Comment by _heimdall
21 days ago
Not always. There have been car manufacturers that sold vehicles with features only enabled by a subscription. You may buy a car with heated seats, but the heated seats only work if the manufacturer enables them.
21 days ago
Not always. There have been car manufacturers that sold vehicles with features only enabled by a subscription. You may buy a car with heated seats, but the heated seats only work if the manufacturer enables them.
And there should be no law against enabling the heated seats in the car you own without interacting with the manufacturer.
Too bad there is one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
Laws can be interpreted in such a way that invites robber barons to pound sand, or repealed.
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The heated seat is an edge case, but there is also the entirely valid argument that you shouldn't be able to arbitrarily modify your car (e.g. replace the breaks with some home-grown solution), as it can put yourself and others in danger, and I see no evil in that being enforced by the government. A more IT-related example might be what radio frequencies can we use - if anyone could spam the whole spectrum, we would lose more than from the "freedom" of being able to do that.
So it's actually far from trivial to draw a line.
You are permitted to change whatever you like on your car, subject to a roadworthiness inspection by the relevant transit authority.
Cargo van -> Camper van conversions go through this all the time - you add/remove seats, add a lot of weight in the form of beds, water tanks, etc. add/remove windows, put solar panels on the roof... After those changes you have to take it down to the vehicle inspection, and they tell you whether or not your changes have been deemed acceptable to drive on public roads.
> there is also the entirely valid argument that you shouldn't be able to arbitrarily modify your car
In at least two european countries that I know of (but probably in all of them) cars need to pass periodic technical inspection to be allowed on the road. Breaks are tested, among other things.
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> replace the br[ake]s with some home-grown solution
Funny you mention the brakes, because a friend of mine told me just days ago that he used to change his own brakes consumables (pads) until the new car, which "throws an error" if you replace the part - you have to go to an official service office for the computer configuration.
Now, do not forget that the need for the intervention of third parties lowers the car reliability ("far away", "too expensive", "device too old", "operation failure", "inexperienced operator" etc.).
This should show that your argument has difficult sides. Of course you should be able to act on your critical possessions. It should be within a good framework, but it should be fully, practically possible.
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Vanishingly few people want to crash their car due to sub-par breaks. If someone is malicious, the physical access to the car is going to be enough to not stop them and murder is already illegal. So, is this a real issue? If it is, is regulating this the most effective choice for what to regulate to increase safety or are other things more hazardous? Removing freedom and creating mandatory bureaucracy shouldn't be done over imaginary issues.
It's trivially easy to draw the line. If it's to be illegal to make some modification to your car then that law is to be enforced by the government rather than the manufacturer.
> but there is also the entirely valid argument that you shouldn't be able to arbitrarily modify your car (e.g. replace the breaks with some home-grown solution), as it can put yourself and others in danger,
That is a nonsensical argument.
"You shouldn't be able to put anyone else in danger" - agreed.
"You shouldn't be able to modify your car" - wtf does that have to do with danger?
"Modifying brakes (not breaks)" is not the same thing as "Putting people in danger". Sometimes we modify them to have better braking than the standard.
What countries actually do is test the end-result, i.e. Does the car conform to the legally mandated required braking performance?
Rather than campaign to stop people from owning property anymore, maybe just enforce the existing laws (which, as far as I know, are enforced already anyway).
This campaign to divide people into an owning class and a servile class is pretty damn repugnant, and "Because someone can be harmed if we allow people to own things" is just the new "But think of the children" nonsense.
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It should be up to the individual to decide whether they want to modify their car.
Say you put aftermarket brakes on your car and they fail, causing an accident that harms someone else. The person who changed their brakes should be held liable legally, its as simple as that. Owners that choose to change their car and do a piss poor job of it are held accountable for their actions and others considering similar modifications can choose to learn the lesson.
Yes that means people could be harmed in the process, but regulations themselves harm people too. There's no way around the fact that one way or another people may get harmed during their lifetime. In the long run regulations just guarantee that, should the wrong people take power, the regulations and authority that originally allowed regulations will be abused.
I'm actually surprised I haven't seen more push back on government authority given everything Trump is either doing or claiming he will do. The president should be largely an anemic office acting more as a figurehead than anything else. We've given them the power to effectively legislate with no oversight, that why he may be able to do so much harm.
This is the same argument people make between Apple and Android.
Can I use an Android phone without using Google? Yes, of course you can. There are plenty of secure OS's like Graphen, Lineage, Calyx and many others. Do people really care enough to use them? Hardly any, which proves my point.
Same thing here. Most people will just pay the fee to get the seats. Some might just opt out and not get them. Others will shop around and find some legacy cars that are older that have them but don't require a subscription.
At the end of the day? There's ALWAYS a choice. How hard do you want to look to avoid the subscription? Is it really worth your time and effort? Some would say yes, the vast majority really DGAF. People have been lulled into not caring about stuff like personal privacy and having a say in what's being peddled to you.
There's always a choice… unless you want to access your bank account that is. In which case there is no choice but to use the official unrooted android OS.
You can still find banks that have physical buildings for retail customers as well as online portals to login and manage your account. Mobile apps aren't absolutely a must.
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Am I the only one that found that to be a reasonable edge case?
The seat heating was apparently shortening the life of the leather seats. Its cheaper to include heated seats in all cars, than it is to maintain 2 different sets of production. The subscription basically offsets the cost of needing to replace the seats more frequently when the heating is enabled.
Likewise, if you manually enabled the seat heaters, then complained that the seats were falling apart quickly, having given you a legal out to get that feature enabled in warranty, would not have to replace your seats for free.
Not to mention, they apparently already ditched the subscription over backlash.
> The subscription basically offsets the cost of needing to replace the seats more frequently when the heating is enabled
I never heard of car-manufacturers periodically replacing seats within warranty because of the wear of the material, regardless of being "more frequently" or not. This sounds like a massive oversight in product-design.
Of all the cases I know, the customer had to bear the cost of such "wear and tear" cases.
That tracks. Dodge seats from the 90s and early 00s were absolutely terrible. I swear half of them came from the factory torn on the outside of the drivers seat just from the delivery driver getting in to drop the truck off at the dealership.
How about automated high/low beam switching or enabling the nominal power of your car instead of handicapping it by default?
If you agree that above are edge cases too, I have a Volkswagen to sell you [0].
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQNeIcQXy74
>How about automated high/low beam switching
I would want the ability to change that. I actually think I can mess with that on my car.
>enabling the nominal power of your car instead of handicapping it by default?
Big topic for me. My car has a DPF, and appears to have been geared such that despite containing an automatic DPF burn process, the engine never quite reaches the required temperature, so I need to perform manual burns.
I have straight up asked the dealer for a method to enable the auto burn process, manually. And have asked if theres a retune available, to make the gearing just a little bit less efficient, giving me more power and more engine heat.
The issue, pretty much verbatim from their head regional diesel mechanic is that any modifications of that nature would fuck the emissions standards they had to limbo under. So its categorically denied. They also issued me with stern official warnings that anything I do to make the car more reliable may also void my warranty. And the unofficial advice I have received is that the DPF is "f*cked mate" and to "get the petrol hybrid before the government forces it to wear a similar PPF"
The car also very suspiciously moderates the engine output unrelated to gearing/tune. Just sometimes underperforms at random. I believe its computational again, like you say, handicapping it for emissions reasons.
These things are largely optional for me, but I wont mess with them too much until I am out of warranty.
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