Comment by 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).
For a while now, the KTM motorcycle company has been selling bikes with a Demo Mode.
For the first 1,500 km, you get access to all of the electronic features of your new bike; then they get disabled and you have to pay to re-enable them.
https://www.revzilla.com/common-tread/ktm-demo-mode
The good news is that no BMW is going to run for 8 years
Toyota was trying to jump onto the bandwagon too.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/43329/toyota-made-its-key-fob-...
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/43636/toyota-reviewing-key-fob...
That said GM is dropping Android Auto and Apple Carplay from it's 2024 EVs, I assume to sell their own services. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/03/gm-confirms-its-droppin...
Klim also sells a motorcycle airbag vest that you can optionally purchase as a subscription rather then a one time purchase: https://www.vice.com/en/article/93yyyd/this-motorcycle-airba...
Ford's Commercial Division was talking about some 400,000 customers on it's subscription services though I'm not sure what those look like.
Stellantis hasn't announced anything concrete yet but said it's expecting fairly large profits from it's software division. https://www.carscoops.com/2022/03/stellantis-targets-full-ex...
Like it or not, this is the trend the majority of the car world is going.
> That said GM is dropping Android Auto and Apple Carplay from it's 2024 EVs, I assume to sell their own services.
They think they’re going to tap into a lucrative market, but really they’re just selling trash at that point.
Even if it does, whoever buys a BMW probably won't keep it for 8 years anyway.
Or they'll wish they didn't when they encounter a basic repair part that costs $3300
my K75 is older than me!
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.
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.
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Abusive business practices are not "good" no matter whether they harm the people you dislike or not.
The argument is about harm to the general populace, not about harm to a specific group they dislike.
Are indoor smoking bans good? The justification is that second-hand smoke has significant negative impacts on the general populace.
Are tabacco taxes good? They encourage the same thing that smoking bans do, a reduction in smoking leading to better health for the population.
The parent commenter is just saying the same applies to cars. Cars cause a huge number of deaths, especially of pedestrians and cyclists, but also of other car users. They harm the general populace. Just like existing in the same room as someone smoking has health consequences for you, living in the same city as cars increases your chance of death.
You can, of course, legitimately argue that capitalist competition isn't the right way to discourage it, but rather having the government levy additional taxes and fees would be better.
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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.
This is Hacker News. Please keep your religion out of the comments.
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.
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.
Ha! Strong Libertarian Police Department [1] vibes.
Ironically, the New Yorker website has an illegal-in-the-EU cookies modal, then a delay and a manufactured-urgency "flash sale!" pop-up that turns into a "you're on your last article" banner.
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
In this example the alarm clock was free, the taxi was cheaper if you didn’t care how fast you got there, and yes, most people pay a subscription for mobile data already
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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.
I don’t think there’s a convincing argument that car manufacturers are current running a price cartel, sorry
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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.
The option is they sell you the same car without the hardware that the second-market buyer doesn’t want, and then it’s harder to resell
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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.
There’s going to be buying cars where the seat warmer is a different price
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...
Sure, but this is a pretty well-established model for computers; if it's more economical for the company to install the hardware on every model, but only charge consumers who want to utilize it a premium, then I don't see the problem. Price competition should keep the market price for any feature reasonable.
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Car feature piracy is already a thing. You can unlock all sorts of things over the OBD2 port.
Even then, car manufacturers are notoriously bad at software, so probably won't be too difficult to pirate any feature.
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.
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.
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.
It’s cheapest for them to not put it in any car though, which is what makes it a value-add