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Comment by userbinator

3 years ago

I suppose the significance is that this is the 10-year anniversary (to the month) of this dystopian meme. While we fortunately haven't gotten to that point of corporate enslavement, it does feel like society has shifted increasingly in that direction since 2013.

51 comments

userbinator

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walrus01  3 years ago

I literally just saw a BMW advertisement yesterday that says it comes with 8 years of adaptive cruise control/driver assist, which then disables itself after the timer runs out (presumably unless you pay to license it again).

  • cactusfrog  3 years ago

    The good news is that no BMW is going to run for 8 years

  • labster  3 years ago

    It’s a little worrying that your anti-lock brake subscription might be cancelled due to credit card fraud, but what can you do? That’s I always prepay my DocWagon account.

  • vel0city  3 years ago

    If it's relying on something like detailed maps or something that need to be updated I could understand that; it costs money to rescan and keep that data up to date. If it's just the basic vision/radar adaptive cruise that's terrible like their heated seats.

    I bet it's the worse of those two things, knowing BMW.

  • megablast  3 years ago

    [flagged]

    • gbear605  3 years ago

      The end result is the same number of cars, that all have built in features that no one pays for and uses, causing more resource usage and waste but providing no one any value. It just hurts the environment but doesn’t convince anyone to switch away.

  • petesergeant  3 years ago

    I think I am in a minority group of 1 for thinking that features that are payable extras are a good thing, actually.

    I guess people who don't like it see it as losing features, and talk about _owning_ their vehicle, where I see it as the ability to fine-tune the cost of a vehicle depending on what features you do or do not want to license. With any luck, competition should end up giving a market price to each of these features, and you can just pay market price for what you want/need. In addition, the car should be easier to re-sell, as any options you cheaped out on, a secondary buyer can pay for if they want them.

    • peddling-brink  3 years ago

      I disagree. This is only about value extraction.

      Let's walk down this slippery slope for a bit.

      It's 8am, your alarm clock doesn't wake you up. You've run out of alarm credits again. They're cheap, but you have to refill them every month because the refill site wants to show you ads first.

      You wake up late at 9:15, you're glad for the extra rest, but you won't make as much money today because you will get in late. On the other hand, you avoided the worst of the surge pricing for your shower.

      You're finally ready to leave. You order your autonomous taxi and are given a choice of which navigation engine to use. You don't pay for UberPremium, so it's an extra $5 to unlock the Waze Ultra traffic avoidance system for the ride. Yesterday you chanced it with the free nav, and got stuck in traffic for an extra hour.

      On the ride you pull out your laptop and connect to the in-car wifi. Within a couple minutes your free DNS requests are used up. You can either watch an ad to continue, or buy more dnscredits. It's only $5 for a thousand more credits, that should last you through Thursday.

      3 replies →

    • pdntspa  3 years ago

      Ha ha ha, "market price". As if market forces don't simultaneously collude on prices while blowing smoke up the ass of its customers. Everyone knows that inflated "market price" is the result of a lifetime of commercial brainwashing done on buyers. There will never be a fair "market price" as long as everyone keeps raising their prices because reasons.

      4 replies →

    • papercrane  3 years ago

      This seems less like BMW offering the customer flexibility in pricing and more like BMW trying to find a way to extract cash from the used car market.

      3 replies →

    • HWR_14  3 years ago

      How is there going to be any competition or market price for "key to unlock BMW seat warmers". Unless you mean among the mechanics that will jailbreak your car and activate that feature.

      1 reply →

    • vorpalhex  3 years ago

      Just to be clear, these features such as heated seats are already in your vehicle.

      You are just being charged monthly.. for hardware you already bought.

      "Car feature piracy" will be an interesting new world I suppose...

      11 replies →

    • nullindividual  3 years ago

      You’re not fine tuning the cost. Your paying full price and a reoccurring monthly price. That full price will never go down. It won’t be less expensive than last year’s new car without a subscription model.

      This is a suckers game. There are zero upsides to the consumer.

    • donmcronald  3 years ago

      All those features significantly increase repair costs because of the parts and calibration required. Should I have to incur those costs so the manufacturer can extract value from a second owner?

      I promise the car will be harder to resell once the warranty runs out. No one wants an old car that’s super expensive to repair, especially if they’re paying to repair things related to features they can’t even use.

    • ImprovedSilence  3 years ago

      yeah, but the extra features don't cost extra money for the manufacturer. For example, BMW sells a subscription for heated seats. But... EVERY BMW has the hardwere in place, seat heaters and everything installed on the car, even if you don't have the subscription. it's not some cost savings passed on to you, it's cheaper for them to put seat heaters in every car!!! They're just going to charge you more to unlock it. Hence, subscription services are not value added, they are value extracted, and understanding that difference is what drives the outrage here.

      1 reply →