Comment by 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.
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
Things that are not free.
- My time. - My cognitive load.
The above sounds like a nightmare to me, but you do you.
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
Why not? Your floor is the base cost of the BOM. Since they absolutely and pathetically have to prioritize shareholder value there is strong impetus to drive prices up or extract additional value some other way. Remember if you're not showing cancerous levels of growth you are dying, if not worthless!
The only time prices ever come down is when one tries to undercut the other, or they feel they can make more money by lowering them. This rarely happens in any permanent or consistent fashion, barring exceptional circumstances or a collapse in demand.
Add in inflationary pressure, and exec's pathetic desire to be cool and copy what their competitors are doing (who cares why? AcmeCo has it, we need to have it to!!!) and you don't even need a price cartel because everyone is making the same sad little moves independently.
The conspiracy aspect is absolutely a red herring. Nobody is that smart, thankfully. This is all supposedly rational actors acting in supposedly rational self-interest. AKA "Market forces"
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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
I don't think any used car buyer will install additional feature in a car. Maybe a new car radio, but even that has become difficult. In our 2nd gen Berlingo the radio is connected to the multimedia "lever" and the digital dashboard ... the aftermarket radio that worked fine in the previous car does not even use the same connectors :-/
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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.
Can you give some examples of computer hardware that are paywall locked?
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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