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254 comments
  • Haha.. connection to server cannot be established. Suspension resetting to default.

    This is extra hilarious in the face of the crib manufacturer that just decided to subscription paywall basic functions of their crib.. or the slow cooker... And that's just this week.

    Game manufacturers pulling the plug on games they sold removing the servers yanking the games.

    And now people think that you can buy a product that is going to last longer and costs several orders of magnitude more.. and you can only hope that the manufacturer can be bothered to:

    1. Keep the service safe and secure.
    2. Have it be reliable.
    3. Maintain it operational for the actual lifespan of the car (not some MBA's definition of economic lifespan or something).
    4. Not fuck with you on the price. (We're not shutting down the servers, but the price will be 50 a month and 5 euros per adjustment).

    But the sale case is easy.. lease car drivers. This way they can enjoy premium functions not incorporated into the sale price of the car. I hope the IRS that taxes these things sees through this ploy and taxes the vehicles for installed functions wether you pay for them or not. Saw this happen with Tesla's.. taxed based on their initial price.. and then the user added 15k of functions after a day.. and the tax was still based on the original sticker price.

  • They tried this with heated seats and no one wanted it, what made them think would we accept this?

    German car makers have become such a joke in the last decade...

  • I wish that someone sues when something breaks in the car that you didn't opt in for.

    And... yet better, they get sued when something breaks that is in connection with a paid service and someone suspects that it's because they paid part caused it.

  • If I own the car it's my hardware to use. If I don't own that suspension then someone needs to collect their property from my car.

  • If I were a BMW customer, I'd be suspending my purchase of their rip-off vehicles.

  • Now, I can "kinda" see the rationale behind optional features on a car being either enabled via software or subscription. I believe the permanent enable price should be the same as if you added the hardware to the car as an option.

    As to why this might make sense for a carmaker. In my work I've visited car manufacturers before, and from what I could see it's quite expensive and adds time to support the various options when building a car. You see they have the main production line, and units are pulled off the main line to fit the options at various points and then reinserted and this causes problems for efficiency and price per unit I think.

    So, there's probably a cost saving to making the base car have all the options fitted and having a completely standardized production line. However, the expense is likely going to mean if they sold the base car at the usual base car price they would either lose money, or at the very least, the profit margin wouldn't be worthwhile.

    However, if you know a certain percentage of people will want the options, and you can enable it with software later, it's possible building the hardware into every car as standard would work out overall cheaper. They might also be able to upsell to more people by making a subscription option, perhaps with maybe a free trial for the first say 3 months of ownership. That is, they turn everything on for 6 months for free, then revert you to the package you paid for. Hoping that you liked some of the features and will pay or subscribe to keep them.

    What I don't like is when this stuff might become ONLY available as a subscription, the overall move toward subscription models for everything irks me a lot. I'd much prefer we still get to choose a package, and have the ability to upgrade later.

    So I think my point is, the argument "the hardware is there anyway" doesn't really work, because they are likely going to install the hardware at a loss, on the assumption (backed up by their own numbers) they will sell enough to make a bigger profit overall.

    They also likely bake into the numbers that a very small number of people will hack the car and enable the features anyway. The vast majority will not do this, though.

254 comments