Nothing quite says “high-performance muscle car” like a popup ad for a Mopar Extended Warranty covering your whole center console.

This garbage feature was spotted in the wild, where a Charger owner posted a photo of their infotainment screen absolutely hijacked by an ad for an extended warranty. Take a look!

  • dmtalon@infosec.pub
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    18 hours ago

    What would be fun is to go test drive one, and when the ad pops up, snap a picture and go back and ask the salesman what its about.

    Then go, oh… Well that’s a deal breaker and walk out. Get enough people to do that, and not buy a car with pop up ads and it’ll go away.

    • Otter@lemmy.ca
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      16 hours ago

      I think it would be better to just ask them directly, and make them admit how the system works. Otherwise, as the other comment suggested, they’ll just delay the ads or have a special ‘demo’ mode

    • Beacon@fedia.io
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      16 hours ago

      I wonder if there’s a mileage/date threshold that has to be reached before the ads start happening. That way they can demo the car in test drives without the ads being shown. And it would probably be legal because they could claim that they don’t need to show ads for a warranty package until you’re getting close to the first recommended maintenance mileage/date

      • KayLeadfoot@fedia.ioOP
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        15 hours ago

        I’d bet dollars to donuts it’s the free trial for SiriusXM.

        When this happened on Jeep vehicles, an apparent Stellantis employee responded on a thread about it. Here’s what they said:

        “Thank you for tagging us and we are certainly sorry to hear of the frustration this has caused you. At this time, we advise that customers click the large [X] in the corner to close out and clear stored notifications from the vehicle. It should also be noted that ads are part of your contractual agreement with Sirius XM, but we are working on the frequency. Thank you for your patience.”

        Lol, they still haven’t “worked on” the frequency 534 days later.

          • KayLeadfoot@fedia.ioOP
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            14 hours ago

            Yeah, so… Let’s follow the money, right? This is how I make sense of basically everything in life.

            Stellantis gets paid by SiriusXM for every unit they ship with this crap pre-installed. SiriusXM gets paid by either themselves, when they advertise SiriusXM membership to drivers, or they get paid by advertisers. The Mopar Extended Warranty, I bet Mopar is paying for the ad placements.

    • KayLeadfoot@fedia.ioOP
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      18 hours ago

      The market is already doing that for you - year over year sales for Dodge down 29% in 2024.

      If the early fan reaction to the electric Scatpack are any indication, people won’t be lining up to buy it, so expect more of the same.