Right-to-repair advocates believe that car owners should have full ownership of the technology embedded in their vehicles
There’s nuance to this article. The cost is for the connected services portion, which usually includes the fee for the cellular connectivity the car has to enable the services, that’s not free and there is a cost to maintain that infrastructure. Additionally the “workaround” that someone provided still uses those connected services (again, not something that is just free to maintain).
The shitty part that comes in is that Mazda removed the key fob remote start option from their newer vehicles. That being said though, nothing in the above statements is centered around “right to repair”. If you don’t want to pay for the connected services, then don’t, everything else in your car will still work.
About the only way you could argue for it is a “bring your own SIM” approach but even then, where would it connect to? Who would pay to maintain that? You’d have to allow it to connect to a custom endpoint, but at that point guess what: you’re paying for the cellular connectivity and the server to host an API on to do what you want. That’s still an additional cost beyond what you paid for the car just like the connected services fee.
Additionally the “workaround” that someone provided still uses those connected services <…>
It literally didn’t. All it used was API endpoint, which by definition is not proprietary.
“right to repair”
Right to repair is about ownership. If a company can take away features or product you paid for, you don’t own it, you rent it.