Carmakers Push Forward With Plans To Make Basic Features Subscription Services, Despite Widespread Backlash
Carmakers Push Forward With Plans To Make Basic Features Subscription Services, Despite Widespread Backlash
In a car? What exactly does the subscription enable? I probably would pay $20/mo if we're talking the difference between base model and the gee wiz model, but only if it's the "car stuff"...like I wouldn't have any real interest in shit like wifi hotspot and movie screens, but If it enables Pandora/xm, heated seats and steering wheel, collision detection, adaptive cruise... I'd be up for that. I'd probably go $5/mo on adaptive cruise alone tbh.
The real question was brought up in the article though... The question of wether that potential residual revenue is left out of the original MSRP. Are we selling all cars at base model price, and getting the value of all the options from just those who pay for them... Or, are we selling every car at "fully loaded" price, since they've all had all the work and materials put in to all potentially be a "fully loaded" vehicle...
I believe it's the latter, in which case they are, in fact, simply ripping everyone off. The non-subscribers pay for options they can't use because they won't subscribe, and the subscribers pay for those options twice.
Of course, right to repair might completely fuck the whole plan at some point. Locking out options would require locking out third party repairs, and that might make the concept untenable if it runs afoul of right to repair laws, and I'd bet at some point it will.
Basically you'll lose adaptive cruise control, remote start and a bunch of other features that cost the manufacturer literally nothing and give the end user no added benefit other than an illusion of ownership.
Why the fuck they think they can do this is absolutely horseshit. It's like Verizon wanting an extra 30 a month to use the built in already existing hotspot function on my phone. Fuck off Verizon.
That seems spendy. I pay $8.25/mo for detailed traffic data and cellular connectivity (including music and video streaming).
I'm not sure I'd pay much more for that given that I have a cell phone.
These kinds of practices are somewhat common in software, notably Oracle and Cisco have been doing this for years. You have everything embedded to make the feature work but you have to pay extra to enable it. This is fucking bonkers.
Hey, kids, math is fun.
Did you know a Stadler 4-unit FLIRT train costs $12,500,000 and has a capacity of 420 people? Let's just say that we're using a badly designed public transit system and the train only moves these same 420 people around for its lifetime and compare to how they'd do with a car. I'm not going to get into maintenance, because it would really be overkill.
So, cost per person to acquire transport:
-FLIRT: $12,500,000 / 420 people = $29,761/person
-Cars: according to KBB, the average cost of a new car in the US in 2023 is $48,008, so ~$48,008/person. That's a total of $20,163,360, if you were wondering.
The cost of car ownership is nearly double, and that figure gets much, much worse if we gave the FLIRT realistic ridership numbers. So, now let's talk about cost over service life:
Average car service life: 12 years. $48,008/person/12 years works out to $4000/year/person
Average electric train (and apparent FLIRT) service life: about 30 years, give or take. At $29,761/person/30 years, that's just $900/person/year.
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!
Those life spans weren't equal. Let's fix that. The car user ends up buying at least one more car over the train's lifespan (30/12=2.5), so let's compare apples to apples. Let's take that $4000/person/year figure and hit it with that 2.5 cars to see what it really costs. That's $4000/person/year x 30 years for $120,000, then multiply it back by 420 people for a total of $50.4 million spent just on buying cars over the train's lifespan by just enough people to fill it to capacity once. You could buy four four-car Stadler FLIRTs for that price and still have some cash for hookers and blow.
Again, the gulf between these figures gets a lot more brutal with realistic ridership figures. So, public transit is cheaper. It requires a larger up front investment, and in the US we need better urbanism to support it, but it's cheaper. Not only that, but public transit won't double dip by selling your private details to advertisers to satisfy their hungry, hungry investors. If we added the value that auto makers extract in terms of selling your data and selling subscriptions, I think these numbers would just be a fucking bloodbath, and that's before we even get into the other costs of car ownership.
Reject subscriptions, embrace train supremacy.
If purchasing is not ownership, then pirating is not theft.
I think more technically-gifted people need to look into these “subscription” systems, in order to find workarounds. Because if it comes with my car, it’s mine to do whatever the fk I want with it.
You're right and that's what should happen.
That said, these scum capitalists own their own regulatory bodies through legalized bribery. I very much believe they would use that power and succeed in getting legislation passed to make such hacks a major, felonious crime, in the interest of "public safety."
The government likes this tech too, because it comes with a built in, always on connection, which just makes it easier and easier for agencies to gather intel on... everyone.