Yeah there's a SIM card in most new cars, usually in a place that's not easily accessible.
on my car it was free for three years
At least it sounds like they told you this. They probably aligned it with the most common lease period. Mazda just suddenly decided to make it a subscription.
Ideally it should be longer, like 8-10 years.
There's socially responsible ETFs that track stock indexes but exclude companies like oil and gas companies. The return isn't as high, but at least you're not giving money to Big Oil.
I acknowledge the cell connectivity in the car costs Mazda money to keep running
They should factor it into the price of the car. Maybe not a lifetime license, but some decent amount of time with a reasonable price to renew it for a few more years.
Why should that use the internet though? There's low-power wireless communication technologies like Wifi HaLow that have a range of around 1km (0.6 miles), which would be totally fine for this use case. No internet needed.
Remote start is a fine feature. It just shouldn't need internet access.
I'm pretty sure the EU rejected this. Facebook tried the exact same thing except the paid version has no ads at all (so either you get tracked, or you pay for an ad-free untracked experience) and the EU's initial findings were that it wasn't compliant because every user should have the freedom to opt out of tracking without having to pay. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/european-union-says-meta-breaking-digital-rules-with-paid-ad-free-option-for-facebook-and-instagram
Having said that, Brexit happened so I don't know if the UK still follows the same laws.
My other guess was that they've hard-coded an IP address in their firmware and they've already sold off the IP range.
Or they fired all the technical staff and no longer have anyone left that "does the computers" (as my parents say about my job as a software engineer)
like USB 3.2 Gen 2x2
Did you see that the newest version is called USB 4 2.0? lol
I suspect we'll end up seeing a hard fork that's entirely community-driven rather than owned by a company. It's happened before - for example, Libreoffice was forked from OpenOffice .org when Sun Microsystems owned it.
Very well written article, and a great methodology for collecting and analyzing the data. Maybe journalism isn't completely dead yet.
HaLow is sub-1Ghz so it goes through walls pretty well. Not sure about cost or how widespread it is yet.