistance of satellite based location services.
Used in a sentence, "Hey does the rental car come with GPS?" "Of course, it's not 2008 anymore"
Jeep is now on the list of vehicles I'd never own. Ever. Even if they go back on the decision. Permanent lifetime ban for me and my family. My wife can't have a jeep, and neither can either of my kids.
The trouble remains: if you come across the brand that we should buy, please inform us - because the state of facts really has us consider the need to build open source cars.
They are cornering us. Options are getting fewer and fewer.
At least as recently as 2024, Nissan model S and SV vehicles (ie, the two lowest trims) did not have any sort of telematics that phoned home.
[edit]
I also know that some Fords for 2024 (specifically the Maverick, but possibly others) had a single, dedicated fuse for the telematics system which could simply be removed.
This is not a technical document which outlines which models _can_ collect or even _what_ is collected. It's just a list of what each manufacturer's lawyers thought they needed to put in their privacy policy. In the Nissans for instance, the S and SV models don't even have telematics systems. I've got a Frontier S, and I'm not even sure it has any kind of voice controls. It might have a mic for phone calls, but there's no GPS or modem in the vehicle. Same was true with my wife's base model Nissan Leaf. That Mozilla document doesn't do anything to actually explain which models of cars either do not have telematics, or which telematics can be be successfully disabled. (for details on disabling Telematics in the Ford Maverick, see this thread: https://www.mavericktruckclub.com/forum/threads/experience-w...)
I only happen to know about Nissan and the Ford Maverick because I was buying a truck and my research narrowed me down to those two models. I'll bet the story is similar in at least some other models from other manufacturers. Perhaps in other manufacturers, there is also a fuse, or perhaps the modem / GPS are simply easy to get to, and do not cause problems when removed? People post that useless Mozilla article as is if it actually conveys any information, but we need real, actual information when it comes to privacy.
Sorry ED but the Sep 2023 articles from Mozilla are so useful, in fact, that when I speak to the "people in the street" they don't know it, and have no idea of the situation - and they the people who feed the phenomenon by not saying no to all that is happening and NO to the whole idea. They promote it with their own money, unaware. They must be woken up. The article is there so that you can tell people "did you know?". I posted it here often, whenever it was possible that some participants had not noticed it.
It does not list models which would pass the test, but it is not its purpose.
And it is difficult to list them models, given that in Europe the e-Call box, GPS and microphone, are mandated by law on all models past 2018 (it should turn on only upon disaster but guess what), and cars (which ones? It's everywhere) stop working when you try to remove it.
They'll tout that word everywhere and people will believe them. For your and everyone else's safety and security, do not jailbreak your in car entertainment. Your wipers and ABS might even stop working.
Hyundai helpfully used a default signing key on their firmware, so at least some of their infotainment systems can be easily rooted. Details: https://xakcop.com/post/hyundai-hack-2/
Roku TVs now inject ads into your non-Roku viewing. Amazon and Netflix have normalized ads in their products.it won't be long before they move them into more expensive product tiers.
If other auto manufacturers follow suit, this too will be normalized. Enshittification seems inevitable without collective action.
I honestly thought their website was triggering a popup ad every time you stopped moving your mouse, and I was ready to write a long rant that no one would ever read.
But... they actually show ads in your car every time you stop!? This is so bad I don't even know where to begin. The audacity!?
Not surprising to see these aggressive tactics given that Stellantis is on the verge of bankruptcy, and other big companies like VW are on that path. Brands started with selling location data to brokers and other invisible things, and now it’s just more obvious how they’re trying to stop losses. Still, this is just as angering as BMW charging subscription fees for heated seats.
They had $50 billion cash on hand as of December 2023 (last time they've reported that). Net income is always positive and in the low single digit billions.
They're nowhere near bankruptcy. Sales are falling for a variety of reasons, and as a result they got rid of the old CEO.
Don’t want to go down the Musk rabbit hole, but wasn’t this a tactic started by Tesla?
This idea that every product must produce a recurring revenue stream has permeated way too deep. Buying a luxury automobile should entail luxury features.
I almost accidentally bought a scanner off Amazon that had a monthly fee in the fine print. As in the damn thing wouldn’t work if the subscription stopped. Wtf?
Frankly it’s tiresome and pathetic. It’s bad enough that pennies are pinched at every step of the manufacturing process to the point hardly anything lasts even 5 years anymore.
We get screwed over and over again so some asshole can hit their quarterly targets, or so the company’s stock can tick up a quarter point.
The author also outlines how to disable them: by creating a user account with Jeep and agreeing to T&Cs and remotely disabling notificaitons. Such centralised control leaves them open to them deciding to re-enable ads in the future if they feel like it.