It's starting to get out of hand. I purchased a Toyota last year and magically get updates and phone calls about scheduling maintenance. This means the car is sending data to the mothership without anyone realizing it. They have all your driving habits and likely share it with however they want. You can't stop it and most people don't realize it is even happening.

I've received these as well, but it's always been "Hey, it's been 6 months since your last oil change with us -- come on in!"

I could very easily see if you go to the same mechanic and they input your mileage between visits and a system having a reasonable chance of getting scheduled maintenance correct based upon time or average mileage.

I've never heard of a company pulling data from a car OTA to do this type of work. (some car insurance companies are a different story though)

Many high-end cars have embedded cellular connections, in 2015 Miller and Valasek managed to crack into Jeep's, jump the airgap and take control of the car over the OTA reporting connection: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...

No idea if that's the case with Toyota, but it's definitely possible with some high-end cars (most definitely including Teslas which routinely report to the mothership) (incidentally it's fun seeing people drool over teslas then freak out at Firefox or MS telemetry)

Amusingly, the air-gap was a firewall on a chip. No air whatsoever. They got around it a few ways, including most effectively, by re-flashing it to just be a passthrough.

Based on that, I'd say anyone who is injured because of this in any way has a great claim against the company for lying about the equipment they provided.

I'm receiving the communication about 2-3 months ahead of that schedule due to the excess mileage I'm driving. At about 6k miles, my tire sensor was going on and off for a few days, then I received an email specifically to come in to check the tire pressure. It may have be coincidence, but it's highly unlikely at this point.

> You can't stop it and most people don't realize it is even happening.

Yet the media will probably spin this as "people just don't care," as they usually do with privacy issues. It's very much an awareness and education issue.

> I purchased a Toyota last year and magically get updates and phone calls about scheduling maintenance. This means the car is sending data to the mothership without anyone realizing it.

No, it doesn't, at least not necessarily.

I also bought a Toyota last year. They called on a regular timed schedule that had nothing to do with my actual usage pattern. We got a call to come in for our 5,000 mile service when we'd just completed the 10,000 mile service.

It may be a feature of the higher-end models, but it's definitely not something the 2015/2016 Corollas seem to do.

>I purchased a Toyota last year and magically get updates and phone calls about scheduling maintenance.

I bet if you were willing to waive the warranty they'd stop calling you. But, being as how the warranty on cars is now 5+ years, and that the maintenance variance among owners is high, I don't see this as a bad thing.

Granted, it's not happening to me (yet), so I might complain too.

I'd rather have that and know when I need to bring my car in for service than go without and accidentally go thousands of miles beyond the service date