A Kia authorised dealer being able to look up any Kia has some very useful benefits (for the dealer, and thus Kia).
If a customer has moved into the area and you’re now their local dealer they’re more likely to come to you for any problems, including ones involving remote connectivity problems. Being able to see the state of the car on Kia’s systems is important for that.
Is this a tradeoff? Absolutely. Can you make the argument the trade off isn’t worth it? Absolutely. But I don’t think it’s an unfathomably unreasonable decision to have their dealers able to help customers, even if that customer didn’t purchase the car from that dealer.
The site explicitly says they tried to get Oracle to release the trademark before, and that this is their final attempt at doing so before filing wigh the USPTO.
And that exact anecdote is contained in the article.
> In fact, the smartphone comparison is not quite right. “The Voyager computers have less memory than the key fob that opens your car door,” Spilker says.
Given it existed for 5 days and you’re only now finding out about it, it sounds to me like it was perhaps a bug that was fixed without realising the full impact of it, or perhaps without realising it made it to production; and only an audit that happened later caught it.
Not ideal by any means. I’d be curious to know if my theory is correct or not.
In that case I guess that the images in the article aren't the 'never before seen' (in 2011) ones that are meant to have been included in the publicised book.
Interestingly in the UK, Nintendo _explicitly_ label it as a USB-C port. I'm not sure if they do or not elsewhere, but they definitely claim it's a USB-C port 'for AC charging' over here.
If a customer has moved into the area and you’re now their local dealer they’re more likely to come to you for any problems, including ones involving remote connectivity problems. Being able to see the state of the car on Kia’s systems is important for that.
Is this a tradeoff? Absolutely. Can you make the argument the trade off isn’t worth it? Absolutely. But I don’t think it’s an unfathomably unreasonable decision to have their dealers able to help customers, even if that customer didn’t purchase the car from that dealer.