Comment by jan_g
3 months ago
> Volkswagen sells you another subscription for that now, at least for their electric vehicles. You can buy the option if you want your EV to perform as it's designed.
You can also buy "for life" subscription (around £600, if I remember the news about it correctly), so you could also say that the stronger engine costs 600 pounds more when you purchase the car. Not too different to buying the cars in the past: more powerful engine adds to the price tag.
Instead, you can sell the cars at increased (nominal, actually) power and remove the lower tier altogether while keeping the cost savings of removing another production line and logistics for the lower powered motor. Moreover you can allow users to have a choice of power from get go (i.e. Reduce to 150KW for more range). It's a couple of variables at most. Will changing the variables too much will wear down storage that faster?
Same is true for the internal combustion engines. Since they already developed the ability to store multiple maps and change the mapping when required. :)
But, where's the value in that, I mean for shareholders, innit?
FWIW, the traditional engineering argument in this case is:
By selling the same hardware with multiple tiers of functionality artificially locked behind increased prices, it becomes profitable to develop and manufacture products that would otherwise not make economic sense. This occurs when there aren't enough potential buyers of the full-featured version at a price that makes the full-featured version on its own profitable, but the sum of all customers at all price/functionality tiers is profitable. i.e. this model results in products that would otherwise not exist.
I have mixed feelings about that argument. The main one being that it's not much of a stretch to go from that to "the full-featured version sold at price X would be profitable, but because most customers are willing do do without the higher tiers of functionality, we can make even more money by selling a reduced-functionality version at price X, and charge a premium for the extra features", and it sure seems like that's what a lot of American businesses do. But I assume at least some of the time, it really is the former and not the latter.