Comment by 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...
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?
Of the to of my head:
* Intel xeon processors have software defined feature sets that are unlocked by a license.
* Nvidia low hash rate GPUs
* Nvidia vGPU on consumer GPUs (there are hacks to enable it)
* hardware video / audio encoders in mobile processors that require licensing to use.
* Sony cameras have licenses that allow you to unlock extra features
* Cisco do this all the time with their router HW.
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I don’t like the idea, but CPUs have long been an example (fused at the factory to disable cores, for example).
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It's heavily implemented in Cisco and juniper routers for serious ISP applications. In addition to yearly paid support contracts for operating system updates.
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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.