> BMW currently requires car owners in some countries to pay roughly $12 per month to access a safety feature called “High Beam Assistant,” which automatically turns off a car’s high beam lights when it senses another car to avoid blinding other drivers at night.
> “Safety should come standard,” Wallace said of adaptive headlights. “Some automakers might think that those are simply a convenience feature, but there’s a demonstrated safety benefit.”
Comfort is a safety feature as well. You need to be awake and able to focus on the road.
Saab had a funny one for this - there were 3 vents in the front of your dashboard, but one always blew cold air no matter what, so that in the winter, you could point it on your face. Heat cranked and no warm fatigue... a beautiful thing.
Saab also had the "night panel" feature where when night driving you could turn down the non-essential dash/cluster lights to avoid vision fatigue. I miss cars like that.
Confusing scenarios like you mentioned are why highway code rule 110 says you should only flash your headlights to let drivers know you are there, not to convey a message, and rule 111 says never assume flashing headlights is a signal inviting you to proceed.
Obviously, it's not your fault that someone else interpreted the headlight as an invitation to pull out. And indeed, it's probably one of the most widely ignored rules in the highway code. Nevertheless... it's still the other driver's fault. I've personally had it where other drivers think I've flashed them out, but I had actually just gone over a bump in the road.
(I'm assuming you're British because you say junction.)
Interesting, do you mind sharing what makes you've experienced it with? My new '22 Subaru is my first experience, and if anything, they are off way more than I would like.
It is a safety feature for the people in other cars being subjected to high beams.
As an aside, one option I like to use to get people behind me to turn down their high beams is to orient the side view mirror so the high beam goes back to them.
I get how high beams work, and hate how some people don't turn them down.
That said, I still think it's a convenience feature because turning down your brights is something that everyone is already capable of doing and legally obliged to do.
Very similar to assisted driving features that control tailgating. Should every car with assisted driving capability have to enable it?
My 2022 Nissan Versa has that "high beam auto-dim" feature as standard. I love it - as a conscientious driver I'd always manually dim, but it's a PITA on a curvy road with little forwards visibility where you are dimming/undimming a lot - nice to have it auto.
Incidentally - the 2022 Versa so far seems to be a great car. Lots of software features that might be considered "luxury" come as standard.
The smarter cars get, the worse they are for consumer rights and Privacy.
Unfortunately its a general trend, everything that is getting "smartified" is becoming an anti consumer black box, and If you care about your privacy or owning the device you bought, you are out of luck.
It happened with TVs, and now its coming for cars too, there might be options now but they won't last long, is there a dumb TV in your local supermarket? No, and there is no privacy respecting TV either.
I dont hate smart things, I wish I can enjoy all the new convenient tech without being spied on and my private life getting sold to the highest bidder.
I want a smart home, a smart car, a smart TV, a smart vacuum.
But until they stop being spyware, there is no option other than just not buying, or hacking it to stop spying.
The only way to stop this is with regulation, because every other monetary incentive, will continue to push everything towards the same goal, spyware and spying on your every move.
Surveillance capitalism, transhumanism, AI government, tech overlords.
People have no guts or comprehension to revolt.
We are an easy target for the combination of psychology and technology hacks which is “bestowed” upon us. For some time ahead, there will be a temporary mitigation route.
But in general, we all have fallen to our internal strive for comfort and convenience. Eventually, with high energy prices and scarce resources, we all be renting everything. So you will own nothing.
I think they’re also a bit blind towards what potential market they’re losing, even if it’s just step by step.
My peer group would probably have been a great target 10 years ago. Now I hardly know anyone at my level with a car, and if, it’s an old one or cheaper brand. I think this is a luxury product in decline, other options just keep getting better. If I like to pay a lot, I’ll just Uber everywhere. Public transport is becoming less shitty (eg with contactless payments in a lot of places, and google maps to find the routes), cycling is safer (and showers in offices) etc. Why deal with this nonsense, and insurance and fines and parking and repairs?
I think they’re looking at these revenue streams as a way to save themselves because it might increase revenue per customer, without seeing that it might actually reduce their market share even further.
This sounds right for someone that lives in a city and doesn't have kids. If you have a family then the options you laid out above don't work very well and if you live in the suburbs then constant uber/biking/public transport are not long term options.
I have a family in a city. Judging by the cars around here, I’d say this is more likely to be BMWs market than most of the countryside. And I also think I would have had a car 10 years ago, now it’s just not anything I’d really consider without massive amounts of persuasion.
> If you have a family then the options you laid out above don't work very well
Genuine question: Why is it that whenever someone on a forum mentions the phrase "public transit", inevitably someone comes along under ten minutes later to tell them how they're obviously wrong?
I am in my 50s. My wife and I have raised children in a city. Many years ago, before transit got much better, we hauled them up into the high-stair buses and strapped their strollers into wheelchair spaces. Trips to the mountains were an annual affair, at best, on poorly-documented shuttle buses. These days, my kids routinely go hiking in the Gorge or out to the Peninsula on nothing but a transit card and a day pack.
My children are now adults and none of them have learned to drive nor have any interest in doing so. Almost our entire friends group is the same, even through the pandemic. The most common reason to be an exception and having been required to learn how to drive is because they got priced out of where they live.
Perhaps it is time for the auto-responders to transit posts to adjust to a wider view of society?
The tube in London isn’t really even suitable for suitcases, let alone push chairs. Nor is the New York subway. Anyone that puts stairs in a transit hub needs to have a good long think about what they’ve done.
Perhaps Hong Kong, Seoul or Tokyo I could see this being the case though.
I'm not sure why the swift backlash - you lived in a city. As I wrote "This sounds right for someone that lives in a city AND doesn't have kids." At the very least, that's an important "AND"
Your experience with this will vary hugely with where you are.
If I live in London, then almost everyone I see regularly will be living car-free. If I live in Weasenham in Norfolk, probably far fewer of my friends and neighbours will have a car-free lifestyle.
They'll regulatory capture that industry out of existence before it ever gets off the ground and you (you HN readers, not you personally) will vote for the politicians that will do it after telling you it's to prevent odometer fraud or dodging safety/emissions inspections. Maybe they'll even frame it as something those filthy poors who should be taking the bus anyway are doing that needs to be reigned in.
I kind of hope that said cottage industry won't spring up, because then more of these products will be sold than if people just start paying attention to their purchased and avoiding these anti-features entirely.
Hacking these features to work is treating the symptom, not the disease.
If EVERY manufacturer makes a smart TV, then there are no longer dumb TVs. It is collusion of a sort, not a monopoly. One could argue: just don't buy a TV, but there is some weird kind of inertia behind the purchasing of a TV that is immune to that claim. It is not essential to own one, but it shouldn't have to be a surveillance device. I expect the EU to address this long before the USA does, as the latter seems to be struggling with its politics doing even basic things for its people.
Providing just enough aid to sustain a resource-draining proxy war against one of the US's geopolitical rivals while Europe pays for it in trade, food, and energy prices is an interesting take on "keeping Europe safe".
Setting aside the morality of the war, (Russia is clearly in the wrong) the current state of affairs in Europe is much better for the US's geopolitical interests than it is for the EU's.
TVs became cheaper thanks to smartification, because networks pay for the privilege of having built-in support, and it more than compensates for the small increase in material cost.
The reason we don't have dumb TVs anymore is that very few people want to pay more for less.
About privacy, regulation is an option, but you have to realize that it goes against the will of most customers. The market has told us that people are ready to sell their private life to the highest bidder. We are often saying that it is greedy companies that do that, but in reality, by prioritizing price and features over privacy, that's our choice. There are companies that target the privacy market, and they have their niche.
Now, it is wouldn't be the only incidence of regulations that go against what consumers want because of higher goals. For example, people typically don't care about the environment, but it is important, that's why there are regulations in place to force consumers to pay for "greener" things. Same thing for safety, people don't always want to pay for safety (but they still complain later when an accident happen...), so they regulate it. And drugs, people like drugs, but since it is considered bad for them, these are regulated. Should we protect people privacy against themselves? Maybe, there are arguments for and arguments against, culturally, the US would be more likely say "no" and Europe would be more likely to say "yes", I don't really have an opinion.
As somebody who wants a world with more buses, cycling, and walking, I welcome the car companies declaring war on their own users.
Maybe it feels like there is no hope but to pay auto companies to abuse you, but there are alternatives, and we can all help try to build the world we want to live in.
They can try, but customers might rebel and safety or standards agencies might get involved. I would think this bs will drive people towards leasing cars, which is also logical in case the 2030-2035 no more ICE comes to pass. Is this what the vendors really want?
Or the hackers will have a field day, and any vendor that breaks ranks should do quite handsomely.
Get that Monthly Recurring Revenue BAYBEEE. If you have MRR, you're a tech company, not a dirty smelly thing manufacturer, and Wall Street might love you.
It's kind of funny that the article says
> "But it’s not just BMW: industry watchers and consumer advocates warn that the nickel-and-diming threatens to become standard as automakers chase a recurring revenue model pioneered by Elon Musk’s Tesla."
GM launched OnStar and Satellite Radio years before Elon bought into Tesla.
Disclosure: I work for GM and I am representing solely my own point of view.
With Tesla, the recurring revenue model makes sense. You get features that can consume considerable bandwidth and mobile data, things that can have considerable cost to Tesla. People usually cite the music streaming and satellite maps, but you also get Netflix, YouTube, and a dozen other video streaming services.
I don't use those video streaming services often in my car (usually just when waiting for a table at a restaurant), but I'm sure there's a long tail of people that spend a lot of time Supercharging and will watch hours of content every month and consume tens or even hundreds of GB of mobile data.
Yes, I think it is vital to understand which subscriptions people are willing to pay for.
People are most willing to pay for things where they understand that there is an underlying cost to providing the service, and where they derive value from updates or ongoing service. The service should also be provided at a competitive price - for example you cannot charge for navigation in most cases because people can use free nav services (Google Maps etc)
> General Motors has told investors it aims to generate up to $25 billion in software and services subscription revenue annually by 2030 — up from an estimated $2 billion in 2021. Stellantis, formerly known as Fiat Chrysler, is shooting for $23 billion by 2030.
If they made $2B and are shooting for $25B, this practice will only escalate.
It's like a hostage situation. They are choosing the worst way of making 23 billion. They could instead do real innovation and just tack a grand onto the price. People will still buy new cars.
GM is definitely escalating. They are requiring the "optional" OnStar on all models of some of their brands, and some models of other brands. $1500 up front, covering a 3 year subscription. Not part of "MSRP" but it's not optional either.
Now OnStar isn't a necessary set of features. And it certainly should remain optional. But if demand is high enough, consumers will buy from them anyway and they'll continue to escalate as much as they can.
There is nothing hidden here. It’s well known and studied that the less competitive a market is, the better at extracting consumer surplus sellers get. That’s why unregulated markets always converge towards monopolistic/oligopolistic configurations.
The issue for corporations is that like consolidation, competition law enforcement also acts like a pendulum. Right now, we are at a point of low enforcement with high consolidation. As electors get tired of being fleeced, they will start to complain and you should see enforcement increase.
As long as competition remains real I think there will always be a manufacturer or model that gives you close to what you want.
Mazda for example has stuck with physical controls and hasn't been making any noises about pushing a bunch of things behind a subscription. There is a subscription for remote start and some useless notifications, but at the moment it's nothing to worry about.
I don't think they can afford to do annoying things given their market share.
They are great cars and it's my preferred brand for sedans, hatchbacks, and SUVs with entry level luxury.
Yes but who regulates the regulators? Google "regulatory capture". Democracies have a poor track record of controlling regulators who make subjective decisions.
There is a solution though: regulate size. It's objectively measurable. The Mazda example that GP gives is legit, but it's on the knife's edge of disappearing -- one more wave of consolidation and it will be gone. But of course regulating bigness is a very pre-2007 solution. In the modern world it's all about ever-increasing bigness. Because everybody loves zombie megacorps living off of an IV drip of cheap debt.
You'd think that, but if citizens were capable of regulating anything, then they'd just directly avoid buying products with anti-features.
My average friend and family member is both well-educated and gives almost 0 effort to either (a) looking at what government regulators are doing or (b) researching their big purchases ahead of time.
I would love it if I could count on my government to look beyond its own self interests here. But I can't. And I don't see this changing without some kind of harm impacting politicians at scale. It's sad that I have to hope for harm to come to my lawmakers but I don't see another way forward.
I hope you're right, but the TV market gives me pause. There's plenty of competition, but all the major brands include advertising and spyware in their TVs.
Because most people don't think "is there spyware or adware on this smart TV" before they choose to buy one. In fact most people don't even really think a lot before buying a TV. This is the kind of thing that indeed regulation could be awesome, even though from a purely financial/objective point of view removing all of this would be kind of bad, I think it would be in the best interest of humanity.
Here's the problem: the same problem that caused consumers to not care about smart TV antifeatures in the first case (apathy) also causes them to not care about what their representatives are doing.
Because of this, any "regulation" that will actually happen is regulatory capture and/or performative regulation (there's probably a better term for this, but the idea is "regulation that looks good but doesn't actually do anything), because the citizens don't pay attention to these things, contact their representatives, or vote based on these issues, which is a necessary prerequisite for good regulation.
Serious and not serious at the same time. My point is that demand is what drives change in a free market, people chose phones without a headphone jack, expandable storage and replaceable batteries so companies chose to sell what consumers wanted, if the demand for these things were so large then more companies would be producing devices with those. Also remember sometimes what people say is not really what they believe or how they act. I know being a techie it's kind of hard to have perspective on it, but as far as I see most people don't give a flying ** about these things, even though I do heavily agree that they should :)
'Consumers' consume whatever is given, it seems. With the exception of the phys kb, each of those omissions lead directly to more control & revenue for the producer(s). Cheaper to build, as well. People did not "choose" to pay more for less, they take what is offered. When all/most manu's collude, it's not really a free marketplace, IMO.
If their competition is able to lower their prices at point of sale due to increased subscription revenue, it's going to hurt Mazda's sales. If the subscription model is successful, I expect Mazda an other auto-makers to follow through.
Huge Mazda fan here but I think this may be coming down the line for them as well because they are becoming more reliant on Toyota as they cannot afford to do an independent transition to EVs. As a result they have partnered with Toyota sharing ICE engine designs, cross shipping models(Toyota Yaris being a re-badged Mazda 2) and moving together (at a snails pace) towards a unified EV architecture. If Mazda starts sharing more components (like infotainment or designs for value added features like heated seats) then a subscription model might be coming there as well.
I have a 2021 Subaru that can only remote start via the App that requires a subscription to their "STARLINK Safety and Security" service. It comes with 3 free years, however its $99 a year after that.
Not as egregious as other companies as I can get a factory remote starter installed. It appears that dealers deliberately order vehicles without the remote starter in order to push subscriptions.
With Subaru, you can also buy additional years for cheaper when purchasing the vehicle. I think I could do 10 years (7 additional) for 375. Personal preference now/later but that 375 goes on the loan anyways.
All of these aren't quite the same though. Charging to use hardware that is already present in a vehicle and contained to that vehicle (heated seats) is not the same as charging to use an app that requires a network of hardware behind the scenes to start a vehicle remotely.
The latter has continuing costs and it's foolish to believe that would be free forever. Should you be _forced_ to pay this? No. But that's a different problem.
There are multiple different kinds of remote start.
Recurring payment to start your car over the internet? Maybe.
Recurring payment to start your car by hitting a button on your key fob from 50 feet away (vs having to be in the car)? Not so much.
Furthermore, it would be perfectly reasonable for the maker of a $60k car to include in that price the cost of supporting internet connectivity for the lifetime of the car.
Any vehicle that was available with "telematics" already collects and transmits a huge amount of information, regardless of whether you have a telematics subscription, including location, speed, interior and exterior temperature, whether the wipers are in use, engine parameters, accessory settings, you name it.
Whether you're paying for any services or not your vehicle is generating a substantial amount of data, so the notion that remote start needs to 'earn its keep' is nonsense.
I can somewhat understand the logic of charging me a recurring fee for a service that costs the provider a recurring cost, gets regular improvements, and where data is maintained. TV/sat radio? Ok (not that I would buy that). Remote tracking / start? Why not. Internet access in the car? Sure. Satellite maps with updates? Maybe. I would hope that given how much you charge me for the product, these come included, but MRR right?
But the idea of charging a recurring fee for something that's already in the car? Heated seats? Remote start with a fob? That's blackmail-powered greed. As far as I see it, that's the manufacturer's version of protection racket. If you stop paying them, then they're remotely breaking your car. Just because they planted a mole in it. Just because they can.
This is so f-ed up beyond grasp.
The good thing is that they have the right lobbies, so that won't ever be changed by customer protection.
I wasn't surprised that BMW, Tesla or Ford would do something like that. But for whatever stupid reason, Toyota is a disappointment, because I thought they would be part of a few manufacturers not playing that game
> I wasn't surprised that BMW, Tesla or Ford would do something like that. But for whatever stupid reason, Toyota is a disappointment, because I thought they would be part of a few manufacturers not playing that game
I didn't think Sony would follow Microsoft in charging a subscription for online play, but they pretty much had to because buyers didn't weight the hidden costs of it appropriately and Microsoft was already doing it giving them a big margin advantage (which could bleed over into marketshare advantage by investing it in marketing and exclusive titles).
But Sony is already charging others for everything. Just to appear on PS4 bar, you have to pay a premium. I sincerely doubt, they were bleeding money ( unlike MS at the beginning of Xbox ) providing free online play. In fact, it was their differentiator.
>I didn't think Sony would follow Microsoft in charging a subscription for online play,
This is explicitly why I'd never buy a PS5, and really didn't touch PS4 except to play Bloodborne. All digital services seem to eventually become anti-consumer. You become reliant on the service, the service keeps changing for the worse or becoming more expensive, and it becomes harder and harder for the user to extricate themselves from it.
Even in cases where it's easy to step away from a service, it almost always either degrades over time, or else morphs into something you don't have any interest in. It's like a ticking clock. You can't even enjoy this product because you know it's totally ephemeral. Eventually it will be worse than it was, exploit you in some way, or price you out of it.
There are a few exceptions here, but they are rare, and I suspect they are still going to go extinct at some point as well, they will merely take longer.
I really don't get people's revulsion to this model.
As long as you know the deal up front, what is the ethical issue? How can it ever be 'greed' or 'blackmail' to offer a service or product (a luxury one at that)?
Do your sums and then either the total cost is worth it to you or it isn't. Why does the payment model get people so riled up?
> I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further
There isn't much from stopping the manufacturers from changing the "up front" deal under this model. (Unless it becomes egregious enough to become illegal.) We'd like to get out in front of this and stop it from getting to that point.
So is all the anger in this thread based on a hypothetical that they might break their contract? If it's an ongoing payment they're actually incentivised to not do that!
That’s not what the article says - they aren’t going back on features you already purchased. It’s for new purchases only. They aren’t breaking any contracts.
I have to wonder if that's part of the paperwork at a dealership now.
"Sign this paper that says BMW/GM/Toyota/etc still owns and retains control over hardware X/Y/Z. You may utilize this part of your car as long as you continue paying $xx subscription fee."
In the good old days, you paid a dealership for a car and you had a car. Everything in the car was yours to use within the legal system of the country in which you reside. That you're now signing away your own rights in order to buy a car is not a good direction.
Whoops, you're right, I meant markup instead of margin. Fixed now. (For the curious, margin is (revenue-cost)/revenue, and markup is (revenue-cost)/cost.)
The cost to them of the owner of the car using the heated seats is zero. The cost of making the car doesn't get used here because that would be double-counting it, since it was already counted in how profitable the sale of the car was.
But since they paid that even if the owner never uses the heated seats and so never subscribes, it should be counted against the sale price of the vehicle itself and not against the subscription.
> it should be counted against the sale price of the vehicle itself
But why? Why should they do that?
For example a band that plays a concert counts on extras like merchandise sales to cover costs. Should the ticket price cover all their costs and is it unethical to also offer merchandise if they need it to cover costs?
The part of giving drivers heated seats that actually costs the manufacturer money is the seat heater hardware, which is part of the vehicles that are wholly sold.
Concert merchandise is fine because it has a cost that they only incur for people who actually buy it. For your concert example to be a valid comparison, imagine that everyone who bought a ticket to the concert were given merchandise, but told they weren't allowed to use it and had to throw it away when they got home unless they paid for it.
> The part of giving drivers heated seats that actually costs the manufacturer money is the seat heater hardware, which is part of the vehicles that are wholly sold.
And they’re recovering that cost and making some profit with these subscriptions.
The previsible absence of alternatives it's the main blackmail issue. The second is the fact that you can sell something packed with services and full of proprietary crap.
That last is not blackmail but a crime against humanity committed by politicians and citizens who allow that.
It's not much a matter of heated sits in a car or rear wheels steering etc. It's a model problem. Did you know the famous McCarthyism-era Barkley scandal lifted by Ernst Kantorowicz [1]?
He was a German ultra-nationalist, member of hitler Freikorps who flee his country to the USA when his Jewish origins became a life-threatening issue in Germany. He became a famous UC Berkeley teacher and when the UC Regents demanded a loyalty oath against the Communism he resign stating that he surely be not a Communist, he fight them in the army, got blessed many times and decorated few times but as a historian he also see the nazi rise and see that any regime start with small low importance stuff like a simple dummy oath, an annual one, who get slightly changed at a slow peace trapping people slowly (what we all now the Chomsky's frog principle.
So far we see small things like in-car-infotainment systems ads, ads on phones, smart TVs even in some proprietary OS you pay for a EULA, connected devices who need a remote service (from Roomba to Kobo) and can't work without them etc after we start seeing ideas about legal IDs on smartphones, smart lock, ... a step at a time we will be entrapped and unable to correct the aim.
That's not a Luddite prediction and that's not a natural, unplanned evolution. Big of IT, conglomerates, financial cartels etc know very well this model and have always practiced it. And that's the crime you can't accept. The fact that we transition slowly to a society WEF/2030 alike [2] a small "innocent" step at a time.
If such kind of evolution hadn't been published here and there everywhere from WEF to G8 etc than yes, call it a crime would be a bold statement, but being published years ago and keep slowly evolving it is.
Because they’re not lowering the initial purchase price of the car to compensate, you’re effectively paying a lot more for what are basic features in a modern car.
I wouldn’t object to a model where I was charged a lot of money for a subscription in exchange for lowering the up front cost of the car.
But nickel-and-diming me for features like heated seats forever after I have already paid a huge price for the car? It seems like a petty cash grab, especially for a supposedly upscale manufacturer like BMW. And why would I even want to have to keep track of that subscription? Yet another stupid tax on my time and attention — when I could just buy a Honda instead and pay entirely upfront and be done with it.
Should it be illegal? Probably not, as long as the manufacturers aren’t colluding and I can still just buy from a manufacturer that doesn’t do this.
Yeah they’re trying to get as much money as possible from you. They’re a business - that’s their reason for existing. When it’s a luxury good I can’t see any ethical issue in that.
When I ask for a pay rise for doing the same job from my employer am I being unethical?
> When I ask for a pay rise for doing the same job from my employer am I being unethical?
You're generally not doing the same job year over year. Your roles and responsibilities grow and evolve the longer you are there, so it makes sense that your pay would also grow with you.
What if your responsibilities/capabilities didn't change, and you merely realized that you're worth more to the business than what you're currently being paid?
Is the objection to the turning a one-time payment into a series of monthly payments? Or is the actual objection that the net present value of those monthly payments is too high?
If you want to turn something that used to cost me $400 one-time into a subscription that costs me $1.49/mo, I'll be happy that you've offered me the subscription and will buy it in subscription form. Charge $9.99/mo for that same subscription and I'll be incensed.
The objection is, if I own a car, then the car manufacturer shouldn't be able to disable functionality. If I buy a car with heated seats, I should be able to use them as much as I want, and the manufacturer should have no control over that. The cost concern is secondary to losing control of devices that we ostensibly own.
The problem is that, since subscriptions are more profitable and look better to accounting, soon I may no long be able to get that deal of buying basic functionality of my car upfront. It’s the classic subsidized printer gouged ink model, except it’s entirely artificial here (no new ink is being shipped to me, the printer is just turning on or not) for increased profits and hiding the trust cost to the customer.
Strong and broad consumer rejection is the only recourse for people not being ripped off by turning what was an owned asset into a rental through this method of cost hiding, which is why I think people are being worked up.
When my cars basic functions stop working I'd rather it be that they're actually broken, not that I've lapsed on payments. I agree that it's definitely a matter of degrees, there are a finite number of months in the useful lifetime of a vehicle so for the right price it might be preferable, I just usually drive a vehicle for as long as possible. All that being said, aren't we all tired of unnecessary monthly subscriptions? Not to mention the fact that there's the predatory implication they simply hope you forget you're paying.
In the software world, we have seen things that used to cost a one-time payment of 60$ turn into a 100$ PER YEAR subscription [0]. I'm sure no manufacturer will make a subscription system that will make them less money. It will, in all likelihood, end up being an order of magnitude more remunerative for them compared to the one-time payment.
This is less to do with blackmail than to do with optimising manufacturing. It is cheaper for manufacurers to produce all the cars with the same heated seats, but not allow you to use them if you don't pay the recurring charge (as long as enough % of customers opt-in), than to manufacture two versions of the car, one with the seats and one without, just so that you can feel like you aren't being blackmailed.
You should forget about what the car "has" and consider if the price makes sense for the features you get access to. This is for example how CPUs and GPUs are sold, and many other products. Consumers usually find it odd that they have the exact same specs (and smart consumers can enable those features for free), but it does provide for lower costs for manufacturing, which dictate how everything else works.
maybe this is supposed to make me feel better, but installing features that will never be used (e.g. heating elements in the seats) just makes me mad re: waste.
It's not a digital asset that costs nothing to produce/host/sustain. These are raw materials, refined, that will someday end up in a landfill.
This bothers me because those raw materials and byproducts of manufacturing still get either used or produced. So this seems like a net negative for the planet when there have been pushes to reform the impact this industry in particular has on the environment.
yeah, the grandparent comment is utterly absurd. if it's cheaper for them to make, then they're making it an upsell even though it could be a standard feature. and if that's happening, but no competitor is coming along to take advantage of this cost situation and standardize the upsell, then there's something wrong with the market.
this subscription approach is just rent-seeking behavior, which is another sign that there's something wrong with the market.
I agree there is waste, but if you buy into the whole capitalist schpiel, if the cost of production is lower, it's still better. This obviously externalizes environmental impacts which the current trend of eco-politics is trying to address with many ideas around taxing carbon output and other ways of accounting for the external effects comes into play. I assume if the world is able to correctly implement such a system we'd get rid of these aberrations where sometimes chucking a bunch of useless stuff into a product, or producing it in the other side of the world ends up "making sense" - because it only "makes sense" if you don't account for all the trash you leave behind you.
I'm optimist though, I see the discourse moving in this direction and many countries starting to investigate properly how to implement these ideas from the 70's.
> This is for example how CPUs and GPUs are sold, and many other products.
Many products use a consistent manufacturing process with binning... a qa step where their performance is measured and then sorted, so you pay more for the top 10 percentile. That makes sense to me... but things like this always seem wasteful regardless of the industry.
> This is less to do with blackmail than to do with optimising manufacturing. It is cheaper for manufacurers to produce all the cars with the same heated seats, but not allow you to use them if you don't pay the recurring charge (as long as enough % of customers opt-in), than to manufacture two versions of the car, one with the seats and one without, just so that you can feel like you aren't being blackmailed.
But there's no connection between adding it to every car and charging a subscription to use it. You could just as easily add the heater to every car and only allow people to use them if they pay a one-time charge, similar to the model today where you pay a one time fee to add the option at build-time.
No, again you can charge people a one time cost to enable it. Whether that happens at initial purchase or years later (in app purchase style) doesn’t affect whether it’s a one time or recurring cost.
Just multiply the monthly cost by how many months you intend to use the car. Are you happy with that cost? Then what's the issue? Why does the monthly-ness wind everyone up so much?
I own my cars forever (until death do us part - either me or the car).
This winds me up because it's a raw, shitty deal: $18/m * 12m/y * forever = infinity.
Even assuming a short lifespan for the car (10 years) it's STILL a raw, shitty, dumpster fire of a deal: $2160 vs the $500 for the actual heated seats today.
BMW knows this. They are double dipping - optimize production costs, ream consumers, violate doctrine of first sale.
It's not about too expensive for me - it's about why a manufacturer is able to pick a method of "sale" that has unbounded costs for the "purchaser".
This is an unbounded cost. That makes sense when the service provided has an unbounded cost associated with it that the manufacturer is paying, but that's utterly untrue in this situation.
This is about a manufacturer taking a cost saving measure -
simplified manufacturing lines
Then manipulating a digital device to also take a profit increasing measure - creating a digital on/off switch for heated seats that they refuse to provide a key for.
Do you think it's ethical for the previous owner of your home to keep the keys? "Hey - you own this house now, but if you want access to the basement - I got the keys and you have to pay up! It's only 25 bucks per month!"
That's clearly hostile. What makes you bend over so far backwards to let BMW ream you up the ass here in exactly the same way?
Why are you comfortable giving them digital control of something you (in theory only) own?
> Why are you comfortable giving them digital control of something you (in theory only) own?
I wouldn't want it myself. I don't get why people think it's unethical though. Someone called it a 'crime' elsewhere. That boggles my mind. It's their product - they can offer whatever payment model they want. If it's a crap one then don't buy it. If enough people think it's crap the market will adjust. It's a luxury car, not baby formula.
This is a distinct misunderstanding of acceptable capitalism. To be very blunt, it's simply not true.
We accept the idea that "greed is good" when it comes to capitalism only because we regulate the cases where the market fails to align the interests of the customer and manufacturer.
In cases where interests are aligned: Greed is good. The seller wants to take actions that increase profit, and that usually means either reducing the cost to produce the item, or increasing the real (or perceived) value of the item for consumers. Both of those are good things for all parties.
In cases where interests are not aligned we regulate the ever-loving shit out of the market because we have incredibly detailed historical evidence that shows that it devolves to straight abuse.
Things like
- Cartels
- Monopolies
- Fraud
- Misleading advertising
- Contractual abuse
- Unequal bargaining
- Regulated goods (black markets)
and several hundred other specific laws we have that only exist because without them people end up killing each other due to real (or perceived) injustice without them.
Let's be real. Manufacturers are going to turn off the feature validation servers for older cars <10 years after sale, at which point that car just doesn't have that feature.
Because it hurts the second hand market. Now when you buy a used car you're paying new car prices for a given feature. Meanwhile, the seller can't charge a premium over a less-equipped car.
They absolutely won't be paying you any extra money for those heated seats... they're already going to have to go pay BMW for the freaking subscription anyways.
At best you could argue you're slightly increasing the interested market for your car, but even that feels incredibly flimsy. The market for used cars is vibrant, and very rarely is trim level a deciding factor on used car purchases.
Usually you can negotiate price on trim - but this decidedly removes that option. You just get fucked right round as the original buyer.
So this means the manufacturer can conveniently side step doctrine of first sale, and continue generating revenue from secondary sales at absolutely no cost to themselves.
Pretty fun for them. Rent seeking usually is.
Pretty fucking terrible for everyone else. Perfect case of market failure, and an ideal target for regulation.
This kind of thing genuinely triggers disgust for me. Personally - I will NEVER buy from these brands again (and I'm in their target market for luxury cars). I'll also enthusiastically vote for politicians who propose regulation on this. In my opinion - nuke this bullshit from orbit.
It seems better for second-hand sales though? You can sell your car as having heated seats available even if you never paid for them or used them. And you can sell to buyers who both want heated seats and those that don't. Buyers who don't want them don't have to waste money on them.
And buyers that do want heated seats, do need to waste money on them. Or more realistically, pay the one time fee to an independent shop to fix the problem.
I believe BMW did offer this option, at least for some of the features. Heated seats were $450 or so, or $18/mo.
It would be ironic if manufacturers were roasted for offering more options for payment rather than fewer.
I would not feel this way if the one-time cost were higher than before (I think $500 is about standard), or if purchases were locked to the original purchaser. And I recognize that some of these examples are of companies that do not offer one-time options.
> I believe BMW did offer this option, at least for some of the features. Heated seats were $450 or so, or $18/mo.
That's a good call-out. I don't think there's anything wrong with offering a monthly option (it seems weird and I think there's probably some social commentary in there, but whatever), I just don't want to be forced to pay monthly.
This is dumb and a sign that the system we have created to operate in is broken. Another sign. Programmers talk about code smells. This is a code smell about our resource extraction and sharing, and money systems.
It's like how it's "cheaper" to farm some foods and ship them half way around the world via plain and ship, than it is to farm the same food and ship it 100km across land. The "cost" doesn't reflect _in any way_ the resource/energy usage, or pollution emission of the system: only the human "cost", which is biased and lobbied strongly towards maintaining existing power centres.
You're overselling the "true cost" of maritime shipping - it's far and away the most efficient form of freight we have. Ocean freight has carbon emissions of 7g of CO2 per tonne-kilometre. Road freight by comparison has emissions of 137 gCO2/tkm - nearly 20 times the ocean emissions.
So, you would need to ship something 2000km before it has equivalent emissions to a 100km trip by road. So yea you're right that it'd be silly to ship something around the world rather than drive it 100km - but that's a a rather small distance. For a real-world example, you would produces less carbon shipping something from Shenzhen in China to San Francisco (11,078 km) than you would produce shipping it from San Francisco to Los Angeles by truck (616km by road).
No country has the density of population and the natural resources to have every conceivable industry within a 100 miles of every conceivable destination - eventually some goods are going to have to travel a longer distance, and once you get more than a couple of hundred kilometres away by road it genuinely becomes more efficient to move it across thousands of kilometres of ocean.
Isn't your first conclusion only true if every point in the country is close and equi-distant to a port and all ports get the same goods? In practice, you still truck multiple tonnage. In your example, the port is in LA and say, manufacturing plant in Michigan and I am in Atlanta.. it is still less carbon-emitting to truck from Michigan to Atlanta than ship from Shenzen to LA and then truck from LA to Atlanta..
“The "cost" doesn't reflect _in any way_ the resource/energy usage, or pollution emission of the system: only the human "cost", which is biased and lobbied strongly towards maintaining existing power”
This is the crux, and I totally and completely agree
It's interesting how plausible conclusions are always so boring. No wonder consensus usually converges to cynical/doomsday conclusions. It's where the emotions are.
> It's interesting how plausible conclusions are always so boring.
No, this conclusion is not plausible at all. It doesn't explain why the payment should be recurring rather than paid only once (even if it's delayed post-manufacture).
It's one thing when two cores of an 8-core CPU fail QA, so it gets sold as a 6-core one instead (since the alternative would be throwing it away entirely). It's another to disable perfectly good equipment purely out of greed.
i have no problem with optimizing manufacturing. you want to turn off a feature if i pay less, sure. but that doesn't explain the need for a recurring monthly charge. because there is no need for that at all.
This is not true. They are binned by capability, and sold at different price points.
I don't mind that idea - if it turned out installing heated seats failed in say... 28% of installations, fine - charge me more for a model with functioning heated seats.
Instead - this is introducing a fixed, recurring charge, and undermining the concept of ownership. That heated seat has zero cost for the manufacturer after installation, and that should be reflected in the costs to the consumer.
I find this a pretty un-ethical (appalling - really) attack on ownership, and long term, a way to undermine the used market for these goods (attack on doctrine of first sale).
Frankly - I think this should absolutely be targeted with regulation. This is literally rent-seeking, with no potential upside.
> I don't mind that idea - if it turned out installing heated seats failed in say... 28% of installations, fine - charge me more for a model with functioning heated seats.
I know you just chose this as an example, but clearly it wouldn't be acceptable to anyone to have a failed installation of something like this. On one extreme, it could cause a fire; but otherwise, it's just a button that doesn't work, and damages the quality reputation of the car.
Processor binning only works because it is a black box, indistinguishable from the outside. You can purposely disable components if your yields get high enough, etc. and nobody will ever notice the difference.
For vehicles, automakers will learn from customers that this kind of nickel-and-diming is not appreciated, when people turn to other manufacturers that still "get it", e.g. Mazda.
> This is not true. They are binned by capability, and sold at different price points.
That's only for the very high yield ones which get sold for specific computing purposes. The GPUs you buy at the store are already from the shit pile. Within that shit pile though, they all have exactly the same amount of transistors in there usually across different versions of the same product line, and if you buy the highest end version you get use of all of the transistors, if not you don't - but they are still there.
At one point, the old Geforce 6800 cards came in three varieties. The cheapest model had two disabled functional units. You could often unlock one successfully (6800XT to 6800), but both (6800XT to 6800GS) was prone to much higher instability and failure. Even if all the transistors worked, the rest of the board (power delivery, heatsinking) was often downgraded on cheap models.
But CPU and GPU capabilities aren't sold on a subscription basis (though I know Intel tried something in this direction), and their features don't vanish if/when they are resold.
I could tolerate car "binning", but only if it was burned into the hardware/firmware by the dealer and always transferred along with the physical vehicle.
Huh? The logic makes sense, except for the "recurring payment" part. This has been done for years in manufacturing, but there is no necessity for it to be a recurring payment. It could just as easily be a one time payment to upgrade your car to have heated seats(really, just the dealership flipping a bit in some config somewhere, or the manufacturer hardcoding the bit one way or the other as it rolls off the assembly line).
I would say it's a way of price segmentation. One example are loyalty cards with rebates and bonuses. Customer A pays less for the same product than customer B. Of course there's the difference that customer B has seat heating enabled, but from the producers' perspective this doesn't matter a lot, because they have the same production process for everybody, somewhat similar to CPU binning.
It's a way for companies to extract more revenue. They hope that customers don't mind too much that they are segmented into groups.
But they do. They feel hurt and outraged if they discover that they paid more than the neighbor for the same product or if the product could be elevated to a higher level at no cost for the producer if only someone had the right key. Companies then try to be clandestine, to mollify customers with cheap added value or offering opt-in by a complicated process for free (loyalty cards, coupons, rebates with conditions, and so on).
It's a fundamental conflict between producers and consumers.
If you want a perfect market economy price segmentation should be avoided. It causes confusion for customers and therefore prevents price transparency. It enables rent seeking by companies.
This is okay too - it's cheaper to put heated seats in all the cars, than to put it in some cars! Enable it via the purchase of an options package. But a recurring cost for the feature? That grinds my gears.
What they could do is allow you to enable that feature later, albeit at higher cost. Imagine what that could do for the used car market? I buy a car where the previous owner hadn't enabled heated seats. I contact the manufacturer and say I'd like to enable the heated seats. Heck, why stop there? The manufacturer may respond asking whether I'd like to purchase an option package instead that included a bunch of other features. This seems reasonable and pro-consumer. Subscribing to a feature does not.
Remote start does not require a subscription or the internet. We've had remote start for at least half a century with just a keyfob.
Satellite maps with updates? Maybe.
Does not require a subscription or the internet. My car's satnav is updated via a USB. $200 from the dealer, but is completely optional. Maybe I do it once every five years. Maybe never. I don't need up-to-the-second maps of hiking trails 4,000 miles away from a place my car will never visit.
Moreover, the last time I looked into updating via USB, there was a community online that had instructions for doing it for free with data, I think from Garmin.
The MBAs want us to believe we are required to be tethered to recurring charges for the rest of our lives. With very few exceptions (electricity, water, etc.) we aren't.
No downvote needed, it's a genuine question, and I'll try to answer based on my view.
Leasing is just a different form of buying the car, in a sense. Yes, the contract/agreement is not equivalent to a purchase, but in essence what you are doing is transforming a set of unknowns (will I have to repair my car twice in the first three years? How much will I spend? How many kilometers will I drive?) with more known quantities ($X/month, Y miles per year included, etc), and you don't have to pay the car upfront, but pay a monthly installment. (approximation, give me some rope here).
Instead, paying a monthly fee to heat my car seats is an aberration of the economic model. It doesn't make any sense, from a customer perspective.
Of course, we are all moving towards a subscription economy, and most customers will simply be royally f*cked up by that, and regulation/government will turn the other way in most cases. Good luck to us.
An alternative would be to simply sell a car with or without heated seats, at two different prices. This is how it was done. The subscription model gives the customer more flexibility, since if she changes her mind about wanting heated seats halfway through ownership, she can cancel and won't have to pay the full price of the heated seats option. Or vice versa - if she decides she wants heated seats, she can turn them on more easily with a subscription than going somewhere and getting them aftermarket installed.
Heated car seats actually makes sense to put on a subscription model for customers.
It means that those of us in generally warm states like CA can opt-in to heated seats for the month or two we spend doing winter sports, and just pay for that usage, instead of paying a few thousand upfront for the heated seat package.
Something which can be helpful when trying to avoid features is looking for "work" versions of the vehicle. It's frequently a different sales manager who is more amenable to plain vehicles. You'll be looking for "fleet" sales, which is generally for corporate clients or maybe high end clients. Some places will insist you go through regular sales.
For example, I bought a pickup but didn't want 4 wheel drive. Being in the suburbs, of course, they only order 4 wheel drives pickups. I ended up getting a "work truck" ordered from a different part of the state where they are used as work vehicles. The useful stuff is generally still available (leather seats), just without the extra that a company won't pay for like pin-striping.
All Ford vehicles, including fleet vehicles, have telematics built-in and it's active whether you're paying for it or not.
Ford even offers free fleet telematics services and you don't have to do anything to activate it. Source: worked for a company that had a bunch of vehicles. Boss was unaware we could automagically see fault codes, mileage, oil change status, etc.
People don't get it: any vehicle with telematics is transmitting a ton of data the entire time it's running, whether you pay for telematics or not.
Remote start is a basic feature in cold climates like Canada, especially if you have young kids. It's hard enough to wrangle kids into the car, let alone when it's -40°C outside. Remote start allows the interior of the car to warm up beforehand.
This just means that circumvention will be an lucrative industry.
For heated seats, someone will add a bypass that just adds a physical switch that is spliced directly somewhere between a power source and the actual heating element. Just have to figure out an aesthetic place to mount it. The only downside being, in this case you can't control it via an aPp or through the tablet that replaced the actual console controls. Big loss.
I think a much bigger downside would be its effect on the price of your insurance. I can't speak for any other country but in the UK insurers have a reputation for being petty about modifications. Even something as minor as a DIY heated seat switch would have to be declared to your insurer who could refuse to cover you or charge a silly premium for cover.
That's a U(k) problem not a me problem. Here people put their cheap base model pick up truck on the highest, cheapest, Chinese lift kit that money can buy with no real effect on the price of their premium. You only pay more when you want to insure the cost of the replacement of your modified parts, which very few people are going to bother doing.
I sometimes suspect I'll continue to drive my 20 year old gas powered vehicle until I can't buy gas anymore. Its not that I want a gas vehicle, but that the rise of EVs coincides with a complete re-thinking of the automotive model that I /really/ don't want--subscription services, touch screens, "connected".
As someone that has a very difficult time managing my real life, I've reduced my periodic payments to mortgage, utilities, internet, phone, insurance. No netflix, no streaming music services, no amazon prime. And even then I frequently forget or mis-budget. I really don't want to add 100 monthly fees to do this or that.
> Toyota, meanwhile, started charging $8 a month to remotely start vehicles using a key fob — a feature that had previously been free.
It's probably not safe to operate these sorts of features in perpetuity. Funding the security team to deal with hacks seems necessary and the cost is reasonable. Really, it's comforting to hope that in 20 years time you might still get security updates. (As opposed to my smartphone which is only 4 years old and can't be upgraded to the latest Android at any price.)
If the product arrived defective (including security flaws), then the liability is on the manufacturer and they should fix it free of charge, because they sold you a product with a defect.
This is categorically different than software updates and feature releases - in that case, you can justify a recurring subscription, because extra value is being provided to the customer. In the bug-fixing case, the customer literally did not receive the value was promised to them (false advertising) - the bug represents an unfulfilled obligation, and the fix is not new functionality, but the fulfillment of what was already promised and paid for.
Security issues with software are "normal wear and tear." If you want something to remain secure you need to provide regular security updates. Assuming it's secure at ship-time, a remote-start keyfob is unlikely to be secure 5 years from now (not without regular software updates.)
This is distinct from something like heated seats where yes, if it works it works.
I can guarantee that I will not ever pay a dime for those monthly billed extras that have no recurring costs to manufacturers. Go away vultures. Next time I buy car I will first look if company uses monthly fee in their vehicles and if it does off to the next one. If they all do then as previously said - I just will not subscribe.
It sounds like the Auto makers want to keep profiting off the used car market as well.
I would say the solution would be not to buy cars from makers that introduce subs. But people will do it anyway. Sounds like a new world of perpetual renting.
Auto companies are scared of big tech. So stuff like heated seat subscriptions ends up happening due to some cargo cult bureaucracy, where the idea could be good (new innovative feature) but execution is horrible.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 226 ms ] thread> “Safety should come standard,” Wallace said of adaptive headlights. “Some automakers might think that those are simply a convenience feature, but there’s a demonstrated safety benefit.”
This is the second-worst example of this kind of thing I've ever seen. The only worse one was gating air bags (yes, the kind that save your life if you crash) behind a subscription: https://hackaday.com/2021/05/18/do-you-really-own-it-motorcy...
Saab had a funny one for this - there were 3 vents in the front of your dashboard, but one always blew cold air no matter what, so that in the winter, you could point it on your face. Heat cranked and no warm fatigue... a beautiful thing.
Antipatterns are the worst.
I’ve driven various cars with this feature and they never turn it on and off when I would.
I’ve nearly been crashed in to because a car at a junction thought I was flashing them to pull out, as I was doing 60 mph, and they did.
(Also, I’m assuming the automatic turning on of the high beam is included in the paywall, not just the turning off !)
Obviously, it's not your fault that someone else interpreted the headlight as an invitation to pull out. And indeed, it's probably one of the most widely ignored rules in the highway code. Nevertheless... it's still the other driver's fault. I've personally had it where other drivers think I've flashed them out, but I had actually just gone over a bump in the road.
(I'm assuming you're British because you say junction.)
As an aside, one option I like to use to get people behind me to turn down their high beams is to orient the side view mirror so the high beam goes back to them.
That said, I still think it's a convenience feature because turning down your brights is something that everyone is already capable of doing and legally obliged to do.
Very similar to assisted driving features that control tailgating. Should every car with assisted driving capability have to enable it?
Incidentally - the 2022 Versa so far seems to be a great car. Lots of software features that might be considered "luxury" come as standard.
Unfortunately its a general trend, everything that is getting "smartified" is becoming an anti consumer black box, and If you care about your privacy or owning the device you bought, you are out of luck.
It happened with TVs, and now its coming for cars too, there might be options now but they won't last long, is there a dumb TV in your local supermarket? No, and there is no privacy respecting TV either.
I dont hate smart things, I wish I can enjoy all the new convenient tech without being spied on and my private life getting sold to the highest bidder.
I want a smart home, a smart car, a smart TV, a smart vacuum.
But until they stop being spyware, there is no option other than just not buying, or hacking it to stop spying.
The only way to stop this is with regulation, because every other monetary incentive, will continue to push everything towards the same goal, spyware and spying on your every move.
When the dystopian future hits, I'll have a backup car that isn't reporting every behavior and remote controlled.
We are an easy target for the combination of psychology and technology hacks which is “bestowed” upon us. For some time ahead, there will be a temporary mitigation route.
But in general, we all have fallen to our internal strive for comfort and convenience. Eventually, with high energy prices and scarce resources, we all be renting everything. So you will own nothing.
My peer group would probably have been a great target 10 years ago. Now I hardly know anyone at my level with a car, and if, it’s an old one or cheaper brand. I think this is a luxury product in decline, other options just keep getting better. If I like to pay a lot, I’ll just Uber everywhere. Public transport is becoming less shitty (eg with contactless payments in a lot of places, and google maps to find the routes), cycling is safer (and showers in offices) etc. Why deal with this nonsense, and insurance and fines and parking and repairs?
I think they’re looking at these revenue streams as a way to save themselves because it might increase revenue per customer, without seeing that it might actually reduce their market share even further.
Genuine question: Why is it that whenever someone on a forum mentions the phrase "public transit", inevitably someone comes along under ten minutes later to tell them how they're obviously wrong?
I am in my 50s. My wife and I have raised children in a city. Many years ago, before transit got much better, we hauled them up into the high-stair buses and strapped their strollers into wheelchair spaces. Trips to the mountains were an annual affair, at best, on poorly-documented shuttle buses. These days, my kids routinely go hiking in the Gorge or out to the Peninsula on nothing but a transit card and a day pack.
My children are now adults and none of them have learned to drive nor have any interest in doing so. Almost our entire friends group is the same, even through the pandemic. The most common reason to be an exception and having been required to learn how to drive is because they got priced out of where they live.
Perhaps it is time for the auto-responders to transit posts to adjust to a wider view of society?
The tube in London isn’t really even suitable for suitcases, let alone push chairs. Nor is the New York subway. Anyone that puts stairs in a transit hub needs to have a good long think about what they’ve done.
Perhaps Hong Kong, Seoul or Tokyo I could see this being the case though.
If I live in London, then almost everyone I see regularly will be living car-free. If I live in Weasenham in Norfolk, probably far fewer of my friends and neighbours will have a car-free lifestyle.
I'm sure the lawsuits will flow — but bad look, no? Shades of McDonald's shake machine....
Of course the Auto industry hasn't got the clout to make states serve them the way the Entertainment industry does, yet.
Hacking these features to work is treating the symptom, not the disease.
This is a controversial point, but a salient one.
If EVERY manufacturer makes a smart TV, then there are no longer dumb TVs. It is collusion of a sort, not a monopoly. One could argue: just don't buy a TV, but there is some weird kind of inertia behind the purchasing of a TV that is immune to that claim. It is not essential to own one, but it shouldn't have to be a surveillance device. I expect the EU to address this long before the USA does, as the latter seems to be struggling with its politics doing even basic things for its people.
Setting aside the morality of the war, (Russia is clearly in the wrong) the current state of affairs in Europe is much better for the US's geopolitical interests than it is for the EU's.
Its a fact, not a feeling, proven by Snowden who sacrificed his life so the people can now about what really is going on.
The reason we don't have dumb TVs anymore is that very few people want to pay more for less.
About privacy, regulation is an option, but you have to realize that it goes against the will of most customers. The market has told us that people are ready to sell their private life to the highest bidder. We are often saying that it is greedy companies that do that, but in reality, by prioritizing price and features over privacy, that's our choice. There are companies that target the privacy market, and they have their niche.
Now, it is wouldn't be the only incidence of regulations that go against what consumers want because of higher goals. For example, people typically don't care about the environment, but it is important, that's why there are regulations in place to force consumers to pay for "greener" things. Same thing for safety, people don't always want to pay for safety (but they still complain later when an accident happen...), so they regulate it. And drugs, people like drugs, but since it is considered bad for them, these are regulated. Should we protect people privacy against themselves? Maybe, there are arguments for and arguments against, culturally, the US would be more likely say "no" and Europe would be more likely to say "yes", I don't really have an opinion.
Maybe it feels like there is no hope but to pay auto companies to abuse you, but there are alternatives, and we can all help try to build the world we want to live in.
I would be fine with banning subscription features in any vehicle.
What you drive off the lot is what you get for the life of the vehicle, barring physical damage.
Is an affordable vehicle with competitive features and no subscription model too much to ask for?
Or the hackers will have a field day, and any vendor that breaks ranks should do quite handsomely.
It's kind of funny that the article says
> "But it’s not just BMW: industry watchers and consumer advocates warn that the nickel-and-diming threatens to become standard as automakers chase a recurring revenue model pioneered by Elon Musk’s Tesla."
GM launched OnStar and Satellite Radio years before Elon bought into Tesla.
Disclosure: I work for GM and I am representing solely my own point of view.
I don't use those video streaming services often in my car (usually just when waiting for a table at a restaurant), but I'm sure there's a long tail of people that spend a lot of time Supercharging and will watch hours of content every month and consume tens or even hundreds of GB of mobile data.
People are most willing to pay for things where they understand that there is an underlying cost to providing the service, and where they derive value from updates or ongoing service. The service should also be provided at a competitive price - for example you cannot charge for navigation in most cases because people can use free nav services (Google Maps etc)
If they made $2B and are shooting for $25B, this practice will only escalate.
Now OnStar isn't a necessary set of features. And it certainly should remain optional. But if demand is high enough, consumers will buy from them anyway and they'll continue to escalate as much as they can.
Will every industry end up being the next printing/telco in the long run?
The issue for corporations is that like consolidation, competition law enforcement also acts like a pendulum. Right now, we are at a point of low enforcement with high consolidation. As electors get tired of being fleeced, they will start to complain and you should see enforcement increase.
The hard part is designing regulation that curtails the oligopoly without preventing new enterprise.
It is easy to fall into a steady state of high corporate extraction + high regulatory barriers.
Mazda for example has stuck with physical controls and hasn't been making any noises about pushing a bunch of things behind a subscription. There is a subscription for remote start and some useless notifications, but at the moment it's nothing to worry about.
I don't think they can afford to do annoying things given their market share.
They are great cars and it's my preferred brand for sedans, hatchbacks, and SUVs with entry level luxury.
There is a solution though: regulate size. It's objectively measurable. The Mazda example that GP gives is legit, but it's on the knife's edge of disappearing -- one more wave of consolidation and it will be gone. But of course regulating bigness is a very pre-2007 solution. In the modern world it's all about ever-increasing bigness. Because everybody loves zombie megacorps living off of an IV drip of cheap debt.
My average friend and family member is both well-educated and gives almost 0 effort to either (a) looking at what government regulators are doing or (b) researching their big purchases ahead of time.
I googled regulatory capture.
Let's look at a few things that have been regulated in the past 100 years of US history:
- car emissions
- lead usage in paint and fuel
- child toy safety
- food safety
- workplace safety
I'd say regulation has worked amazingly well since the days of Upton Sinclair novels.
Because of this, any "regulation" that will actually happen is regulatory capture and/or performative regulation (there's probably a better term for this, but the idea is "regulation that looks good but doesn't actually do anything), because the citizens don't pay attention to these things, contact their representatives, or vote based on these issues, which is a necessary prerequisite for good regulation.
Like a 3.5mm heaphone jack, expandable storage, replaceable batteries & a physical keyboard on my smart(sic) phone?
Serious and not serious at the same time. My point is that demand is what drives change in a free market, people chose phones without a headphone jack, expandable storage and replaceable batteries so companies chose to sell what consumers wanted, if the demand for these things were so large then more companies would be producing devices with those. Also remember sometimes what people say is not really what they believe or how they act. I know being a techie it's kind of hard to have perspective on it, but as far as I see most people don't give a flying ** about these things, even though I do heavily agree that they should :)
Not as egregious as other companies as I can get a factory remote starter installed. It appears that dealers deliberately order vehicles without the remote starter in order to push subscriptions.
That may have been an option, but I wasn't made aware of it. I had to sweet talk the Subaru support to get the free 3 years.
I was also under the impression it had remote start, which it does via the app, but not via the key fob without the remote module installed.
I think that you can have remote start (for fob) dealer installed after the fact though. Maybe check on that.
The latter has continuing costs and it's foolish to believe that would be free forever. Should you be _forced_ to pay this? No. But that's a different problem.
Recurring payment to start your car over the internet? Maybe.
Recurring payment to start your car by hitting a button on your key fob from 50 feet away (vs having to be in the car)? Not so much.
Furthermore, it would be perfectly reasonable for the maker of a $60k car to include in that price the cost of supporting internet connectivity for the lifetime of the car.
Whether you're paying for any services or not your vehicle is generating a substantial amount of data, so the notion that remote start needs to 'earn its keep' is nonsense.
But the idea of charging a recurring fee for something that's already in the car? Heated seats? Remote start with a fob? That's blackmail-powered greed. As far as I see it, that's the manufacturer's version of protection racket. If you stop paying them, then they're remotely breaking your car. Just because they planted a mole in it. Just because they can. This is so f-ed up beyond grasp.
The good thing is that they have the right lobbies, so that won't ever be changed by customer protection.
I wasn't surprised that BMW, Tesla or Ford would do something like that. But for whatever stupid reason, Toyota is a disappointment, because I thought they would be part of a few manufacturers not playing that game
I didn't think Sony would follow Microsoft in charging a subscription for online play, but they pretty much had to because buyers didn't weight the hidden costs of it appropriately and Microsoft was already doing it giving them a big margin advantage (which could bleed over into marketshare advantage by investing it in marketing and exclusive titles).
This is explicitly why I'd never buy a PS5, and really didn't touch PS4 except to play Bloodborne. All digital services seem to eventually become anti-consumer. You become reliant on the service, the service keeps changing for the worse or becoming more expensive, and it becomes harder and harder for the user to extricate themselves from it.
Even in cases where it's easy to step away from a service, it almost always either degrades over time, or else morphs into something you don't have any interest in. It's like a ticking clock. You can't even enjoy this product because you know it's totally ephemeral. Eventually it will be worse than it was, exploit you in some way, or price you out of it.
There are a few exceptions here, but they are rare, and I suspect they are still going to go extinct at some point as well, they will merely take longer.
I really don't get people's revulsion to this model.
As long as you know the deal up front, what is the ethical issue? How can it ever be 'greed' or 'blackmail' to offer a service or product (a luxury one at that)?
Do your sums and then either the total cost is worth it to you or it isn't. Why does the payment model get people so riled up?
I suspect this is... not always the case.
> I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further
There isn't much from stopping the manufacturers from changing the "up front" deal under this model. (Unless it becomes egregious enough to become illegal.) We'd like to get out in front of this and stop it from getting to that point.
"Sign this paper that says BMW/GM/Toyota/etc still owns and retains control over hardware X/Y/Z. You may utilize this part of your car as long as you continue paying $xx subscription fee."
In the good old days, you paid a dealership for a car and you had a car. Everything in the car was yours to use within the legal system of the country in which you reside. That you're now signing away your own rights in order to buy a car is not a good direction.
But why? Why should they do that?
For example a band that plays a concert counts on extras like merchandise sales to cover costs. Should the ticket price cover all their costs and is it unethical to also offer merchandise if they need it to cover costs?
I can't understand the logic in this thread.
Concert merchandise is fine because it has a cost that they only incur for people who actually buy it. For your concert example to be a valid comparison, imagine that everyone who bought a ticket to the concert were given merchandise, but told they weren't allowed to use it and had to throw it away when they got home unless they paid for it.
And they’re recovering that cost and making some profit with these subscriptions.
That last is not blackmail but a crime against humanity committed by politicians and citizens who allow that.
I feel like I can't take these reactions to an alternative payment plan for the heated seats in your luxury BMW seriously.
He was a German ultra-nationalist, member of hitler Freikorps who flee his country to the USA when his Jewish origins became a life-threatening issue in Germany. He became a famous UC Berkeley teacher and when the UC Regents demanded a loyalty oath against the Communism he resign stating that he surely be not a Communist, he fight them in the army, got blessed many times and decorated few times but as a historian he also see the nazi rise and see that any regime start with small low importance stuff like a simple dummy oath, an annual one, who get slightly changed at a slow peace trapping people slowly (what we all now the Chomsky's frog principle.
So far we see small things like in-car-infotainment systems ads, ads on phones, smart TVs even in some proprietary OS you pay for a EULA, connected devices who need a remote service (from Roomba to Kobo) and can't work without them etc after we start seeing ideas about legal IDs on smartphones, smart lock, ... a step at a time we will be entrapped and unable to correct the aim.
That's not a Luddite prediction and that's not a natural, unplanned evolution. Big of IT, conglomerates, financial cartels etc know very well this model and have always practiced it. And that's the crime you can't accept. The fact that we transition slowly to a society WEF/2030 alike [2] a small "innocent" step at a time.
If such kind of evolution hadn't been published here and there everywhere from WEF to G8 etc than yes, call it a crime would be a bold statement, but being published years ago and keep slowly evolving it is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Kantorowicz
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s...
I wouldn’t object to a model where I was charged a lot of money for a subscription in exchange for lowering the up front cost of the car.
But nickel-and-diming me for features like heated seats forever after I have already paid a huge price for the car? It seems like a petty cash grab, especially for a supposedly upscale manufacturer like BMW. And why would I even want to have to keep track of that subscription? Yet another stupid tax on my time and attention — when I could just buy a Honda instead and pay entirely upfront and be done with it.
Should it be illegal? Probably not, as long as the manufacturers aren’t colluding and I can still just buy from a manufacturer that doesn’t do this.
When I ask for a pay rise for doing the same job from my employer am I being unethical?
You're generally not doing the same job year over year. Your roles and responsibilities grow and evolve the longer you are there, so it makes sense that your pay would also grow with you.
If you want to turn something that used to cost me $400 one-time into a subscription that costs me $1.49/mo, I'll be happy that you've offered me the subscription and will buy it in subscription form. Charge $9.99/mo for that same subscription and I'll be incensed.
If the car was instead sold/bought with the heated seats as a subscription, I don’t see any problem with them being, well, a subscription.
Strong and broad consumer rejection is the only recourse for people not being ripped off by turning what was an owned asset into a rental through this method of cost hiding, which is why I think people are being worked up.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150316090012/https://purchase.... https://www.youneedabudget.com/pricing/
If I buy a car with heated seats physically there then i own them.
On that note, if someone just enables them without payment i'm curious of the legality. (or selling devices to enable it)
You should forget about what the car "has" and consider if the price makes sense for the features you get access to. This is for example how CPUs and GPUs are sold, and many other products. Consumers usually find it odd that they have the exact same specs (and smart consumers can enable those features for free), but it does provide for lower costs for manufacturing, which dictate how everything else works.
Absolutely not: manufacturers should forget about having their cake and eating it too.
It's not a digital asset that costs nothing to produce/host/sustain. These are raw materials, refined, that will someday end up in a landfill.
this subscription approach is just rent-seeking behavior, which is another sign that there's something wrong with the market.
I'm optimist though, I see the discourse moving in this direction and many countries starting to investigate properly how to implement these ideas from the 70's.
Many products use a consistent manufacturing process with binning... a qa step where their performance is measured and then sorted, so you pay more for the top 10 percentile. That makes sense to me... but things like this always seem wasteful regardless of the industry.
But there's no connection between adding it to every car and charging a subscription to use it. You could just as easily add the heater to every car and only allow people to use them if they pay a one-time charge, similar to the model today where you pay a one time fee to add the option at build-time.
There is - it means someone who bought the car not intending to use the feature, or who bought the car second-hand, can enable it later.
This winds me up because it's a raw, shitty deal: $18/m * 12m/y * forever = infinity.
Even assuming a short lifespan for the car (10 years) it's STILL a raw, shitty, dumpster fire of a deal: $2160 vs the $500 for the actual heated seats today.
BMW knows this. They are double dipping - optimize production costs, ream consumers, violate doctrine of first sale.
Happy life for our corporate masters.
Something being too expensive for you doesn't make the seller unethical (unless it's a necessary good maybe - but not a luxury car.)
This is an unbounded cost. That makes sense when the service provided has an unbounded cost associated with it that the manufacturer is paying, but that's utterly untrue in this situation.
This is about a manufacturer taking a cost saving measure - simplified manufacturing lines
Then manipulating a digital device to also take a profit increasing measure - creating a digital on/off switch for heated seats that they refuse to provide a key for.
Do you think it's ethical for the previous owner of your home to keep the keys? "Hey - you own this house now, but if you want access to the basement - I got the keys and you have to pay up! It's only 25 bucks per month!"
That's clearly hostile. What makes you bend over so far backwards to let BMW ream you up the ass here in exactly the same way?
Why are you comfortable giving them digital control of something you (in theory only) own?
I wouldn't want it myself. I don't get why people think it's unethical though. Someone called it a 'crime' elsewhere. That boggles my mind. It's their product - they can offer whatever payment model they want. If it's a crap one then don't buy it. If enough people think it's crap the market will adjust. It's a luxury car, not baby formula.
This is a distinct misunderstanding of acceptable capitalism. To be very blunt, it's simply not true.
We accept the idea that "greed is good" when it comes to capitalism only because we regulate the cases where the market fails to align the interests of the customer and manufacturer.
In cases where interests are aligned: Greed is good. The seller wants to take actions that increase profit, and that usually means either reducing the cost to produce the item, or increasing the real (or perceived) value of the item for consumers. Both of those are good things for all parties.
In cases where interests are not aligned we regulate the ever-loving shit out of the market because we have incredibly detailed historical evidence that shows that it devolves to straight abuse.
Things like
- Cartels
- Monopolies
- Fraud
- Misleading advertising
- Contractual abuse
- Unequal bargaining
- Regulated goods (black markets)
and several hundred other specific laws we have that only exist because without them people end up killing each other due to real (or perceived) injustice without them.
They absolutely won't be paying you any extra money for those heated seats... they're already going to have to go pay BMW for the freaking subscription anyways.
At best you could argue you're slightly increasing the interested market for your car, but even that feels incredibly flimsy. The market for used cars is vibrant, and very rarely is trim level a deciding factor on used car purchases.
Usually you can negotiate price on trim - but this decidedly removes that option. You just get fucked right round as the original buyer.
Pretty fun for them. Rent seeking usually is.
Pretty fucking terrible for everyone else. Perfect case of market failure, and an ideal target for regulation.
This kind of thing genuinely triggers disgust for me. Personally - I will NEVER buy from these brands again (and I'm in their target market for luxury cars). I'll also enthusiastically vote for politicians who propose regulation on this. In my opinion - nuke this bullshit from orbit.
Why is it 'pay for them' in the current model but 'waste money on them' in the new model?
It would be ironic if manufacturers were roasted for offering more options for payment rather than fewer.
I would not feel this way if the one-time cost were higher than before (I think $500 is about standard), or if purchases were locked to the original purchaser. And I recognize that some of these examples are of companies that do not offer one-time options.
That's a good call-out. I don't think there's anything wrong with offering a monthly option (it seems weird and I think there's probably some social commentary in there, but whatever), I just don't want to be forced to pay monthly.
It's like how it's "cheaper" to farm some foods and ship them half way around the world via plain and ship, than it is to farm the same food and ship it 100km across land. The "cost" doesn't reflect _in any way_ the resource/energy usage, or pollution emission of the system: only the human "cost", which is biased and lobbied strongly towards maintaining existing power centres.
Our systems stink.
So, you would need to ship something 2000km before it has equivalent emissions to a 100km trip by road. So yea you're right that it'd be silly to ship something around the world rather than drive it 100km - but that's a a rather small distance. For a real-world example, you would produces less carbon shipping something from Shenzhen in China to San Francisco (11,078 km) than you would produce shipping it from San Francisco to Los Angeles by truck (616km by road).
No country has the density of population and the natural resources to have every conceivable industry within a 100 miles of every conceivable destination - eventually some goods are going to have to travel a longer distance, and once you get more than a couple of hundred kilometres away by road it genuinely becomes more efficient to move it across thousands of kilometres of ocean.
This is the crux, and I totally and completely agree
No, this conclusion is not plausible at all. It doesn't explain why the payment should be recurring rather than paid only once (even if it's delayed post-manufacture).
This is not true. They are binned by capability, and sold at different price points.
I don't mind that idea - if it turned out installing heated seats failed in say... 28% of installations, fine - charge me more for a model with functioning heated seats.
Instead - this is introducing a fixed, recurring charge, and undermining the concept of ownership. That heated seat has zero cost for the manufacturer after installation, and that should be reflected in the costs to the consumer.
I find this a pretty un-ethical (appalling - really) attack on ownership, and long term, a way to undermine the used market for these goods (attack on doctrine of first sale).
Frankly - I think this should absolutely be targeted with regulation. This is literally rent-seeking, with no potential upside.
I know you just chose this as an example, but clearly it wouldn't be acceptable to anyone to have a failed installation of something like this. On one extreme, it could cause a fire; but otherwise, it's just a button that doesn't work, and damages the quality reputation of the car.
Processor binning only works because it is a black box, indistinguishable from the outside. You can purposely disable components if your yields get high enough, etc. and nobody will ever notice the difference.
For vehicles, automakers will learn from customers that this kind of nickel-and-diming is not appreciated, when people turn to other manufacturers that still "get it", e.g. Mazda.
That's only for the very high yield ones which get sold for specific computing purposes. The GPUs you buy at the store are already from the shit pile. Within that shit pile though, they all have exactly the same amount of transistors in there usually across different versions of the same product line, and if you buy the highest end version you get use of all of the transistors, if not you don't - but they are still there.
At one point, the old Geforce 6800 cards came in three varieties. The cheapest model had two disabled functional units. You could often unlock one successfully (6800XT to 6800), but both (6800XT to 6800GS) was prone to much higher instability and failure. Even if all the transistors worked, the rest of the board (power delivery, heatsinking) was often downgraded on cheap models.
I could tolerate car "binning", but only if it was burned into the hardware/firmware by the dealer and always transferred along with the physical vehicle.
What on earth kind of CPU or GPU have you bought where basic features require a reoccurring subscription?!
It's a way for companies to extract more revenue. They hope that customers don't mind too much that they are segmented into groups.
But they do. They feel hurt and outraged if they discover that they paid more than the neighbor for the same product or if the product could be elevated to a higher level at no cost for the producer if only someone had the right key. Companies then try to be clandestine, to mollify customers with cheap added value or offering opt-in by a complicated process for free (loyalty cards, coupons, rebates with conditions, and so on).
It's a fundamental conflict between producers and consumers.
If you want a perfect market economy price segmentation should be avoided. It causes confusion for customers and therefore prevents price transparency. It enables rent seeking by companies.
What they could do is allow you to enable that feature later, albeit at higher cost. Imagine what that could do for the used car market? I buy a car where the previous owner hadn't enabled heated seats. I contact the manufacturer and say I'd like to enable the heated seats. Heck, why stop there? The manufacturer may respond asking whether I'd like to purchase an option package instead that included a bunch of other features. This seems reasonable and pro-consumer. Subscribing to a feature does not.
Remote start does not require a subscription or the internet. We've had remote start for at least half a century with just a keyfob.
Satellite maps with updates? Maybe.
Does not require a subscription or the internet. My car's satnav is updated via a USB. $200 from the dealer, but is completely optional. Maybe I do it once every five years. Maybe never. I don't need up-to-the-second maps of hiking trails 4,000 miles away from a place my car will never visit.
Moreover, the last time I looked into updating via USB, there was a community online that had instructions for doing it for free with data, I think from Garmin.
The MBAs want us to believe we are required to be tethered to recurring charges for the rest of our lives. With very few exceptions (electricity, water, etc.) we aren't.
(Thought experiment, don’t downvote me just because)
Leasing is just a different form of buying the car, in a sense. Yes, the contract/agreement is not equivalent to a purchase, but in essence what you are doing is transforming a set of unknowns (will I have to repair my car twice in the first three years? How much will I spend? How many kilometers will I drive?) with more known quantities ($X/month, Y miles per year included, etc), and you don't have to pay the car upfront, but pay a monthly installment. (approximation, give me some rope here).
Instead, paying a monthly fee to heat my car seats is an aberration of the economic model. It doesn't make any sense, from a customer perspective.
Of course, we are all moving towards a subscription economy, and most customers will simply be royally f*cked up by that, and regulation/government will turn the other way in most cases. Good luck to us.
Sorry to be pedantic, but it was GM not Ford mentioned in the article.
It means that those of us in generally warm states like CA can opt-in to heated seats for the month or two we spend doing winter sports, and just pay for that usage, instead of paying a few thousand upfront for the heated seat package.
The only way to know what goes into your car and truly own it (currently) is to build it from parts.
The EV conversion market is growing too. Making cars electric drastically reduces the complexity for dads-at-home.
For example, I bought a pickup but didn't want 4 wheel drive. Being in the suburbs, of course, they only order 4 wheel drives pickups. I ended up getting a "work truck" ordered from a different part of the state where they are used as work vehicles. The useful stuff is generally still available (leather seats), just without the extra that a company won't pay for like pin-striping.
Ford even offers free fleet telematics services and you don't have to do anything to activate it. Source: worked for a company that had a bunch of vehicles. Boss was unaware we could automagically see fault codes, mileage, oil change status, etc.
People don't get it: any vehicle with telematics is transmitting a ton of data the entire time it's running, whether you pay for telematics or not.
I'm not sure why anyone would call this a "basic feature", or indeed why anyone would want it.
For heated seats, someone will add a bypass that just adds a physical switch that is spliced directly somewhere between a power source and the actual heating element. Just have to figure out an aesthetic place to mount it. The only downside being, in this case you can't control it via an aPp or through the tablet that replaced the actual console controls. Big loss.
That has to be trivial to bypass. Maybe as an added bonus you can turn it on with a button.
As someone that has a very difficult time managing my real life, I've reduced my periodic payments to mortgage, utilities, internet, phone, insurance. No netflix, no streaming music services, no amazon prime. And even then I frequently forget or mis-budget. I really don't want to add 100 monthly fees to do this or that.
It's probably not safe to operate these sorts of features in perpetuity. Funding the security team to deal with hacks seems necessary and the cost is reasonable. Really, it's comforting to hope that in 20 years time you might still get security updates. (As opposed to my smartphone which is only 4 years old and can't be upgraded to the latest Android at any price.)
This is categorically different than software updates and feature releases - in that case, you can justify a recurring subscription, because extra value is being provided to the customer. In the bug-fixing case, the customer literally did not receive the value was promised to them (false advertising) - the bug represents an unfulfilled obligation, and the fix is not new functionality, but the fulfillment of what was already promised and paid for.
This is distinct from something like heated seats where yes, if it works it works.
I would say the solution would be not to buy cars from makers that introduce subs. But people will do it anyway. Sounds like a new world of perpetual renting.