Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop

I think in this particular scenario it's shortsightedness. They see this an instant increase in revenue without considering that longer term this will destroy their ever dwindling market share.

I have no idea if this is the case here, but one possibility is deliberate coorporate sabotage. Like planting "bad people" on the board or in key positions.

Either by competition or by hedge funds that want to short it into the ground ("cellar boxing").

Just incompetency is another option of course.

I don’t know enough about cars or the Jeep brand, but a common answer to this in the general case is market segmentation. If a company constantly makes decisions that make their product worse for you, you’re probably not the target market.

Perhaps in this case it means Jeep can sell their cars at a lower price. Perhaps Jeep is already perceived as a budget conscious brand. The market segment they’re targeting may care about that.

Kindle does this with their ads. They are targeting a consumer with ~$50 of disposable income to spend on an ebook reader, who would rather pay that little and have ads. I’ll never buy a Kindle because not only do I not want ads on the screen, but they have also neglected their high end device which is the segment of the market where I’m at.

Jeep was bought by Stellantis, so I'm giving Jeep the benefit of the doubt. I imagine this terrible, horrible, no good idea, was their idea. The people with the money rarely come up with the good ideas.

Pure speculation: Maybe this is an attempt of 'outrage marketing'?

Every company I've ever been at I've always worked side by side with people from good universities/pedigree. You'd be shocked at how stupid some people are. In fact, it caused a lot of imposter syndrome in me, like ... how did they make it that far? Are they a fraud? Am I? What is happening here.

I've lost respect for entire institutions, no joke. You literally will not believe some of the people they created.

And also implies an always on connection to the mothership that can push arbitrary content to the infotainment system (which we can be sure is totally airgapped from the CAN bus right? right?)

https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...

From the article.

> “This was an in-vehicle message designed to inform Jeep customers about Mopar extended vehicle care options. A temporary software glitch affected the ability to instantly opt out in a few isolated cases, though instant opt-out is the standard for all our in-vehicle messages. Our team had already identified and corrected the error, and we are following up directly with the customer to ensure the matter is fully resolved.”

So everyone can put down the pitchforks now, unless you are assuming deliberate malfeasance.

Aka the "Skip for now"/"Remind me later" button.

I suppose the "Fuck off forever" action is to crash the car through the window of the dealership...

What if you don't connect your car to the internet in the first place?

If their server forgets the saved settings during routine maintenance i.e. once a month.

This and the reports of build-in options that are software disabled; this is such a dystopian society.

Holy shit, you will have to pay me a lot of money to accept this in my car.

Why limit your reach to your car only, it's much better to project the ad directly on the road either with a dlp projector, or a laser + galvanometer.

In fact if you are already scanning the environment with a galvanometer for things like obstacle detection then you only need to point an extra laser to the rotating mirror and synchronise it. So for an extra buck for the laser pointer, you could have something like this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmRfDEhTeYg

I am in the vehicle glazing/ automotive electronics industry. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't switch to making child-sized sewing machines, toy-shaped landmines or fentanyl-laced sweets. It would be morally less damning than what is made in that industry.

And what if you don't need to drive?

We could have transport funded by advertising - think of the captive ( quite literally ) market, and the ability to have full surround advertising for the whole of the journey.

The future is bright.

This won't be a joke when the car is on L4 automation.

This sticker is dangerous and inconvenient, but I do love Fig Newtons.

And loud un-mutable audio, in case of bad hearing or unattention

but the driver might be distracted by .... the real world, you know

OTOH cars do have very good speakers and their ears are not needed much for the road

Most cars also have speakers these days. Some are even HiFi!

Huge, huge opportunity for reaching people about your products.

"Take the number of vehicles in the field, (A), and multiply it by the probable rate of failure, (B), then multiply the result by the average out-of- court settlement, (C). A times B times C equals X...If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."

I read somewhere that today the internet is a few walled gardens each full of screenshots of text from the other walled gardens.

Is Jeep's reputation the same in Europe?

I've been thinking of making a "sentiment database" for car brands where users share their personal, subjective view of a car make/model. I'm sure something like this probably already exists.

It won't take long for all of the the other brands to follow suit. Hopefully jeep patented the idea.

Jeep is a solid car, now it seems it's just being mismanaged badly.

CR called Jeep the worst car brand in America.

Friends don't let friends drive Jeeps.

Presumably the ad will be a reminder to perhaps buy another Jeep.

> Is this a criminal safety investigation matter now, or...

Not to try to start a political flame situation, but I genuinely think the next 4 years will see a lot of "innovation" and business experiments in the automobile space. Elon certainly won't leave NHSTA alone, when he can instead get his way to clear the path for new Tesla opportunities.

No way that any sort of criminal investigation occurs over something like this. Tesla would love to be able to have extra flexibility on their giant screens.

(Also, it seems very unlikely someone would die due to lack of navigation, but being too distracting due to a glitch seems more likely.)

If lack of navigation led to criminal investigations basically every car manufacturer would already be gone. They are completely unreliable already without this change.

There already is a safety issue right now, as this will make drivers ride away and only then enter their destination into their GPS system. So, it will distract them from paying attention to the road.

In some juridictions I could see it as illegal. For instance in the UK you can't use your smartphone when stopped at a traffic light, you need to park and stop the engine.

kinda like that bad landlord map webapp that ppl in nyc setup

Honestly feels like the definition of `user` is being stretched here..