It's not like they have a reliable product so you're better off buying a Japanese car anyhow.
Somebody will hack it and charge $50 a car...............
Heated seats have serious drawbacks for some.
Why not just rent cars instead of selling them? Oh, right, we do that already.
IBM pioneered it with mainframes. Pay the minimum and get an artificially constrained computer. Pay up and get its full capabilities.
It is the alure of ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) driving this. A predictable stream of income is sometimes more attractive even than profit, at least from an accounting standpoint.
Exactly, well said. And like how many people need or even notice a difference in an extra 27 horsepower. Like GM offering 3 different V6 engines with a total horsepower range difference of 30 HP. People are gullible.
“...for a monthly subscription fee” I exactly what Microsoft Office 365 is doing. Ditto with some other software companies are trying. Long term it will serve to piss off customers.
I suspect car companies which do not hinder the cars performance will do better in the marketplace.
I actually like it. You can try it out for a cheap monthly price, and if you like it pay the life-time fee of $877. It’d be analogous to trying the powerful 8-cyl gas car cheaply for a month before paying $877 extra for it vs the cheaper 6-cyl.
and they wonder why some people cheer when executives from Blackrock or United Healthcare are shot.
The Babylon Bee should do a story on this.
Volkswagen:
Pay a monthly fee or your trunk will no longer open.
Pay a monthly fee or you won’t be able to make right turns.
Come on, Bee. Get on this.
🐝
Good grief!
European style customer service.
The Japanese would never think to do such a thing.
the id.3 doesn’t even have an engine does it? I thought they were full electric
I have my doubts unless the "official" measurement method never tops out either car's power usage or the lower powered car's milage is artificially reduced. If you use more power, your battery life goes down.
We are deep into the new economic model. Owning nothing, being happy.
Serfs were not property, but they were tied to the land, which was owned by a lord. The serf had to work the land for the lord because there was no other option.
Slaves were property. They did the work they were told to do, they could be sold to distant places, families could be broken up.
Free people work where they want to, earn their own money, and can purchase “stuff” which is their own property.
Now you can’t really own much of anything. I’m not sure I see the benefit of working and striving. Technofeudalism. It’s no fun being a serf or a wage slave.
The service center at most dealerships is the biggest high profit subscription service in history.
This is what I hate about anything software related: you don’t own it, you “license” it. You check a box that says you agree. If people stop agreeing, the practice will end. You have to be willing to say no.
Unfortunately there are a whole bunch of stupid people out there who will pay it. Then it will spread and become an industry standard with all makers.
I’ll ride a Mule first...
Yep, The German cars have declined significantly in quality, as has their country and their leadership. It will only get worse.
I work at a (small) automotive OEM. I do see another side to this.
The engineering for ‘options’ can be very expensive, all the additional tooling, engineering of two versions, testing & validation, diagnostics, etc. - it can be millions in overhead, above and beyond the cost of the resulting parts that go into a car.
Therefore, it might be cheaper to just make one high-end version, with all options, but enable certain things in software on demand. If you chose not to buy the software enabled features, even though they exist in hardware in your car, you have not paid for all the additional engineering for those features - enabling the OEM to sell the same vehicle at different price points to a larger segment of potential customers. Customers may still choose to purchase features after the sale of the car, if they realize they should have purchased an option to begin with.
It’s not intuitive. You feel like you’ve paid for the feature - but you really haven’t. You got the HW for free(ish) - you actually pay for it when it’s enabled. As a consumer, I don’t like it, but I understand the economic reasoning.
If the engine development costs were extremely high (which they usually are), having different performance options, controlled through software, allows you to spread the cost of development across more customers because of the price spread. If a customer wants more power, they only have to upgrade via a software purchase. It’s about lowering engineering costs, when everyone isn’t paying for all the hardware features in terms of the engineering behind them.