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Comment by crooked-v | Hacker News Reader

There are several software-unlock 'upgrades' they sell, like the $2000 'boost mode' [1].

[1]: https://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/a30294938/tesla-model-...

Wow that just made med like Tesla a lot less. I know it's "just business" and all that but several thousand dollars for "unlockables" reminds of the way gaming has taken a turn for the worse.

I never understood this. If you want the latest tech, you should be expected to pay your share of the the R&D/materials that went into creating it.

The problem is not so much paying for the tech that you want, but the ability to reverse accidental or unintentional purchases.

It is not like the customer accidentally hit a button that burned up $4K of electricity; it is a digital enable code that could be just as easily disabled.

Even if they add some trivial service charge for reversing the transaction, or 1/1000 of the cost (because you had access to the fun feature for a day out of the 1000day expected lifetime), fine, but just stonewalling on an obviously reversible event is tantamount to dishonest dealing

Tiered pricing is a standard way to allow more price-conscious customers to get the product, while still charging higher prices to those who are willing to pay for the best features.

A big fraction of product cost is the overhead of setting up the manufacturing pipeline, so often the product tiers will be very small or even software changes to the exact same object.

This doesn't strike me as unfair. It's helped me recently, when I bought the lowest tier iPad pro (I don't care about storage or built-in cellular, and I want the smallest one). If someone wants to pay more for those things, let them. If it came full-price with all those features bundled, I simply wouldn't have bought it at all.

Exactly. You can see this in Tesla with their 60 vs 75 model S. The battery is physically the same in both, but software limited (liftable via OTA) in the 60.

Though I think it's fair to note for that case that the battery unlocked to full capacity is going to wear out faster, and since Tesla has an 8-year warranty for the S, that increases their costs in a way that doesn't happen with pure software unlocks.

Note that making the lowest tier product cost less requires the highest tier product to cost more.

(Say the lowest tier widget costs $10 and sells 1000 units. The higher tier costs $20 and sells 100 units. The average revenue per unit is $10.91. The question then is, how many units would they sell if the single-tier unit price was $11?)

What you're saying is true, but it's just the price floor and often not the actual sale price. It's more often "what the market will bear." "Professional" customers are often happy paying significant premiums. If it makes me 2x-10x more productive, the cost is of little relevance. "Consumers" are a lot more price sensitive. A durable orbital sander doesn't mean much if I only use it once every few years.

I do hate the idea of software unlocks, though.

I once (like 15 years ago) bought a base model car and the buttons on the radio didn't work right. This was after the era of standard DIN radios, and it wasn't broken, it just didn't do what you told it to. So I took it to the dealer and after initial disbelief, they fixed it.

I realized what happened (they didn't explain in so many words) was that to be as efficient as possible, the difference between the mid level and base level trims was a different plastic faceplate with different labels, and a software switch. So mine apparently had the switch set for a different trim and all that was needed was to change it. But the exact same electronics were installed in all the cars.

Still today. Audi users grab a VAGCOM and enable new features that where disabled by the dealer. Fords disable several cosmetic features based on initial programming that can be overwritten with a change of a single hex value. Etc etc

Once I rented an Audi Q5 from Avis, fancy with leather seats and the touchscreen stereo and all that jazz... but the Nav didn’t work. I didn’t pay for the Nav addon, but the car comes standard with Nav. Looked for the Sd card, and it was there. I figured I’d spend some time after the client to figure out why... well before I even left, while I was putting my bags in the trunk I noticed a panel missing and a cable dangling. I plugged the cable back in, suddenly the car chimes and Nav appears on the stereo.

Don’t underestimate the lack of knowledge by people and the wolves who prey on them.

Doesn’t software cost money to develop and research?

The main ones are Enhanced Autopilot (before it was bundled) & Full Self Driving which make sense as add-ons. Also charging.

If you want more power out of your ICE car you have to pay for a tune and additional parts. Those things cost money just like software development costs money.

That's a broken analogy. Boost mode, etc., is more "your engine has eight cylinders, already installed, but you need to pay us money to use more than six".

> Those things cost money just like software development costs money

The hardware is there. The software development cost is around building a gate/UI so only certain customers have access to it.

Using your analogy, it can be better for all involved to develop a single eight cylinder engine and sell it with two cylinders disabled for less to those that only need six cylinders.

Which is what Intel/AMD do.

Well, and there are non-zero costs of allowing greater wear / risk of damage on parts of the car that are still under warranty. Not $2k, but software isn't the only cost (to Tesla) here.

In the case of the acceleration boost update, it's more like "we wrote a new firmware for several subsystems that increases your acceleration". It's not enabling hardware that already exists, but is disabled. It's the same case with the Full Self-Driving package: you're not paying for hardware you have to be enabled, you're paying for new software features. The purchase price covers the "labor" of creating those software packages.

Okay, I can get behind the "new firmware" for Boost.

But this, less so:

> It's the same case with the Full Self-Driving package: you're not paying for hardware you have to be enabled

Now, obviously there's a cost for software development. But this is nebulous hand waving at best (and though you don't "speak" for Tesla, they're also not alone in this).

"Oh, the hardware is free, you're just paying for software..." as a justification, that is.

The hardware is demonstrably NOT free, no matter how you spin it. It's just a better business model for them. It's no different to Comcast wanting to charge me less for installing telephony equipment that was never plugged in, in order to "bundle", than just plain Internet service.

Okay lets take my hardware out of play. Every car now days is detuned at the factory for reliability. You can get an aftermarket tune and programmer for 1-2k that might void the warranty on your engine and drivetrain. If you want to go the custom route and have your car tuned on a dyno that might be a few hundred dollars an hour. With gas cars the hardware is there. The software development cost is around building a gate/UI so only certain customers have access to it.

So I can take my theoretical Tesla to just any software developer to unlock those optional features? Because where I live a tuned car doesn't require paying the cars creator a cent.

I got my Model 3 in 2018. Since then, it has received a ton of free upgrades making it way more feature rich than I bought it. There are certain add-ons you can purchase when you order (at a bit of a discount compared to if you decide to get them down the road).

I think another way to look at it is that some features cost extra money because they cost money to make, and they add value to the vehicle. In a traditional model, you would have to take your car into the dealership or whatever to have some sort of extra feature installed. (Once upon a time, this might have been upgrading from a tape deck to a CD player.) The difference with Tesla, is for some things (not all), they can do this remotely. There's really only a psychological difference because we perceive if something is technically capable of some feature, it should be able to do it whether or not we've paid for it.

While there are certainly some cases of poor customer service that get a lot of bad press, there are also many cases of excellent experiences where they go above an beyond what they needed to do, and compared to any other car company, the experience just doesn't even begin to compare.

It ain't new. IBM used to sell mainframes that could be unlocked to a higher level of capability, long before the microcomputer era, so I'm told.

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