Featured Toyota bZ4X Specifications Revealed

A well known EV manufacturer collects that data over-the-air--no need to bring the car in.

Still, I agree that this provides dealer buy-in. That's one of the biggest hurdles traditional car manufacturers face: dealerships don't like EVs because they make a lot of their income from services and EVs need very little servicing. If you make servicing a requirement for the long warrantee, then dealers won't see EVs as a threat.

 

Definitely cars should be self monitoring the batteries and should be able to provide the manufacturer with data without going to a dealership.

Dealerships already see EVs as a threat. They are going to need different training to repair, and likely with fewer repairs less people and/or profit. Profits on sales may be higher, but will be lower on service, and that is how many dealerships make their money.

As a driver, why would you want to go into a shop simply because a manufacturer wants to keep the dealership happy.

I'm sure it is not a deal breaker for many, but my dealership experiences with my prius were not very good (only one guy knew how to work on it). This should not stop people from buying the cars but it is a competitive disadvantage.

In the 3 years I've owned my ev, I have had the mobile mechanic fix some internal trim and upgrade my computer. I had to bring it to the maintenance facilities to fix a misaligned door (initial defect in the first year of production). I took it to a brake shop to inspect the brakes and rotate the tires, and changed the air-conditioning filter myself. I like this much more than going to the dealership.

 

Who is going to pay for that connection?

To self-monitor, there must be a permanent & dependable means of transferring data. There is no guarantee whatsoever that a Toyota customer will have Wi-Fi available for the car on a regular basis. For that matter, it may never have access.

Expecting an automaker to pay for service for every single of their vehicles sold under all possible location circumstances is absurd. That's a completely unreasonable expense for a mass-market offering. Know your audience. Toyota doesn't have select customers like Tesla, well resourced and well informed early-adopters. Toyota is targeting a vast spread of potential buyers, some of which won't have a regular parking location. Toyota strategy of KISS has been extremely successful too. Just bring it to the dealer annually.

The dealer will have a connection.

 

Certainly if the owner does not have wifi on their phone or house or work or car to connect, dealers should be able to do it. For those 99% of people that buy this car that will have one of those methods, they should not be required to go to the dealership for this service.

 

Ford has data Xfer now, as does GM & Fiat/Chrysler/jeep & likely several others.
And when you go into the service center waiting room? Are there any service stations that don't offer free Wi-Fi? Even coffee shops have data access - for over a decade. It's hardly a big deal.

 

You can just make up a statistic like that. Excluding owners living in an apartment or condo, there will be some who simply don't have Wi-Fi in their garage or driveway.

As for going to the dealer, you'd still have to do that regardless. Physical inspections (and the obvious related cleaning) cannot happen over the air.

 

Know your audience. They want an effortless experience with a no-risk guarantee.

Of course, relying upon a weak signal in a parking lot is what?

 

WiFi chip addition is very cheap, but just for redundancy in this case. Cellular/mobile transmitters in vehicles have been around for years and add little price to the vehicle and manufacturers also negotiate very low prices for their data buckets.*

To not include these services in a new vehicle today after all of these years is to have a poor understanding of ones audience.


*But, but, but...what if I live in a cave 100' underground and never come up to get access to a cellular network...

...Hate it that Toyota includes speakers in all their vehicles, some never listen to the radio or other audio media...

 

The equipment is already included. It's the cost of millions of data lines that isn't cheap or guaranteed.

I'm not sure if that was a red-herring or an attempt at FUD, but it confirms the problem regardless. There is exposure some still clearly don't want to address.

 

Sorry for your misinformation here. I work for a company where we buy corporate data buckets that are distributed with each mobile device and yes, they are cheap and they are guaranteed. Please stop the FUD.

 

Yes I'm sure Toyota is offering over the air updates in this vehicle because most people would rather do that then drive to the dealership wait or get a ride, and hope they do it right without trying to sell you something. Yes the 99% was a guestimate that I pulled out of my nether regions but it probably is higher ;-). I really would not trust the dealership to disassemble the car enough to get to see the battery and know what they are doing. It took the dealer 6 hours to actually do the second software update to my gen III prius. They did pick me up at home to get it for being so slow. I no longer had a ride from work.

My guess is it is very few lines of code to do diagnostics on the bms and battery pack. Most of these will be required anyway and likely what the dealership will use to inspect the battery.

So if you had the choice would you go to the dealership and didn't have wifi (most appartments and condos here that have charging spots also have wifi if you park close enough to the office) and don't have a phone that you are willing or able to make a wifi hotspot. Do you think the dealership wifi is easier or more convient than all the coffee shops, restaurants, libraries, etc.

Who is that audience. Yes the dealership should do it for those that want it. That was in my original post. But think for a minute, and you will realise this is not a competitive advantage for toyota.

 

Actually @john1701a has a couple of good points. Going to the dealer does prevent planned obsolescence for those cars relying on current technology. How many cars are on the road now that have 3g cell radios sending their data over the airways now? 3G is planning to sunset all over the country next year. Everybody laughs away the fact that 4G LTE isn’t going away too soon, but in five to ten years can you for certain say it’s still going to be there doing your over the air updates? And Wi-Fi never changes? Of course it will, including security requirements, it’s already changing now. While the people on Prius Chat can likely differentiate 3G, 4G (LTE), WiFi, 5G, etc. and fix issues with those technologies, this is beyond most people’s grasp or even concern. If it was I’d have a hell of a lot more time on my hands than fixing issues from dozens of people with this or that part not connecting to their Wi-Fi router. You want to see people’s eyes glaze over, just mention how a 3 band Wi-Fi system is better than a dual band system or just mention Ethernet bonding. Isn’t technology wonderful?

Also Toyota has their ToyotaCare which is free maintenance for the first 2 years. However, a lot of customers will continue it beyond those first 2 years (I know of at least 3 that signed up for multi year extensions). They’ll probably roll the battery inspection into that which will bring in customers. Genius on Toyota’s part. I’m pretty sure it will contain context data as well as battery data. Look at TPMS. Yep it’s great when it tells you your tire is low on air but there is zero context on how, what, and why.


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Radio generation obsolescence is an important item to point out. But to explore this topic more, 3G will be 20 years old when it goes dead next year (Verizon launched the first 3G network in the U.S. in 2002). Not bad when considering a vehicle's part cycles and the vehicle lifecycle turnover itself.

There have been some vehicle manufactures who have installed 3G radios as recently as several years ago - a poor choice for certain. However, 3G's 20 year window illustrates that if manufactures stay up to date on their radio transmitters, this should be a non-issue. Many manufacturers have figured this out.

 

It is very simple communication. Updates to the car are over Bluetooth thru your own smartphone and cell plan. This Bluetooth technology will not change for many years while your smartphone could be on 4G, 5G or any future data service and It does not matter. Again it will use your cell plan to upload download data thru Bluetooth to your car.

 

While we are on this topic, I for one currently do not connect my car (PP) to any WiFi. I do not have an unlimited data plan on my phone, so cellular data is almost always off except in emergencies when I don't have a WiFi connection. I do not connect my phone to the car unless I have some reason I want to. If a car maker forces me to keep a phone with cellular data enabled in order to drive the car, I probably will not buy the car. That's an extra $30-$65/mo cost I would not usually spend otherwise. Besides, even if I have the cellular data enabled on my phone, I do not get data signals most of the places I drive and park including my own driveway.

 

This is all silliness and a diversion. No one said the dealership should not be an option. I said it should not be required for warranty.

Lexus has announced that next year their Enform will stop working.
https://lexusenthusiast.com/forums/threads/lexus-enform-going-away-in-2022-angry.6094/
The bz4x is not going to have 3G when it comes out next year. Planned obsolescence or bad planning is happening at Lexus with it. The complaints are about emergency help and map and traffic updates. Those are more important reasons for toyota not to put obsolete tech in a new car like the bz4x. The map for the next decade is pretty clear it will be lte and 5G in most of the world. The bz4x will also allow you to use nav from your android or apple phones. They can put both in the car or lte as they are doing with current lexus and provide an upgrade path to 5G.

I just don't get the hand ringing that toyota needs to force all the people that have wifi, or phones, or whatever to come in to have a dealer touch the car to check this or the warranty goes away.

I really think less than 1% who buy this bev are going to prefer to go to the dealer for this service.

 

The data does not need to be live. You can probably use settings to use data only when your phone is connected to Wi-Fi like outside of your house. Data could be uploaded/downloaded every few days or weeks.

 

Even with that setup, I will not buy a car that requires a connected smartphone to operate the car. As I said, I do not want to connect my phone to the car period.

 

I wouldn’t jump to too many conclusions right now. Remember in the announcement it is only a European thing right now. Europe has many more privacy and anti-competitive laws than the US. I see this as Toyota’s way to get around many separate country laws by not having to expose themselves to the many hundreds of lawsuits there involving remote data. It is not as homogenous of a market as the US.


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Some cars get a red or yellow triangle when something awful goes wrong. So - if in our Prius, I might have to get it towed into the dealership for warranty work - because the last thing I want to do is continue driving if I'm doing something that will further damage the drivetrain. But - using our model S as an example, when the triangle occurred, all we had to do was called up service, they diagnosed what it was (air suspension valve pack) & let us know it would be safe to drive it into the service center.
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