Are we talking about better fuel efficiency, acceleration or both? To lock down better fuel efficiency would be downright evil. I am okay with locking down better acceleration.
It’s very interesting to see businesses like BMW, Mercedes, Shell and Google obsess over quarterly revenues instead of the long term. I would see it as a red flag as investor, but maybe the main investor in these companies is someone who obsesses over quarterly revenue?
That’s ideal but remember a company is made of thousands of shareholders - execs, employees, investors etc
When the stock price starts going down / not growing as it “should”, everyone is unhappy. Execs can leave, key employees can leave, and investors can launch an activist campaign.
If the story is spun right even “weak” financial performance can lead to strong stock - look at Amazon. There was very little profit for years but that was because they were reinvesting in growth (and seeing results). So people believed and stock price went brrr.
You're mixing shareholders with stakeholders. Shareholders are only the investors. Execs would only care for stocks if their variable is tied to it. Low/mid employees don't really care.
Many states will ban the purchase of used ICE vehicles eventually just as they have deadlines for banning new ICE vehicle sales, or at least make the process so onerous they might as well have banned them.
Oh there's a way around that. Places like Lisbon and London already have time periods where older vehicles cannot enter parts of each city without paying a fee. It's only a matter of time that they're banned altogether for "the sake of the environment".
Don't worry, I'm sure they'll make that illegal too, just like when they outlawed personal importing of cars from cheaper markets in the name of safety. Because everyone in the car world knows, after 25 years, a car is automatically safe for the road, right?
The US Federal government is claiming that!
"A motor vehicle that is at least 25 years old can be lawfully imported into the U.S. without regard to whether it complies with all applicable [Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards].(1)"
After 25 years, it is assumed to be so safe they don't even need to comply with vehicle safety laws. If the import ban was about safety, it wouldn't ever allow cars previously legally considered 'unsafe' onto the roads, but the 25 year law pretty much gives away it was about people importing Lexuses and BMWs for less than it cost to buy one in the US, which made the manufacturers unhappy.
They aren't saying after 25 years the cars are safe. Right in their statement they acknowledge that the cars may not meet safety standards.
I suspect the 25-year cutoff is mostly about allowing enthusiasts to drive classic cars. There's a small number of them. Allowing millions of new unsafe cars to be sold to random consumers would be a terrible idea. I think the rules make sense.
Another thing you could do is just not buy the damn things.
As someone who cannot physically drive because I'm blind, the idea that you need a car is already suspect, but regardless, you certainly don't need a 2023+ car with "smart" features.
Don't buy them, tell your families not to buy them, let them pile up, unpurchased, on dealer (what a silly idea a dealership is!) lots.
Your ability to not need a car is highly dependent on where you choose to live. A coworker of mine got into a car accident a few days ago and has temporarily lost access to a car, and in the process discovered that getting from the house to the airport without a car was far less viable than they expected.
(I say this as someone who is emphatically of the opinion that we should be less reliant on cars!)
This only works if there are some popular automakers not in on it.
If everyone goes that way then consumers are screwed.
Then inevitably after 10-20 years there will be enough anger that congress will do something about it, but in the mean time the original execs all lived like fat cats and danced into the sunset. Yippee!
exactly this. Start building resistance to these anti-patterns early and often. Reviews need to call this out.
More broadly, business models should only rely on recurring revenue streams for products that are receiving nontrivial updates or for which there are demand-based costs.
Presumably where this gets murky is with AI features, where inference costs are high and one-time fees aren't sufficient or appropriate.
The united states is designed to be driven. It was very intentional. In NYC, depending on where you live you don't need a car, but once you get to the outskirts of the boroughs (like outer queens, outer brooklyn, any of staten island that isn't right by the ferry, upper bronx) you basically drive or getting anywhere to anywhere can take hours. And NYC is the best in the country regarding not needing a car.
Many places "going to the corner store" is a 20 minute drive. I still remember going up to long island to visit a friend, and we wanted to eat. The absolutely closest place to get food was a 45 minute walk each direction.
Because building code is US don't allow mixed living/business areas - so you CAN NOT FIND business near the place you are living and YOU MUST HAVE A CAR...
(I assume you meant "zoning", not "building code". Zoning is what says what kind of building you can make, such as business or residential. Building codes cover things like electrical service and safety, plumbing requirements, what building material you can use, and stuff like that)
Around 92% of US households have a car. Comparing to Europe Italy is around 89%, Germany 85%, France 83$, Spain 79%, and UK 74%.
Unless those countries are also restricting mixed living/business areas they suggest that there is some other more general factor that drives (no pun intended) people to car ownership. US zoning might explain why US car ownership is higher than in Europe but seems unlikely to explain more than maybe 20% of US car ownership.
That's all fine; none of it precludes voting with your wallet by e.g. buying an older car. It's not necessary for literally everyone to do this for it to have a noticeable impact on auto makers.
I’d say aim to always stay as many years behind the current models as you can. They might eventually ilegalize very old models due to emissions, but economically they can’t force you to drive latest models. That should hurt dealers and auto makers.
In my country, I often see people buy Toyota Land Cruisers (which are built to last a lifetime of abuse) and upgrade every 2 years. New car is shiny, lets you show your friends, but it means you grossly overpaid for your previous car (bc you actually did not need that robustness for just 2 years), and you are now driving a spy on wheels.
At least in my area, buying a used car that’s safe and reliable is effectively buying a new car. Over the past few years the used auto inventory has fluctuated significantly.
I was reading an article about car prices in the UK over the last 50 years. It seems the median car price has increased inline with earnings. This is twice the rate of inflation. It seems car manufacturers have done a really good job on us.
>You are still allowed to opt out.
>For now.
Opting out of consumerism is probably the most subversive thing most people can do.
As far as I know they still don't sell a wiring harness or battery for it, though. So you either have to yoink parts from a dead Mach-E or F-150 Lightning or adapt existing parts to poorly suit the conversion. They've been selling very few of them because of this, and Ford's legal department's too scared to actually sell battery cells that would fit in place of gas tanks or whatever.
Liability. If someone installs the battery or wiring harness incorrectly there's any number of things that could go wrong. You don't want to be sued over a battery fire if someone shortcuts wiring or venting things properly. There's a double standard in that you can buy a Ford 532 crate engine and it'll come with the wiring harness and fuel system with an "approved for off-road use only" disclaimer simply because people have been doing engine swaps and self repair since the dawn of the automobile.
I was pumping gas and the gas pump decided it should advertise at me and clue me in on the latest celebrity gossip. We really have no concept that we shouldn't degrade the public realm.
Bring expanding spray foam with you and fill in the speaker grille and muffle or mute the sound. Other people will greatly appreciate it and the employees most likely won't care until it comes time for inspection from corporate or state agencies. I've seen it more than once at Speedway stations.
I actually think this makes some sense, based on my own experiences owning various cars.
The first was a Mercedes A200 that had been imported from the Netherlands to Denmark. It did not have heated seats, something I overlooked when I bought it, supposedly not a deal breaker in NL, but a big issue during cold Danish winters. I would have gladly payed a subscription fee to activate seat heating had it been possible, but the car was originally made for another market, so there was nothing I could do except sell it and buy another one.
The second is my current car, a Volvo, which came with a wifi hotspot. For some reason, the hotspot stopped working after a the car was out of warranty, and I found that I am able to live without it, by using my phone as a hotspot instead. In this case I could have stopped paying for a feature that I no longer need. As cars get more laden with tech, I think it is quite feasible that some initially "fashionable" features will get irrelevant over time, and users might like to have to option to stop paying for features that have lost their relevance. If Volvo would upgrade my current sat-nav to Apple Carplay I would gladly pay for that too.
Having users pay recurring would also incentivize car makers to keep investing in updating their software, and perhaps even install hardware upgrades "free" of charge, in the hope that the user would keep paying a recurring fee to have them.
volvo hotspot has independent sim card for internet (different from the one that is used for volvo oncall). usually first few years of service included but after this you need to create account with internet provider in order to get service
> Having users pay recurring would also incentivize car makers to keep investing in updating their software...
Please no. I don't want fancy software that hides essential features 4 layers deep and stops working when the internet is bad and the billing service can't be reached. I want buttons for the features and a display that works with android auto. Nothing more, nothing less.
> so there was nothing I could do except sell it and buy another one.
You could also have bought a heated seat warmer seat cover*, or taken it to an independent service shop to have them install heated seats. Buying a different car was just the solution you choose. Having the hardware but having to pay for it in software wrankles those with a Marxist understanding of value and pricing things, but most of us don't live in such a world.
If I choose to not activate their features I end up stuck with the cost of hosting their hardware. Those heated seats cost me money to transport, maintain and insure. They should be paying me.
It may not be the case. The financials could be covered by the deferred revenue of expected subscription adoption.
Perhaps heated car seats would normally cost an extra $1,200. If they predict a 50% adoption rate, they could charge $40/month (raised annually by inflation) and they'd get $2,400 from each subscriber over a 5-year ownership. This way the people who don't use the hardware don't pay for it, their unused hardware is paid for by those who do use it.
If it functioned this way, I imagine some people would figure out how to hack the car to unlock these features without paying for them. I'd even be curious how illegal that would even be -- distributing software hacks might be prohibited by DMCA, but installing a switch that bypasses the infotainment OS entirely and directly connects the heated seats' resistive heating elements to 12V/48V rails or whatever surely wouldn't be in violation of any current laws.
Because generally, as a consumer, if I want to add a package which includes heated seats it seems to cost me about $600-1500. When I said "cost $1200" I meant "cost the consumer $1200" not "cost the manufacturer $1200".
I can see the benefits, make only one car model. And then let the user decides what to use for a fee.
The problem is a lot of cars will have features that will never be used and trashed.
Their goal is just how to optimize their production and not their impact on their environment.
This article's 90% outrage and 10% material. The idea is still in its infancy so we don't see an impact in prices yet -- there aren't enough models with this function to price out a difference.
Here are my questions:
1. Would this work for much more than small conveniences? Heated seats, steering wheel, wifi, etc? Where it's literally cheaper to build 1 part instead of 2.
2. If it's cheaper to always build in the feature, why wouldn't a competitor just include the feature as standard? The auto market is pretty competitive, and Brother did pretty well just by not screwing up their printers.
3. Will people get turned off at the fear of higher replacement part costs?
4. Has this grown past the small-experiment stage? Is it any more than BMW heated seats?
GM dumping CarPlay / Android Auto fits this as well. GM thinks they can generate $20-$25 billion in annual subscription revenue within 6 years and they can't do that if you can just connect your phone and use that.
The underlying issue here is that European car manufacturers are in deep financial trouble. Employees are getting more expensive. Cars are getting more complicated and contain more chips. This increases R&D expenses. Margins are getting squeezed. Asian competitors are on their tails. Lexus and Mazda are attacking the lower end of luxury cars and Chinese manufacturers are the only ones that can produce economy (electric) cars at a profit.
European carmakers are looking into subscriptions, knowing it will anger their most loyal customers, because their main business is struggling. They look at sofware companies with envy. To put it in perspective, Volkswagen, Europe's largest carmaker with 675,000 employees has the same market cap as Crowdstrike and Snowflake.
Cars are getting way more complicated. Just look at all the tech inside of modern headlights and side mirrors. Don't you think you need a complicated supply chain for all the sensors in modern cars?
ICE drive trains aren't impossibly complicated. It's 200 year old technology that has been near perfected. Modern engines last 200k miles no sweat and require little more than an oil change. BEV is simpler in some ways but more complex in other ways. BEVs are much heavier and that means you need more structural components, heavier suspension, more complex crumple zone, etc. Electric cars also can't be repaired as easily. BEV aren't simpler than ICE cars, it's just a different set of costs/benefits.
No. Definitely not. The drivetrains swap has made them simpler in that regard. But ever changing and increasing safety standards mean that a single bodystyle costs hundredss of millions of dollars to develop. Mostly caused by SUVs and CUVs that make the physics of an impact much harsher. The widespread popularity of the Jeep Cherokee and Ford Explorer in the early 1990s have been detrimental to so many facets of the modern world...
There's too much regulatory capture for any newcomer to start up and produce anything different and not go bankrupt. Tesla was such a lucky exception; they had to raise tens of billions of dollars of investment and still were on the verge of bankruptcy multiple times.
As an interesting anecdote, Ford was founded with the 2023 equivalent of less than a million dollars.
Car features subscription: 1) create new product (car) -> 2) Lobby for a lot of regulation so only a few companies can make a product -> 3) Abuse market position to extract money from customers (car feature subscriptions)
If purchasing is not ownership, then pirating is not theft.
I think more technically-gifted people need to look into these “subscription” systems, in order to find workarounds. Because if it comes with my car, _it’s mine to do whatever the f**k I want with it._
77 comments
[ 8963 ms ] story [ 449 ms ] threadAre we talking about better fuel efficiency, acceleration or both? To lock down better fuel efficiency would be downright evil. I am okay with locking down better acceleration.
When the stock price starts going down / not growing as it “should”, everyone is unhappy. Execs can leave, key employees can leave, and investors can launch an activist campaign.
If the story is spun right even “weak” financial performance can lead to strong stock - look at Amazon. There was very little profit for years but that was because they were reinvesting in growth (and seeing results). So people believed and stock price went brrr.
Nobody is claiming that.
After 25 years, it is assumed to be so safe they don't even need to comply with vehicle safety laws. If the import ban was about safety, it wouldn't ever allow cars previously legally considered 'unsafe' onto the roads, but the 25 year law pretty much gives away it was about people importing Lexuses and BMWs for less than it cost to buy one in the US, which made the manufacturers unhappy.
1: https://www.nhtsa.gov/importing-vehicle/importation-and-cert...
I suspect the 25-year cutoff is mostly about allowing enthusiasts to drive classic cars. There's a small number of them. Allowing millions of new unsafe cars to be sold to random consumers would be a terrible idea. I think the rules make sense.
You are still allowed to opt out.
For now.
(I say this as someone who is emphatically of the opinion that we should be less reliant on cars!)
If everyone goes that way then consumers are screwed.
Then inevitably after 10-20 years there will be enough anger that congress will do something about it, but in the mean time the original execs all lived like fat cats and danced into the sunset. Yippee!
For now, there are a lot of used cars and my plan is to get good ones and drive them.
I can't wait! The auto makers will deserve everything they get for going down this road.
More broadly, business models should only rely on recurring revenue streams for products that are receiving nontrivial updates or for which there are demand-based costs.
Presumably where this gets murky is with AI features, where inference costs are high and one-time fees aren't sufficient or appropriate.
Many places "going to the corner store" is a 20 minute drive. I still remember going up to long island to visit a friend, and we wanted to eat. The absolutely closest place to get food was a 45 minute walk each direction.
Around 92% of US households have a car. Comparing to Europe Italy is around 89%, Germany 85%, France 83$, Spain 79%, and UK 74%.
Unless those countries are also restricting mixed living/business areas they suggest that there is some other more general factor that drives (no pun intended) people to car ownership. US zoning might explain why US car ownership is higher than in Europe but seems unlikely to explain more than maybe 20% of US car ownership.
At least for the remainder of my life, I recon. (I'm in my 40s.)
>You are still allowed to opt out.
>For now.
Opting out of consumerism is probably the most subversive thing most people can do.
When you need service from the same company that made your car, dealerships can be a life saver. (Not all of them, of course. YMMV.)
Ford's electric crate motor is out now: https://performanceparts.ford.com/part/M-9000-MACHE
I wish we would stop making our lives worse for each other.
The first was a Mercedes A200 that had been imported from the Netherlands to Denmark. It did not have heated seats, something I overlooked when I bought it, supposedly not a deal breaker in NL, but a big issue during cold Danish winters. I would have gladly payed a subscription fee to activate seat heating had it been possible, but the car was originally made for another market, so there was nothing I could do except sell it and buy another one.
The second is my current car, a Volvo, which came with a wifi hotspot. For some reason, the hotspot stopped working after a the car was out of warranty, and I found that I am able to live without it, by using my phone as a hotspot instead. In this case I could have stopped paying for a feature that I no longer need. As cars get more laden with tech, I think it is quite feasible that some initially "fashionable" features will get irrelevant over time, and users might like to have to option to stop paying for features that have lost their relevance. If Volvo would upgrade my current sat-nav to Apple Carplay I would gladly pay for that too.
Having users pay recurring would also incentivize car makers to keep investing in updating their software, and perhaps even install hardware upgrades "free" of charge, in the hope that the user would keep paying a recurring fee to have them.
Please no. I don't want fancy software that hides essential features 4 layers deep and stops working when the internet is bad and the billing service can't be reached. I want buttons for the features and a display that works with android auto. Nothing more, nothing less.
You would've just had heated seats, no fee required.
You could also have bought a heated seat warmer seat cover*, or taken it to an independent service shop to have them install heated seats. Buying a different car was just the solution you choose. Having the hardware but having to pay for it in software wrankles those with a Marxist understanding of value and pricing things, but most of us don't live in such a world.
* https://a.co/d/fnDQRBv
Perhaps heated car seats would normally cost an extra $1,200. If they predict a 50% adoption rate, they could charge $40/month (raised annually by inflation) and they'd get $2,400 from each subscriber over a 5-year ownership. This way the people who don't use the hardware don't pay for it, their unused hardware is paid for by those who do use it.
If it functioned this way, I imagine some people would figure out how to hack the car to unlock these features without paying for them. I'd even be curious how illegal that would even be -- distributing software hacks might be prohibited by DMCA, but installing a switch that bypasses the infotainment OS entirely and directly connects the heated seats' resistive heating elements to 12V/48V rails or whatever surely wouldn't be in violation of any current laws.
OP was saying they pay to cart it around the country.
how do you derive $1,200 from a ~$20 BOM change?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2LLB9CGfLs
Here are my questions:
1. Would this work for much more than small conveniences? Heated seats, steering wheel, wifi, etc? Where it's literally cheaper to build 1 part instead of 2.
2. If it's cheaper to always build in the feature, why wouldn't a competitor just include the feature as standard? The auto market is pretty competitive, and Brother did pretty well just by not screwing up their printers.
3. Will people get turned off at the fear of higher replacement part costs?
4. Has this grown past the small-experiment stage? Is it any more than BMW heated seats?
European carmakers are looking into subscriptions, knowing it will anger their most loyal customers, because their main business is struggling. They look at sofware companies with envy. To put it in perspective, Volkswagen, Europe's largest carmaker with 675,000 employees has the same market cap as Crowdstrike and Snowflake.
Making a ICE drive chain is very very difficult, there is a long supply chain required. This moat is drying out very very fast.
ICE drive trains aren't impossibly complicated. It's 200 year old technology that has been near perfected. Modern engines last 200k miles no sweat and require little more than an oil change. BEV is simpler in some ways but more complex in other ways. BEVs are much heavier and that means you need more structural components, heavier suspension, more complex crumple zone, etc. Electric cars also can't be repaired as easily. BEV aren't simpler than ICE cars, it's just a different set of costs/benefits.
I’ll find an old 72 travelall and swap the motor/trans for something modern and efficient and say screw the automakers.
One exception: a new c8 z06. I might get one, if my dealer gets an allocation and I have all my ducks lined up AND I can get it with no markup.
Which… isn’t happening
The way things are going BYD will be able to come in next year and make a killing.
As an interesting anecdote, Ford was founded with the 2023 equivalent of less than a million dollars.
I think more technically-gifted people need to look into these “subscription” systems, in order to find workarounds. Because if it comes with my car, _it’s mine to do whatever the f**k I want with it._