[jothishX]

I renewed my Kia connect last year and just after a month after that, got a rat bite incident. Got free towing bundled with the subscription by using the in-car RSA button. The ride summary and remote tracking comes useful at times.

[yshvj]

Even though i have never used any car with such features, i think an app needs to have important information and use such as limiting the distance someone can drive or tracking if you're a parent, vital information about the car and service schedule, Remote start and setting the ac temperature beforehand is the feature i am a fan of since it came is Mahindra e2o.

Having an app for locking, unlocking or rolling the windows and some not so useful features is a waste of money.

If the car comes with the above mentioned features then i would love to pay for them.

[sarav100]

My 2024 Honda Accord came with 10 month trial of Honda Link app that can do start-stop and set climate control amongst other features.

Start-stop and climate control becomes critical feature in snowy winters months.

Ironically, the trial expires just before winters arrive when it is most needed. I plan to switch to monthly subscription for those 4 winter months for starting and prepping the car in snow/ negative temperatures.

On a side note, the remote key is also able to do the same functionality but that works only if you’re in vicinity of the car. Although I haven’t tested it, I expect it to fail to start when sitting in the comfort of heated office space. Hence, app subscription would be renewed after trial.

[ashpkd]

These subscriptions are a way to milk more money out of customers. BMW have these subs for quite some time now. Why would anyone pay £40 per year for realtime navigation when google maps and waze have the same thing for free?

[sidoxic]

I pay for it primarily for live GPS tracking only. There's a small child in the house, and the value of this feature is many times it's cost. If I was the only user, I might have given it a miss.

I can arguably add a tracker like onelap or the likes - but I'm ok paying a bit more for a native integration, no additional hardware.

Gaining remote start feature for pre cooling is a bonus.

[Geo_Ipe]

Originally Posted by sidoxic

I pay for it primarily for live GPS tracking only. There's a small child in the house, and the value of this feature is many times it's cost.

I'm sorry I'm not understanding. How are GPS tracking and small child in the house related? Do you mean to say you can track the car when the child is in it? If the child is small then there would definitely be a responsible adult accompanying, correct?

[HillMan]

I would renew the subscription only if they change the service provider from Vodafone Idea to Airtel or Jio and the cost is not more than 3K.

Half the time the VI network is not reachable within a city like Bengaluru.
Even though I like the inbuilt navigation it is not effective because of this network.
Apart from the navigation the only use the subscription has is the tracking of vehicle. When you have to give the car for valet parking or service. This can be solved by plugin an OBD gps tracker like JioMotive

[Ranabegins]

Originally Posted by bharathreddyt

Hello car owners!

So do you think spending INR 6.5 a day (that's going by 6990 for 3yrs plan) on Kia Connect with it.

Would you subscribe? Why or why not?

I paid 3490 for 3 year subscription directly to the service center, this plan is cheaper and gets you all the Kia Connect features but you miss out on the RSA. If you want this plan then directly call the dealership. My car is chauffeur-driven most of the time so the location tracking is very useful for me, apart from that I rarely use any other feature.

Originally Posted by bharathreddyt

I'm guessing the updates to the in-car system and navigation happens OTA via kia connect, but pls correct me.

My Kia 2021 HTX doesn't support OTA updates but I don't know about higher models. I have gone to the service center multiple times to get my map updated but the service center is of no help.

[TorquePull]

Originally Posted by avira_tk

I use it for safety reasons, the brake pedal gets jammed if I don't use remote start for at least 5 minutes in the morning.

This used to happen in our Creta. Brakes would get really hard even few hours after a stop but it'll return to normal by the time the car starts moving(probably 30 seconds). They tried bleeding brakes a couple of times and changed some part under warranty and the problem hasn't come back.

5 minutes is a long time. And paying for a subscription, just for this is a waste of money. Push the issue in service center and get it fixed.

[GTE]

Considering this is as early days it would be good if anyone who has renewed it would post the costs from various cars for renewal.

[sid3091]

I think the My Jeep app will require a renewal next year for my Compass, and honestly i'm not sure if it's worth it. The functionality barely works, barring location tracking and the app has very little info about how I'm driving the car. The very least they could've done was share fuel economy per trip but apparantly even that was too advanced for them.

[vsbabu]

I've a 2019 Seltos and I used features in this car for exactly first 30 days and then novelty factor was gone. So no, didn't renew it after 3 years. I am the only driver of this car and location tracking is good enough with my phone tracking shared with family. Maps are useless compared to Google maps with live traffic. The only time this helped me was when I was out of town, one police station called me saying car has been involved in hit and run (he had the right number, right make and model, but wrong color for the car) on a date when me and car were 400km away - I shared a screenshot of "day's trips" from the app for that day and he just filed that info and it turns out that they had noted down the car number wrong. Emergency roadside assistance I guess is useful, but insurance provides that anyways.

[Cresterk]

Toyota has given it free for 3 years. After that, I am forced to buy. They have locked away remote start within the app so without the subscription you cannot remote start the car.

Other than that, it also stores every trip for 30 days complete with a map of where you accelerated, braked, turned too hard so it’s useful for monitoring your driver. Everything else is rather meh.

[hypermiler]

Originally Posted by sid3091

I think the My Jeep app will require a renewal next year for my Compass, and honestly i'm not sure if it's worth it.

Costs around INR 4999 per year, which is expensive. Mine expired by April and I just let it be.

[rpmmachine]

I want to share my experience with the subject.
I have XUV 700, and as you all know, it comes with an Adrenox inbuilt Car-connected system.
It came with 3 years of Subscription and out of 3 years, for 2 years the Adrenox was worst and useless. In the initial months, whenever I used the remote start feature for the car, there was a bug that drained the battery within a day. As a result, I stopped using it and have only used it 5-6 times in three years. After 3 years, when the free subscription was over, I decided not to renew it but then got the offer of 2499/- ( Regular cost 5999/-) and thought to give it another try.
But to my shock, I could not use the feature for 6 months, and 6 months of my subscription was wasted. More shocking was that it's not like mobile recharge. You need to send emails to the department and they will then do something from their end, meanwhile keep on disconnecting and reconnecting the Battery terminal to see if it works.
I have sent an email to Mahindra customer care asking that My subscription was not working for 6 months and they should extend it by 6 months, but as you all know Mahindra is Mahindra.

Here are a few points which I want to highlight:

1) There should be an option for monthly, 6 monthly, and yearly subscription packages.
2) If for any reason the subscription was not working it should be compensated to the owner with twice the number of days. ( Recently in states when I was there the AT&T fiber was not working for 2 days due to some technical glitch and they compensated all owners with 1/4th of the bill i.e. for 7 days)
3) There should be an option for the owner to choose his simcard, like I have experienced with Range Rover in Australia. You can insert your simcard without any problem and no need to rant about the network coverage. None of networks is good pan India, its Airtel in one town, Jio in another and BSNL in remote towns. So let the users choose the network provider as well as the package themself. Mahindra would have earned a lot of respect if they would have done this. Mahindra should focus on a lager picture to earn the market share and the people's faith and trust (like Toyata) rather than this milking way of subscriptions, as I know 18 people who own XUV and none of them have renewed the subscription.
4) Mahindra has played dirty by tuning the Audio system better on the Alexa and inferior on the Carplay and Bluetooth. No other Manufacturer have done this and I think no one should do this.
5) Mahindra should have provided the remote start feature in the unlock key itself as we see in abroad rather than the app-based which took 4-5 minutes and with someone like me having a car parked inside the house it's better to go, start and come back in the room than punching password 3-4 times with 2-3 failures of the command. Some friends in Metro cities are unable to use it in their XUV from their flats above because of the poor networks in parking basements.

For Arenox of Xuv 700 combined with VI sim, I am not going to renew it again ever in my life.