Peter Mertens, Former Head of Audi R&D: “We All Did Sleep”

Without software, you are just what is left, a company assembling low-profit metal boxes assembling company — and low profit metal boxes are an exchangeable commodity.

Personally, im sick of being constantly commoditized by companies who appoint themselves as pimps for my personal data and attempt to worm their ways into my life. Alot of people prefer their car to be a dumb box that they buy knowing the manufacturer is operating on low margins. Im certainly not going to celebrate a manufacturer for increasing their profit margin by adding paywalls, subscriptions and other nonsense that do nothing for the driver while extracting that delicious recurring revenue for the company. BMW has been pushing things this direction recently with remote disabling of features. I hope the market will punish them, but I'm not holding my breath.

New car buyers look for pretty different things from used buyers, will be interesting to see how these schemes age and what they do to resale value. Might be interesting if firmware unlocks are available for only earlier model years as often happens with gaming consoles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W__A569KX2c

The shorter video in the Cleantechnica article seems to be based on a transcript of the above.

As a consumer, how about you just make a car and stay the hell out of my "data".