how to disable the DCM/Telematics unit in the car

Another benefit of disabling/removing DCM is you don't worry about future battery drains due to bad programming: Tell HN: 3G sunsetting is remotely killing every Subaru Outback battery | Hacker News

Idiots will come in and say "hurrrrrrrrrrrrrr that's just cause 3G was shut down, ours uses 4G". Yeah, and you never know when something will happen with the current DCM that causes it to stay awake and drain the battery. Programmers are people, and companies hire cheap programmers who don't consider all situations. Shit happens. Disabling the DCM prevents shit from happening.

 

Hmm, battery issues related to the DCM seem to be virtually an urban legend. I don’t think I have had any.

Without the DCM, navigation, traffic information, TJA on the Gen 5 PHEV, and SOS would not work among other things. I would keep it functional. I’ve also found out that the traffic information works even without an active Toyota Connect subscription, which is great.

 

You guys are still so weird for trying to dissuade people from disabling theirs. What does it matter to you? Seriously. Why do you care to try to talk anyone out of it? It doesn't hurt the car. It increases security and privacy by disabling it (and no one cares about your likely retort that we're all being tracked by our phones, we know, but with a simple pull of a fuse we can not be tracked by our car company and not lose a single feature that isn't already easily handled by the phone).

Oh and who the hell would use the traffic information when we all have carplay and android auto and waze? Weird behavior. Weird reason to even keep the DCM powered up. Having the in-car microphone working is a more compelling reason than toyota traffic info. Only some weird NPC type person would be like "hey honey, let's not use waze, google maps, or apple maps, let's check the toyota traffic information system ".

Also please read through the thread, I've posted many links to articles regarding issues with DCMs through car manufacturers. It's not an urban legend. Subaru even went as far as making a dongle to bridge connections to restore mic and speaker functionality in theirs after they had to do a recall for issues when 3G shut down. The DCM is a massive liability in all regards. It's a security liability, it's a privacy liability, and it's a reliability liability. And you add these liabilities for what? Toyota traffic info and an SOS button? lol gtfo

 

LOL I am not trying to persuade you to do or not do anything. Do or not do whatever you want. I am telling you that I am not disabling my DCM for the reasons I explained.

 

Priipriii suggests trying # 16. If you do, let us know if it works.

 

Greetings, my friend. I see you're on the right path. I chose to unsolder the esim from the module. The data grab definitely occurs even without antennas/battery connected to the module, saw it with my eyes. Microphone and speaker works in my case. I also get traffic data even though I'm not sure where it gets that. But removing the sim disabled the sos button and toyota app connectivity.

 

So basically what I did is disassembled the transceiver/telematics block, so that you only have the
microboard circuit part of it. Then opened up the Kyocera Corporation's modem and removed the chip for eSim receival by Verizon. You have a different Prius. If you'd shown the telematics block to me, I would try give a look.

 

Seems like a lot of work to go thru

 

Is it? The hardest part is to move the screen out of the way. If you don’t have the soldering station you can delegate the process to someone else for like 20 bucks