Probably, but nothing is to stop a manufacturer from just doing this artificially and it would be hard to prove it one way or the other, since the end user would never have enough data.
If $1,000ish every year was a reasonable cost based on increased warranty risk, that is a big increase in risk!
If the price dropped over time as the warranty ticked away, eventually becoming free after the warranty expires, or if you could ask for it without paying in exchange for voiding your warranty, then this would be reasonable. But they didn't do either of those things.
Some people buy cars for status and bragging, so you need the car to be expensive. Others don't care. So instead of having too separate cars, you just sell the "base version" for $X and then sell "status upgrades". Like "skins" in video games.
The bragging person will brag about the expensive subscription, just like some brag about their AMEX/Centurion/... credit card, while the regular person will get a cheaper car since it's price won't be artificially inflated to cater to the luxury segment.
That's a good point - I reckon Mercedes haven't thought this through fully yet.
All cars have their branding and model number on display, perhaps what new cars will have is some kind of fancy electronic display on the back that shows the current model number. When you subscribe to the added extras, the display will show something different to let others know that your car is one of the special faster ones and, by extension, that you are better than the others !
A status tax is an excellent idea. Is it horrible and anti-consumer? Absolutely. Status hunger is a vice, and companies will figure out a way to exploit this in a more nuanced fashion, as it opens more revenue streams.
You think it's a good idea that the performance of your car (and other features behind simple software flags) is remotely controlled by the manufacturer locking you into a relationship with them, giving them the ability to reduce the resale value of the car you "own" if you don't pay them an ongoing subscription? I don't think this is a model worth cheering about unless you're a shareholder.
Your Google Drive/DropBox/OneDrive storage space or your IntelliJ IDEA feature level (Basic/Pro/Ultimate) is also remotely controlled by how much you pay.
What's the resale value of the IntelliJ IDEA that you "own"?
Funny how HN thinks that's perfectly fine, but if you do this to cars suddenly it's a dystopian nightmare.
Google Drive/DropBox and OneDrive has continued costs for the hosting provider and for this reason a subscription makes complete sense.
IntelliJ IDEA can be bought as a perpetual license [1] and the subscription just gives you access to the latest version.
The increased acceleration would make sense if it was a one time payment but as a subscription its nonsense. Mercedes has no costs for it after they produced the car.
A better analogy is Office 365. Traditionally preputial licenses were purchased. Now consumers have become accustomed to purchasing access to the desktop applications through a subscription.
Advocating for this is the equivalent of going "Yeah man, it's not a big deal that you don't 'own' those movies/games/books on a digital service, and a company can decide to rescind them without refund if they didn't like the post you made on Twitter."
Considering that cars are becoming a bunch of electric motors controlled by a computer, I'm thinking that even without subscriptions we're going to see identical hardware sold as 2 different performance models with the only difference being a sotfware flag. Car manufacturers are extremely good at streamlining production.
I think it's Tesla that started with Autopilot and now others are also experimenting.
In the case of subscriptions, obviously the resale value will become based on base configuration without options with the buyer then hopefully able to get the subscriptions they want.
Having the hardware tuned to specific performance curve (via software) doesn't bother me as long as I know when I buy the car what I'm buying. There are reasons to do that, long term wear and tear, safety, insurance costs, co2, etc. But I resent being made to pay a subscription for something that has no natural need for one, especially when it requires no ongoing work for the company I am paying. It's slimey and only exists to erode ownership, increase the cusumers reliance on the manufacturer and will disporportionately affect poor people whose wealth is further lessened by never properly owning anything.
Interesting anecdata… for quite some time it was possible to buy hardware from IBM with CPU cores locked and the buyer has to pay to unlock the cores. Not that all cores were locked, half of them were though.
The acceleration you needed wasn't there the moment you needed it most, because your subscription expired or your car couldn't get online to check that it was still active.
This is an SUV that can do 0 to 60 in 6.2. Those used to be sports car numbers not too long ago. 5.2 is ludicrous for anything without an electric motor. It is not as if this is a 90s Yugo.
Some car magazine a while back did a side-by-side comparison of two Mercedes sedans, one with a V6 and the other with a V8. They were happier with the V6, because nobody can use the extra power given speed enforcement on highways. So do yourself a favor and just don't pay for it.
I disagree. I am in a bad situation. I know my car. I either brake or accelerate to get out of this pickle. I choose to accelerate, based on what I know that the car can do, as that seems to be the safest. And it doesn't react the way I expect. Now I'm dead.
It seems highly unlikely. What maneuver are you pulling where you need to floor it and your 0-60 time comes into play? You see a boulder rolling down a hill toward the road a quarter mile away, and you say "I can beat it!"
Something unexpected is moving into your lane (wreck from the other lane, semi driver falling asleep, moose, ...), and you need to apply some combination of braking, accelerating, and turning to avoid it.
Less drastically but much more frequently, just when merging onto the freeway you'll typically choose to accelerate or brake based on what's most comfortable given the available traffic openings, and finding in hindsight that acceleration wasn't actually an option isn't going to make the road safer.
Have you really never been in a situation where you need to accelerate out of the way of another driver braking the law? For example, driving through an intersection and suddenly you notice someone is running their red light on a collision course. You must either go forward or backward. Much more difficult to reverse than to accelerate.
I check intersections before proceeding through them , so no that hasn't happened in 250,000 miles of driving.
And what is that, like 0.5 seconds to make a difference? How much further will the car be when it had this subscription vs not having the subscription?
Half a second seems roughly right. An exact answer depends on the car's power band and other more complicated factors. You'd expect an extra 2-8 inches, and if the interesection were a bit wider and slower so that you had 1.0 seconds you'd expect an extra 16-64 inches. Also, on such small timescales the engine's responsiveness would come into play, and it's unclear if the tuned package would affect that for sure, but it'd be hard for it not to.
2-8 inches probably won't give you better odds of any meaningful outcomes beyond an extra few percent. 16-64 inches could easily be the difference between a miss and a crash (especially if the red-light runner swerves or counting the selection bias in which distribution of possible strike zones you're likely to have predicated on the assumption that accelerating was a reasonable course of action), or would very likely be the difference between an extremely dangerous collision with the driver's door and something more reasonable toward the back of the car (worse with kids in the back -- thankfully for the purpose of this discussion, only 15% of cars in the US have passengers).
That depends how the UI to the extra power is implemented. I bet the lower power mode still has increasing power the further the pedal is pressed (as opposed to simply finding there is no extra power if you floor it -- a smooth monotonic graph rather than one clipped at the top), so you still have a feedback loop going through the latency of conscious thought as you press the pedal the "right" amount to accelerate (not flooring it), find that it's insufficient, and now still have to choose between braking and accelerating -- either braking after you've already decided that's the less safe option and accelerated enough that that's probably more true than it was previously, or accelerating now that you've wasted some time and need to accelerate more briskly than you previously would have (maybe even flooring it, which as you say is not a safe place to be) while also having doubts about whether attempting to accelerate faster will actually suffice since your current pedal input should have also sufficed.
Edit: Not to mention, lack of safety in an absolute sense doesn't mean that the safest option for a given driver (predicated on the assumption that it looked safe to go as far as the onramp and there's no way off other than merging eventually) wouldn't be to floor it to merge. In the Bay Area in particular, drivers are notoriously aggressive about both tailgating and blocking merge attempts, and faced with a tricky merge you might find that braking input is unlikely to work (no openings toward the rear), heavy braking to avoid the situation is unlikely to work (in theory you're supposed to yield to the freeway traffic, but doing so will probably result in the tailgater behind you rear-ending you), and the nearest available opening in front of you requires heavy acceleration. It'd be better if everyone could be polite and zipper merge, but in a bad situation with limited personal control you can only hope to make the best of it.
You do a legally allowed right turn on red. But visibility to the left is bad, and only as you turn do you notice a bus on your left. You floor it to avoid the collision.
To be fair, a vehicle that does 0-60 in 10s can probably pull this off too.
That's bad driving, sorry. If you don't have good visibility, just don't turn right on red. It's a stupid law that allows it anyway and if makes streets more dangerous to pedestrians.
Obviously... that Star Wars screen where they just dropped there bomb in the through regulator vent and need to Get Out Real Quick before the Death Star explodes.
I agree with the "speed is not the solution" point of view. But if you're used to your car behaving in a certain way (accelerating fast in this case) and then your subscription expires and suddenly, while overtaking someone, you realise that it's no longer behaving the same way. That could be dangerous.
Due to my car having good acceleration I spend less time on the opposite lane during overtaking. This is safer for those in my car, the vehicle/object I'm overtaking and the traffic from the other direction.
Why is it safer? Are you saying that you would otherwise overtake another car in an unsafe way, perhaps when you haven't enough visibility to check if there is no oncoming traffic for the overtake time? That's on you. The decision is the same, in a fast car or a slow one.
A faster car allows you to safely overtake more frequently than a slow one because it requires less time (distance) to complete the accelerate/overtake/return operation.
Many drivers in slow cars think they can execute the same manoeuvre as the fast car in front of them and this is when accidents happen - often fatal too.
So bad driving causes crashes? Who would that thought? It's not that the faster car is safer then, it's just the fact that if you try to overtake without sufficient room, you will be taking a risk.
No-one is disputing that a faster car allows you to overtake faster.
Honestly you should not be overtaking in the other lane at all. It's a large risk to you and the other drivers on the road, and all you get in return is a few seconds off your trip.
This assumes the driver in the front is a good driver. What if the driver is constantly breaking and accelerating? Or the driver is simply a big truck that cover the view
I take your point, but if the driver in front is a "big truck that cover the view," then that is all the more reason not to pull into the other lane! This is probably the most dangerous time to attempt this sort of merge.
>What if the driver is constantly breaking and accelerating?
I've found that there are two general strategies that work well in this situation.
- Simply increase distance and wait longer to catch up to the driver in front of you. This accounts for their bad driving.
- Modulate your speed using the car in front of the car in front of you. ie, focus on the 2nd car in front of you. They're likely driving with the flow of traffic properly and won't constantly be accelerating and braking. It might sound unintuitive to focus focus on a car other than the one in front of you, but this can actually be more safe: You've made enough space between yourself and the car in front you to avoid an accident, and you're better prepared for when the actual braking will occur.
In the UK the overtaking driver is expected to give ample room and the example diagrams on this highway code guide [0](considered to be a good resource) implies the driver occupies the opposite lane.
Here in Ireland the highway code is almost identical given the history of British influence [1].
Giving 1.5-2m distance would imply use of the opposite lane.
Merging on to freeways? Turning in to traffic? Passing a slow car in fast traffic?
I spent years driving a $500 shit box car. There are loads of situations where acceleration mitigates other people's mistakes. I lost that car getting rear ended - not my fault, but it could have been avoided with more power (saving myself weeks of neck pain).
So you're driving in a manner that if your car gets a hiccough and underperforms, you're in extreme danger? That happens all the time with ICE cars...how are you not dead yet?
Yes but imagine you're in a stressful situation where your life is in danger because you didn't realize your subscription expired and your 0-60 is 6.1s instead of 5.1s.
Are you hitting doenshifts 100% in those situations?
I was traveling and rented an underpowered hybrid ford something that defaults to Eco mode every time you turn it on. I was waiting to turn left in crosstraffic and when I saw my chance hit the gas to go and I assure you I almost died due to lack of acceleration.
On a motorcycle, reaction speed is all you have to save your ass and accelerating away from danger is a totally valid strategy in many situations. A car may not be able to squeeze ahead as easily in a bind because of its size but having enough reserve power still makes some maneuvers safer (e.g. overtaking a slow vehicle).
The “speed is safety” bit is probably a lot more obvious to motorcyclists but applies to everyone on the road, even if the situations are less likely. Imagine some road eager tries to pit maneuver you but you’re able to accelerate away and they miss. Or you’re not able, and you end up dead.
I hope the people who designed/developed do not have clean consciouses.
Totally. What are they going to do next, put your banana dropper on a subscription? So next time some road rager fires a turtle shell at you it doesn’t harmlessly hit your bananas, and you end up dead.
“Driving too fast for conditions or in excess of posted speed limit” is the largest related factor in fatal crashes in the US, according to the NHTSA, it ranks above alcohol (by nearly 2x!). https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
Do keep in mind that we’re talking about a subscription to go 0-60 MPH in 5.2 seconds vs 0-60 in 6.2 seconds. The non-subscribed acceleration of 0-60 in 6.2 seconds for this specific car is far faster than the majority of cars on the road can accelerate. Do also keep in mind that the non-subscription features of the car must pass all safety standards, therefore safety is clearly not on a subscription model. There are plenty of valid reasons to dislike these auto-maker attempts at rent seeking, so let’s not be hyperbolic about them, lest we undermine the stronger arguments.
It's definitely harder to count the time spent speeding when that speeding doesn't end in a crash, but the NHTSA still tries to do it [0]. About 19% of vehicle miles are driven at more than 10 mph above the speed limit on highways, somewhat fewer on city streets.
That might seem like a logical point, but think about it a little more; if speeding is helping some people to not crash, then the point you’re effectively making is that speeding might actually make you even more than twice as likely to cause a fatal accident as a drunk driver, but sometimes helps enough that it evens out to be only twice as likely to cause a fatality.
It’s not true that non-crashes aren’t represented here- the NHTSA statistics capture the rate of crashes in terms like crashes per vehicle miles traveled, which represents both the probability of crashing and the probability of not crashing (one minus the probability of crashing). The fact that speeding is a huge factor in many crashes and that it increases the chance of death does in fact demonstrate that it’s overall less safe to speed. Speed might anecdotally help some people in some situations, but the actual stats do prove that the net effect of speeding is greater risk.
Acceleration increases the degree of control you have over your vehicle. That control could be the difference between life and death in an emergency. For example if you see a car driving towards you from the side (e.g. they're running a red light), increased acceleration could allow you to get out of the way in time.
More conventionally, increased acceleration allows you to complete an overtaking manoeuvre in a reduced time. Reduced overtaking distance is fairly universally regarded as also reducing the risk of an accident.
That’s true, good point. (But we’re talking about a sport feature of a Mercedes car with unnecessary amounts of acceleration.)
> Acceleration increases the degree of control you have over your vehicle
That’s not true. You’re exercising control by accelerating, but not increasing control. Braking and steering are also exercising control. Accelerating too fast in wet or dusty conditions reduces control. Accelerating too quickly when people around you don’t expect it increases the risk of accident.
> Reduced overtaking distance is fairly universally regarded as also reducing the risk of an accident.
I’ve never heard this before, can you back this claim up with some evidence? The NHTSA report I posted is quite thorough and does not mention passing time as a risk factor. I’m sure you’re right and it is true when overtaking into oncoming traffic, if you cross the median. I doubt this is true for separated freeways like most of the urban US interstates inside city boundaries. I’m sure your claim here is not true when people exceed the speed limit in order to overtake, which is a very common occurrence where I live. Much of the passing that goes on happens when someone overtakes another person who’s already traveling at or above the speed limit, by further exceeding the speed limit. This is not made safer by doing it faster.
We recently shopped for new home appliances and were surprised at how hard it is to find non-"smart" ones these days.
At this point I think it's inevitable that some appliance features will require a subscription (e.g. your fridge's ice-maker is an additional $5/month).
I've heard this same sentiment for years but my refrigerator/freezer went out approx 3 months ago and I was dreading having to find a dumb replacement. But when I went to our local Lowe's, surprisingly there was only one smart refrigerator option out of the approx. 30 dumb units. So I was able to easily purchase a nice, high quality, dumb replacement.
Obviously that's just anecdotal, but was a pleasant surprise.
It is very quick and easy to filter options on homedepot.com, Lowes.com, Costco.com, and BestBuy.com to see many non smart fridges available for purchase.
Most people are terrible at pricing an item over its full lifetime. A smaller cash outlay almost always attracts a sale, even if the item has a much shorter expected lifespan than a more expensive alternative, or will require constant repairs, etc. Seeing a low base price on a car, fridge, etc will sway people to buy an item even if there's now a larger operational expense. You're not just powering a device you own anymore but also "unlocking" the Ice Maker Feature(tm) for $5/month.
This feels like businesses are trying to force everyone in the debt trap that keeps the poor where they are. Having to pay a monthly subscription for basic functionality isn't _that_ different from being in debt. But instead of floating consumers a loan, these companies are selling an item that selectively breaks if they miss a payment.
Part of it is simply, why would it sell for cheaper when they can get away selling it for the same?
And part of it, I believe, is inflation. I.e. I believe inflation is vastly undercounted and underreported, because a good chunk of it hides in "shrinkflation", decrease of manufacturing quality, lower-quality components, replacing customer service with "AI" chatbots and recently also voicebots, more ads and upsells, and - of course - extra subscriptions tacked on to everything.
I bought a new washing machine two months ago. I went to an appliance store and specifically asked for a dumb one. The seller lied to me and said they don’t sell those. They actually did, but it was the cheapest model and I had to look for it by myself. For my next washing machine, I’ll be looking for a professional model, of the kind that you find in laundromats.
From what I hear, the problem with professional models of appliances, beyond concerns like heat, noise, vibration and price, is that in some cases, it could void your home insurance. One needs to read the policy extra carefully these days.
It's easy to say "just don't buy it", but a few of us not buying it will not swing the balance sheets when the extra profit is so significant for the companies pulling this shit.
It seems inevitable that these types of subscriptions will slowly take over more and more areas of end consumer lives, until there's such a fatigue and hard push-back on subscriptions that it becomes profitable to create companies that sell products outright just to compete with subscription models.
As-is, launching a company that will compete with the subscription models is difficult. You will have a harder time finding investors (who will see the numbers and ask, "are you crazy?"). You basically have to do this, alongside others, just because you believe it's the right thing to do.
And then you have to not get bought up by a company that will introduce this model.
I'm not saying all subscription models are bad; I believe they're warranted or a good trade-off in a lot of cases, especially in hosted software. But knowing how significant a difference it makes, I just don't see this turning out well for consumers, even if we want to organize boycotts.
So, how do we speedrun to the part where "you own your product" competition exists and thrives?
Unauthorised third-party modifications and add-ons may end up being part of the solution here. It's already established that this can be a viable business model with e.g. car accessories, games consoles and printer inks. I can see a market for one-off DIY modifications to various things that unlock what was intended to be a subscription feature.
A related issue is the increasing possiblity of devices being effectively bricked because some cloud service or online system has ceased support. Could there be a niche for a company selling improved after-market firmware for other companies' devices?
My fridge is not ‘smart’ but the water filter has a chip in it that does not allow third party filters. Funny how that fact was not advertised when I bought it.
In my humble opinion, here are some of the best appliance brands that don't require smart features to be enabled or offer smart features.
For washers and dryers: Speed Queen makes some of the most reliable washers and dryers I've ever seen. You'll pay an arm and a leg for them, but they're known to last for between double to quadruple the length of the warranty. My family recently had to purchase a new washing machine, and the Speed Queen display at the store showed off the drum unit designs for Speed Queen vs their competition; Speed Queen uses a single giant gear made of stainless steel, whereas other brands use super complex plastic gearboxes.
For refrigerators: it's really a toss-up; I was able to find plenty of high predicted reliability models without Wi-Fi on Consumer Reports' website.
For other appliances: I haven't had to look for any other appliances as of late, but I always look to CR first because I personally trust their ratings. Your milage may vary.
If durability is your primary criteria then the usual recommendation is to purchase commercial appliances targeted towards restaurants and institutional customers. Those have fewer features and cost more, but are generally more robust. Consumer Reports doesn't usually review those.
I doubt it but I share your concerns - you will always get the basic home appliances without proprietary firmware, or at least the ability to flash them with open source firmware. I can’t wait to see the first open source car for mass production.
On one hand cars have been sold with "same engine different tuning" for different prices for a long time now. Paying 5k extra to "own" the extra HP versus paying 5k in installments over the life of the vehicle to lease it only makes a difference if it turns out to be a loss over the same period for the buyer, or if the company is allowed to rescind the agreement. Tesla already brought this to mainstream in the auto industry by putting all the hardware in and then limiting its use or the battery capacity with a software switch.
On the other hand even the most advantageous subscription today just eases people into this model which certainly opens the door for far more abuse in the future than straight ownership.
Given where we are today with subscriptions I'd say that battle is already lost. People stopped owning their movies or music (that's after you realize that even having a physical copy doesn't mean ownership), and who knows how many other things. It's just one more software switch for a feature you rent rather than own.
I wonder how many people buy these things outright. Every time I see an ad for a luxury car, they tell you about the monthly payment. If you stop making the monthly payment, guess what? They take the whole car away.
There are already GPS interlock systems where the dealer can shut down your car and locate it for collection, just in case of such a thing.
My husband and I purchased a new electric car last year.
It is for this and many related reasons that we found the exact car we wanted, took the VIN to our bank, and walked into the dealership with a financing check. The dealer financing officer called our bank, gave them the price-out-the-door, and our bank gave them a PIN to write on the check alongside the total amount.
We walked away without having any further relationship with the dealership. Despite this, they tried several times to get our written consent to run their own financing. We steadfastly refused.
Not everyone is in a position to do this, but it was nice because we didn’t have to put up with any (other) dealer bullshit. (We did have to put up with other tangentially related dealer bullshit, which I have previously written about on here.)
In the states, dealerships make more from financing kickbacks than from the actual sale.
One of the strategies I hear about online is working with the dealership to take out financing with the implicit understanding that you’ll wait to pay off the loan until after they’ve received their payout.
One should always come to the dealer with their own financing already approved- because it’s a starting point for negotiation. It’s very common for dealers to find a better APR than you can get independently. It’s also common to bundle discounts/perks with dealer financing. Customer has to do the math to figure out if the deal is good for them.
Dealer GPS tracking and interlocking is usually reserved for “credit criminals” and folks with previous repos.
That’s frequently true. This was an unusual situation. In our case, they wouldn’t have been able to better our financing. Our credit union was giving us 1.75%. The best the dealership could do started at about twice that.
We had also contracted ahead of time to buy that particular car at almost exactly MSRP, and between the overly eager sales rep who wrote it up with no dealer add-ons, and Toyota’s allocation system deadlines, they were incentivized to walk us out of there as fast as possible. We were there less than an hour.
Assuming that initial assumptions about resale values and reliability hold out, leasing vs financing is essentially a wash. You’re either paying for the whole car with interest with equal payments over a period of time or you’re opting for lower payments with a final balloon payment.
Now, cash vs financing is a different story, but that depends on whether you have that much cash on hand and what you plan to do with it. Most people don’t have 35K available to buy a car outright.
I prefer cash over financing. Most buyers opt for the latter, and have been for decades.
Buying a German luxury car is kind of a silly financial decision for most consumers because the electronics are so fragile, and so expensive to repair. Ownership cost gets ridiculous after the warranty expires. So if you want to drive a Mercedes-Benz then the smart move is to lease instead of buy. Then it's based on monthly payments anyway so subscriptions are kind of moot.
The GPS interlock systems generally aren't used by new car franchise dealers. You mostly see those at "buy here pay here" used car lots that target "credit criminals" and do a lot of repos.
the drawback with a subscription is resale value: the next guy will need to buy the subscription too. You cannot recoup the money spent on subscription when you sell your used car.
My Model Y has a $2000 in-app purchase option to increase acceleration by something like 0.5s.
It’s not a subscription, but the idea is the same.
It doesn’t bother me one bit: I bought the car knowing full well that it wasn’t included, I don’t need it (the standard acceleration is already more than I ever had before), end of story.
Car engines have been under the control of software for decades now, with different products differing by the program. The only difference here is that there’s now the option to change the program over the air.
Nobody would have complained if Mercedes had offered 2 versions without the option to upgrade.
My biggest issue with this kind of thing is resale. This kills resale value, because the company is going to be leeching a lot of that value with every transfer. They're not going to make the unlocks transferrable.
Are you sure? I personally don’t like the subscription model for car features, but look at it this way: it means there will be more cars in the second-hand market that are capable of faster acceleration or seat-heating or whatever else is pay-walled. It means that people can pay for a lower model car, and then someone else can buy it and “upgrade” to the higher model. I don’t know or have evidence that this will help resale value, but it seems at least logically plausible that it could help resale by giving downstream purchasers more options than they might have otherwise. You’re right, it’s still true that the auto-maker is leeching some of the value with every transfer, and that unlocks won’t transfer, but I’m not sure that will hurt resale.
Pretty sure. As this continues, more and more things will be behind paywalls. The companies have every incentive to do this. Then more and more percentage of the value of the car is _not_ transferrable and will need to be paid (again) to the company by any new owner.
You paid X thousand for "upgrades"? Great, that is completely lost money when you sell it.
You can see this in the games market with DLC-heavy games. The physical copies of those aren't worth much because it doesn't even include most of the content.
The effect you explain does exist I think, but to me seems to be obviously overpowered by the other(s) in the other direction.
Yes the companies are incentivized, and yes they will extract money on resales, and yes your upgrades aren’t transferable. All good reasons to be careful when subscribing to features of this car. It might hurt first sale more than it hurts resale, if people actually care, which could be a good thing.
But I’m not sure the analogy to DLC games works here, you’re talking about DLC value that you purchased above and beyond the initial price of the game. The game itself doesn’t lose resale value, it’s the value of your DLC that doesn’t transfer.
If you want a new electric Mercedes, your choices will be either buy a new one at the new-car price and subscribe to upgrades, or buy a used one at the cheaper used-car price and subscribe to any upgrades you want. Cheaper and upgradeable is still going to be attractive to buyers than more expensive up-front. Part of the deal here is (presumably) that the car was cheaper in the first place than it would have been if the upgrade features were built in and permanent.
> It might hurt first sale more than it hurts resale, if people actually care, which could be a good thing.
If consumers were rational, that's how it'd work. They pretty rarely are though.
> But I’m not sure the analogy to DLC games works here, you’re talking about DLC value that you purchased above and beyond the initial price of the game. The game itself doesn’t lose resale value, it’s the value of your DLC that doesn’t transfer.
It's barely even an analogy it's so exact. You could just call acceleration upgrades and heated seats and whatever DLC, it's the same thing.
All of that can be accomplished with one-time purchases. What’s the value-add of a subscription?
It’s great that future buyers can upgrade, I think that’s cool. But now sellers can’t recoup any of the money they spend on these features, and over the life of the car they are likely to cost many times more. It’s brutal for lower-income people relying on decent cars to eventually reach a price point they can afford, because they’ll need to effectively pay for every option like they are buying new.
> All of that can be accomplished with one-time purchases. What’s the value-add of a subscription?
True, and some of these new car subscription features are indeed being offered as one-time purchases, BMW’s heated seats, for example. The value-add of a subscription is a lower up-front cost in exchange for rent instead of ownership. You don’t have to pay for the whole thing, and you can decide to stop paying for it before you’ve covered the product’s full cost.
> now sellers can’t recoup any of the money they spend
True, and people should (and some will) consider this before buying a new electric Mercedes, right? I hope so. Their FAQ states that the service must be disabled before resale. I’m pretty sure I won’t be buying one of these new. But for people who go in eyes wide open, there’s a decent chance they’ll still sell them eventually. Hey, who knows, maybe they’ll be force to sell for less than the car’s worth because of everyone’s subscription fears.
> It’s brutal for lower-income people
We’ve suddenly skipped a few steps here. We’re commenting on a Mercedes car with an optional feature to increase acceleration to 60 MPH by 1 second. This isn’t a brand that lower-income people are buying, by and large, and isn’t a feature lower-income people will be subscribing to. Cars for the lower-income brackets are already sold with zero luxury features, so I don’t see how this option feature aimed at rich people hurts poorer people at all, and I don’t see the slippery slope clearly in this case either.
This will kill the resale value as soon as the possibility to upgrade expires. Why would Mercedes let you buy heated seats for a ten year old car when they could upsell you to lease a new one? Also, does 30$/month subscription make as much sense on a 10k$ car as it did on a 80k$ one?
And yes, this will happen. Just look at how many games are broken already because the servers were shut down and how many cars don't get original parts anymore. I have no confidence that car manufacturers will be better with subscription servers and that's assuming they stay in business, which is not a given (see, for example, Scion and Saab).
I’m not that worried. Monthly subscriptions work mainly because they’re impulse buys.
The mental impact of paying three-four figures a year for a subscription is different from a 3.99 app store payment.
This will benefit some folks. I imagine that most people will simply pass, the same way they’ve been passing on all of the other non-Tesla car subscription/remote upgrade offers.
> The only difference here is that there’s now the option to change the program over the air.
The mutability is the part that bothers me. Remotely disabling features and the option to hike prices for monthly subscriptions to have functionality in the car serve to erode the concept of ownership. I'm not a Tesla owner but I believe they also allow paid upgrades that neither stick with the owner nor with the car during a sale. How is that not exploitative?
It’s exploitative if it is not sticky and isn’t clearly communicated. But it’s not relevant for the Mercedes case where it’s very clear that it’s a subscription.
For my personal case, it still doesn’t matter, of course.
I wouldn’t complain if it was a one-time purchase. Different spec levels have always cost different amounts for basically every product.
But what ongoing value do I get for my subscription? Will I get free acceleration upgrades over time because they keep improving the software? Free brake light DLCs that show how hard I’m accelerating? It’s great I can upgrade OTA but what about that means I need to pay over and over?
Acceleration is not a service- there’s no ongoing cost to deliver it to owners and there’s no increase in value to the owner over time to compensate for the ever increasing cost. That’s why I think the subscription model is much more exploitative.
A subscription model where you know the exact terms is less exploitative than a fixed cost where it’s not even clear if the upgrade is sticky or not (as is currently the case for Tesla.)
I don’t get the “it’s not a service” argument. It’s not relevant. There’s no ongoing cost with many software licenses either. It’s just a business model.
Subscription fatigue could transform in a regulation. I have a Muse S EEG device and yesterday I discovered that I need to subscribe to their monthly service for just recording my EEG without listening their meditations guides. I obviously can mute them or hack it.
I understand that this is different from subsidized game consoles since I paid the full product.
I do wonder if auto-makers might suffer some subscription fatigue themselves in the near future when these electronic features get hacked and people enjoy them without paying. The danger of giving someone hardware capable of something and then artificially limiting it is that hardware can be modified, and arguably has stronger legal support for such modification.
please note that this additional subscription fee only applies to physical models. in the, increasingly popular metaverse version acceleration tuning is part of the base subscription.
The birth of a new category - acceleration as a service. Perhaps future iterations will have usage-based billing and throttling based on an acceptable use policy.
Hard to miss the irony that the place with the worlds highest density of beneficaries of such silicon valley driven business models drowns in outcry as soon as "old-industries" finally cought wind of it.
133 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadA few more steps closer to paid doors to your apartment from Ubik: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7444685-the-door-refused-to...
I guess we'll see if Mercedes is going to suddenly prevent third party tuners from doing this, but I guess not.
If $1,000ish every year was a reasonable cost based on increased warranty risk, that is a big increase in risk!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33744577
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33750228
Some people buy cars for status and bragging, so you need the car to be expensive. Others don't care. So instead of having too separate cars, you just sell the "base version" for $X and then sell "status upgrades". Like "skins" in video games.
The bragging person will brag about the expensive subscription, just like some brag about their AMEX/Centurion/... credit card, while the regular person will get a cheaper car since it's price won't be artificially inflated to cater to the luxury segment.
It’s just pure greed and collusion and abuse of their position in the market to facilitate these things.
All cars have their branding and model number on display, perhaps what new cars will have is some kind of fancy electronic display on the back that shows the current model number. When you subscribe to the added extras, the display will show something different to let others know that your car is one of the special faster ones and, by extension, that you are better than the others !
What's the resale value of the IntelliJ IDEA that you "own"?
Funny how HN thinks that's perfectly fine, but if you do this to cars suddenly it's a dystopian nightmare.
IntelliJ IDEA can be bought as a perpetual license [1] and the subscription just gives you access to the latest version.
The increased acceleration would make sense if it was a one time payment but as a subscription its nonsense. Mercedes has no costs for it after they produced the car.
[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/#commercial (All yearly subscriptions include a perpetual fallback license.)
That's where this is going to head.
I think it's Tesla that started with Autopilot and now others are also experimenting.
In the case of subscriptions, obviously the resale value will become based on base configuration without options with the buyer then hopefully able to get the subscriptions they want.
I can't imagine if Apple sells us an iPhone with 3 cameras, and we have to pay 3 different subscription tiers to access to each of them.
And now you are dead.
Safety is now software, on a subscription model.
That whole argument is as old and tired as it is wrong.
Escaping from dangerous situations is not a thing. Speed got you in that situation in the first place.
Wouldn't such a thing be useful when overtaking?
Some car magazine a while back did a side-by-side comparison of two Mercedes sedans, one with a V6 and the other with a V8. They were happier with the V6, because nobody can use the extra power given speed enforcement on highways. So do yourself a favor and just don't pay for it.
Less drastically but much more frequently, just when merging onto the freeway you'll typically choose to accelerate or brake based on what's most comfortable given the available traffic openings, and finding in hindsight that acceleration wasn't actually an option isn't going to make the road safer.
And what is that, like 0.5 seconds to make a difference? How much further will the car be when it had this subscription vs not having the subscription?
2-8 inches probably won't give you better odds of any meaningful outcomes beyond an extra few percent. 16-64 inches could easily be the difference between a miss and a crash (especially if the red-light runner swerves or counting the selection bias in which distribution of possible strike zones you're likely to have predicated on the assumption that accelerating was a reasonable course of action), or would very likely be the difference between an extremely dangerous collision with the driver's door and something more reasonable toward the back of the car (worse with kids in the back -- thankfully for the purpose of this discussion, only 15% of cars in the US have passengers).
Edit: Not to mention, lack of safety in an absolute sense doesn't mean that the safest option for a given driver (predicated on the assumption that it looked safe to go as far as the onramp and there's no way off other than merging eventually) wouldn't be to floor it to merge. In the Bay Area in particular, drivers are notoriously aggressive about both tailgating and blocking merge attempts, and faced with a tricky merge you might find that braking input is unlikely to work (no openings toward the rear), heavy braking to avoid the situation is unlikely to work (in theory you're supposed to yield to the freeway traffic, but doing so will probably result in the tailgater behind you rear-ending you), and the nearest available opening in front of you requires heavy acceleration. It'd be better if everyone could be polite and zipper merge, but in a bad situation with limited personal control you can only hope to make the best of it.
To be fair, a vehicle that does 0-60 in 10s can probably pull this off too.
Obviously... that Star Wars screen where they just dropped there bomb in the through regulator vent and need to Get Out Real Quick before the Death Star explodes.
It's a win-win-win all round.
Many drivers in slow cars think they can execute the same manoeuvre as the fast car in front of them and this is when accidents happen - often fatal too.
No-one is disputing that a faster car allows you to overtake faster.
>What if the driver is constantly breaking and accelerating?
I've found that there are two general strategies that work well in this situation.
- Simply increase distance and wait longer to catch up to the driver in front of you. This accounts for their bad driving.
- Modulate your speed using the car in front of the car in front of you. ie, focus on the 2nd car in front of you. They're likely driving with the flow of traffic properly and won't constantly be accelerating and braking. It might sound unintuitive to focus focus on a car other than the one in front of you, but this can actually be more safe: You've made enough space between yourself and the car in front you to avoid an accident, and you're better prepared for when the actual braking will occur.
The big truck example, I wasn't suggesting you overtake without view, rather increase the distance, then overtake.
In Italy you can overtake ONLY on the left, so it's not out of the blue to change lane just to overtake.
Just do it safely.
In the end nothing stops you from getting out of the highway, wait 10 minutes and resume, to be done with all of this.
Here in Ireland the highway code is almost identical given the history of British influence [1].
Giving 1.5-2m distance would imply use of the opposite lane.
[0] https://highwaycode.org.uk/overtaking/
[1] https://countrysideallianceireland.org/latest-news/changes-t...
I spent years driving a $500 shit box car. There are loads of situations where acceleration mitigates other people's mistakes. I lost that car getting rear ended - not my fault, but it could have been avoided with more power (saving myself weeks of neck pain).
Are you hitting doenshifts 100% in those situations?
I hope the people who designed/developed do not have clean consciouses.
Do keep in mind that we’re talking about a subscription to go 0-60 MPH in 5.2 seconds vs 0-60 in 6.2 seconds. The non-subscribed acceleration of 0-60 in 6.2 seconds for this specific car is far faster than the majority of cars on the road can accelerate. Do also keep in mind that the non-subscription features of the car must pass all safety standards, therefore safety is clearly not on a subscription model. There are plenty of valid reasons to dislike these auto-maker attempts at rent seeking, so let’s not be hyperbolic about them, lest we undermine the stronger arguments.
[0] https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/documents/812485...
It’s not true that non-crashes aren’t represented here- the NHTSA statistics capture the rate of crashes in terms like crashes per vehicle miles traveled, which represents both the probability of crashing and the probability of not crashing (one minus the probability of crashing). The fact that speeding is a huge factor in many crashes and that it increases the chance of death does in fact demonstrate that it’s overall less safe to speed. Speed might anecdotally help some people in some situations, but the actual stats do prove that the net effect of speeding is greater risk.
Acceleration increases the degree of control you have over your vehicle. That control could be the difference between life and death in an emergency. For example if you see a car driving towards you from the side (e.g. they're running a red light), increased acceleration could allow you to get out of the way in time.
More conventionally, increased acceleration allows you to complete an overtaking manoeuvre in a reduced time. Reduced overtaking distance is fairly universally regarded as also reducing the risk of an accident.
That’s true, good point. (But we’re talking about a sport feature of a Mercedes car with unnecessary amounts of acceleration.)
> Acceleration increases the degree of control you have over your vehicle
That’s not true. You’re exercising control by accelerating, but not increasing control. Braking and steering are also exercising control. Accelerating too fast in wet or dusty conditions reduces control. Accelerating too quickly when people around you don’t expect it increases the risk of accident.
> Reduced overtaking distance is fairly universally regarded as also reducing the risk of an accident.
I’ve never heard this before, can you back this claim up with some evidence? The NHTSA report I posted is quite thorough and does not mention passing time as a risk factor. I’m sure you’re right and it is true when overtaking into oncoming traffic, if you cross the median. I doubt this is true for separated freeways like most of the urban US interstates inside city boundaries. I’m sure your claim here is not true when people exceed the speed limit in order to overtake, which is a very common occurrence where I live. Much of the passing that goes on happens when someone overtakes another person who’s already traveling at or above the speed limit, by further exceeding the speed limit. This is not made safer by doing it faster.
At this point I think it's inevitable that some appliance features will require a subscription (e.g. your fridge's ice-maker is an additional $5/month).
Obviously that's just anecdotal, but was a pleasant surprise.
This feels like businesses are trying to force everyone in the debt trap that keeps the poor where they are. Having to pay a monthly subscription for basic functionality isn't _that_ different from being in debt. But instead of floating consumers a loan, these companies are selling an item that selectively breaks if they miss a payment.
And part of it, I believe, is inflation. I.e. I believe inflation is vastly undercounted and underreported, because a good chunk of it hides in "shrinkflation", decrease of manufacturing quality, lower-quality components, replacing customer service with "AI" chatbots and recently also voicebots, more ads and upsells, and - of course - extra subscriptions tacked on to everything.
It's easy to say "just don't buy it", but a few of us not buying it will not swing the balance sheets when the extra profit is so significant for the companies pulling this shit.
It seems inevitable that these types of subscriptions will slowly take over more and more areas of end consumer lives, until there's such a fatigue and hard push-back on subscriptions that it becomes profitable to create companies that sell products outright just to compete with subscription models.
As-is, launching a company that will compete with the subscription models is difficult. You will have a harder time finding investors (who will see the numbers and ask, "are you crazy?"). You basically have to do this, alongside others, just because you believe it's the right thing to do.
And then you have to not get bought up by a company that will introduce this model.
I'm not saying all subscription models are bad; I believe they're warranted or a good trade-off in a lot of cases, especially in hosted software. But knowing how significant a difference it makes, I just don't see this turning out well for consumers, even if we want to organize boycotts.
So, how do we speedrun to the part where "you own your product" competition exists and thrives?
A related issue is the increasing possiblity of devices being effectively bricked because some cloud service or online system has ceased support. Could there be a niche for a company selling improved after-market firmware for other companies' devices?
Then the whole aspect of data mining, how long (if not already) will these devices report back your usage and activity that is sold on.
For washers and dryers: Speed Queen makes some of the most reliable washers and dryers I've ever seen. You'll pay an arm and a leg for them, but they're known to last for between double to quadruple the length of the warranty. My family recently had to purchase a new washing machine, and the Speed Queen display at the store showed off the drum unit designs for Speed Queen vs their competition; Speed Queen uses a single giant gear made of stainless steel, whereas other brands use super complex plastic gearboxes.
For refrigerators: it's really a toss-up; I was able to find plenty of high predicted reliability models without Wi-Fi on Consumer Reports' website.
For other appliances: I haven't had to look for any other appliances as of late, but I always look to CR first because I personally trust their ratings. Your milage may vary.
So many products these days break down within a few years :/
My wolf stove is 10 years old. Will last 10 more. But it cost like 16k. Could have bought 12-16 normal stoves for that price.
I know it will last both because mine has made it 10 already, and I know many people with even older stoves.
The only difference is that, instead of immediately opting for a chip or retune, you now have the option to pay a monthly fee to keep your warranty.
Cars are a competitive market, so I don't agree with the pure greed sentiment. It's not like Apple or Google raising app store fees from 30% to 40%.
On the other hand even the most advantageous subscription today just eases people into this model which certainly opens the door for far more abuse in the future than straight ownership.
Given where we are today with subscriptions I'd say that battle is already lost. People stopped owning their movies or music (that's after you realize that even having a physical copy doesn't mean ownership), and who knows how many other things. It's just one more software switch for a feature you rent rather than own.
There are already GPS interlock systems where the dealer can shut down your car and locate it for collection, just in case of such a thing.
It is for this and many related reasons that we found the exact car we wanted, took the VIN to our bank, and walked into the dealership with a financing check. The dealer financing officer called our bank, gave them the price-out-the-door, and our bank gave them a PIN to write on the check alongside the total amount.
We walked away without having any further relationship with the dealership. Despite this, they tried several times to get our written consent to run their own financing. We steadfastly refused.
Not everyone is in a position to do this, but it was nice because we didn’t have to put up with any (other) dealer bullshit. (We did have to put up with other tangentially related dealer bullshit, which I have previously written about on here.)
Edit: typo and context
One of the strategies I hear about online is working with the dealership to take out financing with the implicit understanding that you’ll wait to pay off the loan until after they’ve received their payout.
Dealer GPS tracking and interlocking is usually reserved for “credit criminals” and folks with previous repos.
We had also contracted ahead of time to buy that particular car at almost exactly MSRP, and between the overly eager sales rep who wrote it up with no dealer add-ons, and Toyota’s allocation system deadlines, they were incentivized to walk us out of there as fast as possible. We were there less than an hour.
Edit: proofreading
Now, cash vs financing is a different story, but that depends on whether you have that much cash on hand and what you plan to do with it. Most people don’t have 35K available to buy a car outright.
I prefer cash over financing. Most buyers opt for the latter, and have been for decades.
The GPS interlock systems generally aren't used by new car franchise dealers. You mostly see those at "buy here pay here" used car lots that target "credit criminals" and do a lot of repos.
It’s not a subscription, but the idea is the same.
It doesn’t bother me one bit: I bought the car knowing full well that it wasn’t included, I don’t need it (the standard acceleration is already more than I ever had before), end of story.
Car engines have been under the control of software for decades now, with different products differing by the program. The only difference here is that there’s now the option to change the program over the air.
Nobody would have complained if Mercedes had offered 2 versions without the option to upgrade.
Are you sure? I personally don’t like the subscription model for car features, but look at it this way: it means there will be more cars in the second-hand market that are capable of faster acceleration or seat-heating or whatever else is pay-walled. It means that people can pay for a lower model car, and then someone else can buy it and “upgrade” to the higher model. I don’t know or have evidence that this will help resale value, but it seems at least logically plausible that it could help resale by giving downstream purchasers more options than they might have otherwise. You’re right, it’s still true that the auto-maker is leeching some of the value with every transfer, and that unlocks won’t transfer, but I’m not sure that will hurt resale.
Pretty sure. As this continues, more and more things will be behind paywalls. The companies have every incentive to do this. Then more and more percentage of the value of the car is _not_ transferrable and will need to be paid (again) to the company by any new owner.
You paid X thousand for "upgrades"? Great, that is completely lost money when you sell it.
You can see this in the games market with DLC-heavy games. The physical copies of those aren't worth much because it doesn't even include most of the content.
The effect you explain does exist I think, but to me seems to be obviously overpowered by the other(s) in the other direction.
Harder for BEVs where everything is electronically controlled. It’s a different story if there’s a physical motor and you can edit or bypass the ECU.
But I’m not sure the analogy to DLC games works here, you’re talking about DLC value that you purchased above and beyond the initial price of the game. The game itself doesn’t lose resale value, it’s the value of your DLC that doesn’t transfer.
If you want a new electric Mercedes, your choices will be either buy a new one at the new-car price and subscribe to upgrades, or buy a used one at the cheaper used-car price and subscribe to any upgrades you want. Cheaper and upgradeable is still going to be attractive to buyers than more expensive up-front. Part of the deal here is (presumably) that the car was cheaper in the first place than it would have been if the upgrade features were built in and permanent.
If consumers were rational, that's how it'd work. They pretty rarely are though.
> But I’m not sure the analogy to DLC games works here, you’re talking about DLC value that you purchased above and beyond the initial price of the game. The game itself doesn’t lose resale value, it’s the value of your DLC that doesn’t transfer.
It's barely even an analogy it's so exact. You could just call acceleration upgrades and heated seats and whatever DLC, it's the same thing.
It’s great that future buyers can upgrade, I think that’s cool. But now sellers can’t recoup any of the money they spend on these features, and over the life of the car they are likely to cost many times more. It’s brutal for lower-income people relying on decent cars to eventually reach a price point they can afford, because they’ll need to effectively pay for every option like they are buying new.
True, and some of these new car subscription features are indeed being offered as one-time purchases, BMW’s heated seats, for example. The value-add of a subscription is a lower up-front cost in exchange for rent instead of ownership. You don’t have to pay for the whole thing, and you can decide to stop paying for it before you’ve covered the product’s full cost.
> now sellers can’t recoup any of the money they spend
True, and people should (and some will) consider this before buying a new electric Mercedes, right? I hope so. Their FAQ states that the service must be disabled before resale. I’m pretty sure I won’t be buying one of these new. But for people who go in eyes wide open, there’s a decent chance they’ll still sell them eventually. Hey, who knows, maybe they’ll be force to sell for less than the car’s worth because of everyone’s subscription fears.
> It’s brutal for lower-income people
We’ve suddenly skipped a few steps here. We’re commenting on a Mercedes car with an optional feature to increase acceleration to 60 MPH by 1 second. This isn’t a brand that lower-income people are buying, by and large, and isn’t a feature lower-income people will be subscribing to. Cars for the lower-income brackets are already sold with zero luxury features, so I don’t see how this option feature aimed at rich people hurts poorer people at all, and I don’t see the slippery slope clearly in this case either.
And yes, this will happen. Just look at how many games are broken already because the servers were shut down and how many cars don't get original parts anymore. I have no confidence that car manufacturers will be better with subscription servers and that's assuming they stay in business, which is not a given (see, for example, Scion and Saab).
The mental impact of paying three-four figures a year for a subscription is different from a 3.99 app store payment.
This will benefit some folks. I imagine that most people will simply pass, the same way they’ve been passing on all of the other non-Tesla car subscription/remote upgrade offers.
The mutability is the part that bothers me. Remotely disabling features and the option to hike prices for monthly subscriptions to have functionality in the car serve to erode the concept of ownership. I'm not a Tesla owner but I believe they also allow paid upgrades that neither stick with the owner nor with the car during a sale. How is that not exploitative?
For my personal case, it still doesn’t matter, of course.
But what ongoing value do I get for my subscription? Will I get free acceleration upgrades over time because they keep improving the software? Free brake light DLCs that show how hard I’m accelerating? It’s great I can upgrade OTA but what about that means I need to pay over and over?
Acceleration is not a service- there’s no ongoing cost to deliver it to owners and there’s no increase in value to the owner over time to compensate for the ever increasing cost. That’s why I think the subscription model is much more exploitative.
I don’t get the “it’s not a service” argument. It’s not relevant. There’s no ongoing cost with many software licenses either. It’s just a business model.
If I found out the cheaper car were the same as the more expensive one except for a software anti-feature locking something out, I'd still be upset.
Moving away from one-time purchases to a reoccurring payment model is just a logical next step, that is familiar in many other spaces.
The end-games is that the vast majority won’t own anything at all and are stuck living paycheck to paycheck, being sucked dry by subscriptions.
You see, what really matters in the end is shareholder value. And finding growth is therefore what only matters.
The top comment was about "subscription fatigue".
I understand that this is different from subsidized game consoles since I paid the full product.
I do wonder if auto-makers might suffer some subscription fatigue themselves in the near future when these electronic features get hacked and people enjoy them without paying. The danger of giving someone hardware capable of something and then artificially limiting it is that hardware can be modified, and arguably has stronger legal support for such modification.