Stellantis Is Spamming Owners' Screens with Pop-Up Ads for New Car Discounts

For those unfamiliar and confused, Stellantis is the mega corporation formed from the merge of Chrysler and Fiat that owns Jeep, Dodge, Peugeot, Opel, and many other brands.

I had already scratched Jeep off my car-buying list years ago.

Now the bulk of car-buying research is not "how good is it?" but "what are the purposefully in-built annoyances? Can I hack them away?"

Stellantis makes some of the most unreliable vehicles in the world and charges a small fortune for them. I predicted they'd be out of business a year ago but apparently somebody keeps buying them.

I remember many years ago thinking, "if they can have a add a SIM card on a phone, why not add one in your car? Imagine an Internet connected car?"

What I didn't think about was this would be an opportunity for ads and subscriptions. And everyday you'll own less and less of your car. I'm shopping for a car right now, I may have to just put a fresh coat of paint on my old one.

> To opt out, call 1-800-777-3600

You call the number, maybe let it ring one time, and hang up. You did your part to opt out.

Then you sue them.

Just when you think Stellantis couldn't do anything worse...

This is the company that ran Chrysler into the ground. The only remaining Chrysler product is one mini-van.

They raised the prices on Jeeps so much that they lost their market. They went the "mild hybrid" route, with such silly things as 21 miles of electric range.

The Stellantis dealers signed a joint letter demanding that the CEO be fired. That was done. It didn't seem to help.

(I own a pre-Stellantis Jeep Wrangler, and would like to buy a replacement, but Jeep now has nothing I want.)

“Ok", "Remind me later", "To opt-out, call..."

The jokes write themselves in 2025

it'd be cool if we had a more consumer-friendly admin who would ban advertising on long-term purchases like washing machines, fridges, cars or require you the seller to tell you about how the advertising works on said things (ad types, whether they are child friendly, frequency, and upfront option to permanently opt out)

Getting a pop-up like this would be a sure way to get me to never buy your brand again.

Trying to estimate whether I'm old enough that when I buy the last car of my life, there will still be ones without screens to choose from.

This kind of behavior should re-open the return window for the car.

It's an interesting phenomenon. Something like this happens every week or two, and then these threads basically just become cope, with vague advice that most people can't easily do ("oh, just desolder the eSim contacts, it'll be fine"), as though that is in any way a longterm solution to corporate overreach in our daily lives.

What if we all decided to actually work together to fix this terrible situation? Unfortunately, it will involve collective action, and holding companies accountable who are otherwise very averse to that sort of thing. But dear God, we can't keep "why don't you just"-ing forver as the world closes in around us, people.

If we want a better world, we are going to have to build a better world.

Pro tip: if you buy the new car, the ad goes away for a year ;)

Is this also the brand that tracks your driving data and sells it to insurance companies?

So, what happens if you accidentally drill through your car's LTE modem while doing an oil change?

Never buy any product from any company who does this.

There is a time to put your foot down and that time is now.

I never owned a car with such a system. Do they at least give you a way to install uBlock and NoScript or will that brick the car?

Any screen is just an advertising delivery system.

Relevant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g

Imagine you will buy a house and somebody will have so much gall to slap a billboard on the side of your house. Repeatedly. Would you tolerate this behavior? Obviously not, then why companies thinks that it is OK to show ads on my fridge or in my car? This is outrageous behavior and I hope that some nasty regulation will end this nonsense so we can hear crying of companies how big government is bullying them and hampering innovation...

The last (hopefully only) Stellantis vehicle we owned had trouble with its transmission’s network connection.

“Nothing stops a Ram, except routine driving”.

I’m completely unsurprised they’re pushing spam to the dashboard.

The crazy thing is BMW has been doing this well for years. They should have just copied the playbook. There’s a little shop icon in the app where you can buy digital services, swag and schedule dealership appointments.

Sometimes it has discounts or track day invitations in there.

Looks like Stellantis is on my no buy list now, along with Samsung, Microsoft and Tesla.

I bough a new Honda and Mazda within the last year and neither have any of this kind of nonsense. Both are great. I hope people vote with their wallets. I would never have considered anything from Stellantis anyway.

Here is an idea for a project - open source street legal EV car platform.

1. Locate cellular modem.

2. Disable it.

Nope.

Saw this in my car this morning myself. I only noticed it as I was getting out and right before turning it off.

And isn't this just weeks after a bad software update bricked a bunch of Wrangler 4XEs?

... Oh, and isn't this the same Stellantis that now requires a fuck-ton of hoops to access your own diagnostics now because of their "secure gateway"? (https://autel.us/security-gateways/)

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