Anyone purchasing a car lately seen any similar shenanigans like this at your local dealer? Long story, but I think it makes for an interesting read.
When I started shopping for trucks, one of my nearby dealers had the little “local dealer add-on” sticker addendum that included a couple of things: tint (a few hundred bucks), door edge guard (iirc), and a “theft recovery system for some $1500 ‘retails for $2400’)”. I never pay any attention to these things and if I offer for the car I tell them to remove or forget all that stuff.
I was curious about what the “theft recovery system” was because for the last 5 years or so all of our other work vehicles have used these little inexpensive OBD-II gps “dongles” that are dirt cheap, depending on the service you use free to < $100, with a small fee for the tracking app to know what is up with everyone without guessing. Many services out there to provide these today.
So I asked them what this “theft recovery system” was *exactly* and got a bunch of nebulous responses and dealer mumbo jumbo about their “Apex system”. I told them if it was just some $25 OBD-driven gps dongle they were trying to peddle for $1500, just unplug it and keep it. The last thing I wanted is some dealer gizmo to track me for the dealer’s unknown purpose. Uconnect services can already do that for FCA. You’d have thought I’d asked the dealer for their first born and over the course of the negotiations they finally gave it away “for free”, but didn’t remove it. I figured it would take me 30 seconds to remove it so I agreed and thought I would do the research and share what they were up to.
After I bought the truck it has rained non-stop, so I put off until a dry day to discover their “$2500 Theft Recover System”. I did feel under the dash for the OBDII port and it was not where it was supposed to be. I shot a couple of phone pics up under the dash (was dark and raining) to see what I could see – some odd stuff, and filed that away.
The day after purchasing the truck I got an email from “Apex Protect” about enrollment and a free 5-year service for their tracking service via their web site and smartphone app. It is similar to the other services we have already used but rough around the edges of the app and way off in the mileage it calculates on trips. But it does work to track the location and trips of your truck, not entirely dissimilar to the other services I’ve used. So sure enough, this was the dealer’s tracker turned product.
Doing some research on the internet shows
https://apexprotectiongps.com and their main role is services to their members (dealers) in tracking their inventory. Along with that is tracking and other info provided back to dealers after the car is sold. Boggles my mind that they would be providing tracking info dealers on cars they have sold. I am sure part of the game is that it is no cost to dealers if they can get the customers to pay for it. I think this is a creepy process the dealers are pulling behind the customers back – surprise surprise.
Searched for other dealer installed gps tracker removals and found this post by a Toyota truck owner:
http://www.toyota-4runner.org/5th-gen-t4rs/260475-finding-removing-gps-tracker.html
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It was a nice day finally today, so I removed the panel under the dash and extracted the “Apex tracker” (see photos below). It’s a dongle plugged into a OBD y-harness and it has its own lithium battery to continue to send data when the truck is off. The truck’s OBD plug was removed from the bracket in the cover and plugged into the tracker’s harness and all zip tied and velcro’d to a support member right behind where the OBD plug should have been. I removed it and put the original OBD plug back in its bracket.
Basically the same unit the Toyota owner found. The FCC ID pointed back to the manufacturer:
http://connected-holdings.com/portfolio/, and there are docs on the unit there. These folks have related companies, example as
https://www.connecteddealerservices.com/en/home/ ,
https://www.connecteddealerservices.com/en/customer-vehicle-connection/
If you dig around these web sites, my guess is that you’ll get the same impression I did in that the dealer gets inventory tracking (basically for free since he normally pushes the highly inflated cost on to the unsuspecting buyer) and then continues to get info of some kind from the provider (location? Mileage? Driving habits? They are all tracked). I think it is a(nother) sleezeball move by dealers to put this stuff on and monitor you without disclosure.
I don’t really get bent out of shape by the manufacturers getting tracking data when it is known and logically acknowledged for the most part – the Uconnect thing with FCA. I also have a 5-year old Tesla Model S and it’s widely known that the car communicates with the Tesla mothership *all the time* and gets a constant stream of enhancements, updates, and pushes buckets of operational data back to the manufacturer.
I am curious if anyone else has run into this dealership practice? Might be worth taking a phone pic or two under your dash or checking out where your OBD-II port is and what's plugged into it upstream. Especially if you bought from the dealership in Grapevine.
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