I get market segmentation and having optional features in a car. But most car companies don't actually integrate a seat heater if you didn't order one. Lugging the weight of the extra hardware for these features around but being blocked from using them at all feels wromg to me.
Heating pads start around $15.00 on amazon, seems easy to believe it's cheaper to make only seats with heating integrated instead of making two part numbers, doubling the overhead for seat inventory, make the assembly line more complex, making the order system more complex, documentation, testing, doubling the overhead for car inventory, handling additional order complexity etc.
No, this isn't "pretty common". I've worked on a variety of automotive assembly lines and have never seen it. Why would you waste the money? It's trivial to not include parts you don't need, because the lines are designed that way.
"The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.” In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."
Philip K. Dick, Ubik
Sold!
What could be better than this?
How do you think modern JIT auto manufacturing works? And what if I told you that Tesla is, in fact, doing the opposite most of the time, by building in batches of cars and holding inventory? Why do we continue to attribute to Elon "inventions" that already exist?
I don't understand why they decided to make two models out of the same engine.
As you go more esoteric, you need to rebuild the engine, replace piston rings, etc. But those bikes are either built for it (off road two strokes) or have the budget for it (racing). Still don't need to scrap the whole engine.
Perhaps oil changes counts as high maintenance. It can be a bit messy, but it's quick and cheap on most bikes. More time is spent oiling chains overall though.
Taiwan has drive through automated oil change machines that suck the oil out and fill up via a tube into the filler. Makes sense especially for <125cc scooters which do not normally have oil filters.
There are motorcycles that you buy facing the near certainty that it will most likely outlive you, like KLR 650, or you can get a Ducati with a Desmosedici Stradale in it, where you have to get valves adjusted (major service) every 2500 miles. But given timely service, no motorcycle will last less than 50k miles, and most will last above 100 before an engine block rebuild.
Comparing cars to cars, or motorcycles to motorcycles, the logic holds though.
Increasing performance puts greater stress on the engine, increasing maintenance cost and/or failure rate. If engine breaks down before end of warranty, it's producer's cost.
This is an extreme example of it.
The difference between the 18 page/min and the 45 page/min copier was a DIP switch and $10k.
I remember there was an AMD chip that was similarly hobbled, that could be unlocked using a pencil line to jump a pin on the processor.
If there were a bunch of viable Tesla-like alternatives out there, they wouldn't be able to afford to leave in disabled features.
So, it's in essence exploiting their monopolistic position which is evil.
Same as a chip manufacturer, say Intel, developing a process to make say 3x faster chips. But instead of releasing the fastest chip they could make, they titrate their new ability to the market over time. First a chip 50% faster, then 2x, etc., so they can milk the market.
I don't know about what you're willing to accept, but I don't like being treated like a farmer's cow.
So... Where's my 200 dollar car that costs 4000 to make?
Oh wait, did you mean
>The profit margin of an item is what value the customer is willing to pay over and on top of the cost of initial production + logistics of getting product to the final resales?
Because if you don't take that in to account, you only played enough attention to validate a worldview in which capitalism justifies unbounded exploitation.
Capitalism operates within specific bounds outside of which the axioms on which it is based cease to produce net positive effects for the health of the societal framework in which it operates based on it's tendency to inequitably partition the fundamental means of exchange without active measures in place in order to ensure that the majority of capital continues exchanging hands instead of languishing in accounts chasing after opportunities for growth rendered nigh-impossible to find once a "winner" is established by conservative investment strategies in most industrial verticals, and that winner optimized beyond the reach of meaningful competition by new entrants.
You'll then end up in repetitive cycles of boom and bust as too much capital chases too few opportunities for growth; all the while with the financial industry converging toward whatever form is most able to avoid current regulatory controls.
Some design or manufacturing flaws can lead to auto makers paying someone to dispose of an otherwise brand new car. Sometimes, such as when they've poorly forecast demand, selling their inventory at a loss is a smaller loss than paying for disposal. Other times they will destroy functioning, new vehicles if that's what's necessary to maximize total revenue.
If anything you're Also to a degree proving my point on the market at large being skewed toward larger actors; as the capability of the "new entrant" to extract value from the market is significantly diminished. Get that same car to a dealership, and they might even be able to extract even more value for it.
Also, if you're taring the sale at last seller, that's not entirely fair. First sale is what we're discussing, generally represented by first change of hands after factory->reseller.
>the financial industry converging on whichever form most effectively sidesteps the current regulatory regime.
I should probably have phrased it to industry in general, but regardless, I stand by my original point. The automotive industry accepts taking a loss through sub-optimal implementations of regulatorally incentivized models in order to optimize on the most profitable model segment.
Capitalism will converge in the direction of a net negative naturally without active efforts to reign in it's tendency toward fiscal optimization at all costs.
I'm not even being controversial and saying socialism/Marxism is the way. (They aren't; in case anyone is wondering). I'm just pointing out what actually happens.
I think they've learned from Juniper's licensing model for routers. They ship with all the hardware, but are reliant on license keys for full ability. Go look up the licensed versions of an mx204 for instance. Not something I'm a fan of.
Nope they do, and it is more common than you think. I become aware of this while on my friend Ford Fiesta as he enabled some features which were not available even in the most expensive model. It was a "wtf" moment. Until I realized that my car (mazda 3) does have features disabled by the seller. I just was too lazy to research unlocking them and doing it.
As someone who has owned a Fiesta, and worked on a Ford auto assembly manufacturing line, I'd love to see some evidence of this. What features are you talking about? Because, having actually built seats for Ford, I know that they explicitly did not include heaters when they were not ordered. It was trivial to just not include the part; the assembly line was designed that way. You simply grabbed one cushion set vs another. Most auto manufacturers are actually concerned about margins and costs, so these things matter.