Back in late February Nissan Leaf owners began to receive messages from Nissan informing them that the remote features in their cars would cease operation as the NissanConnect app would drop support for Leaf EVs produced before 2020 as well as eNV200 vehicles that were produced until 2022. The indicated cut-off date was March 30, giving affected users about a month to come to terms with the fact that their vehicle would soon to losing any and all remote control features. What this highlights is an increasingly pertinent question when it comes to ‘connected cars’, which feature a built-in wireless modem to provide a range of additional features. These require access to a remote server for even simple remote features like controlling the charging process or turning on the heating. This has left many Leaf users rather dissatisfied. While for such basic remote features you could make the argument that they’re just silly convenience features that do not affect the car’s functionality, modern cars are increasingly becoming reliant on such remote features, including for things like navigation and checking subscriptions for features like heated seats. Increasingly it would seem that we’re looking at the Car-as-a-Service (CaaS) model being implemented. The cloud giveth and the cloud taketh away. Cursed be the cloud. The real question is, why do they do this? Are the server hosting costs really such a massive financial burden? Could they not have a workstation pc in a closet somewhere handling all the requests? Surely they can’t be too processing or bandwidth heavy? Did they not account for this in the selling price of the car? If Lewis Rossman’s video is correct then the actual reason is security, or lack of. In that anybody can go to a URL, plug in a VIN (publicly available in many countries)