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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I think it's great that it's relatively common to work on a complex piece of machinery that you use daily. You get the joys of understanding how a large system works and being able to tweak it according to your desires. It could easily go the other way, where every subsystem is DRM'd and only licensed professionals were allowed to touch it.

Letting anyone do whatever they want can obviously lead to problems, like headlights that blind people or parts that fall off and kill the person behind them. But overall, I think I like the world where people are free to experiment and create.

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>every subsystem is DRM'd and only licensed professionals were allowed to touch it

Kind of like how smartphones are right now.

BMW is doing it right now - some of their US cars will come with features locked behind a subscription model. Want heated seats? They are $99 a year, you get a free 14 day trial to see if you like the feature. Same with adaptive cruise, with more advanced media features etc etc. Their argument is that vast majority of new BMWs in US are leased, so it's "better" for customers to lease a basic model for less, and then pay extra for features you want.

The obvious question here is - if you make these features work without paying(assuming you paid for the car outright), is that illegal? After all, you own the heated seats - you just installed an extra switch to put them on.

Because they're physical features already installed, it'll probably be okay. Will void your warranty, but nothing the MFG can do. Same way retuning your ECU to make more power works.

Versus something like hacking a subscription for satellite radio, where the feature in question is the content the service is providing, which is easier to frame as illegal.

Then there's the case of hacking hour Tesla to enable autopilot. The hardware is there (like the seats) but the functionality is continually updated via subscription.

I look forward to the lawsuits, with the hope that the consumer prevails.

> if you make these features work without paying(assuming you paid for the car outright), is that illegal? After all, you own the heated seats - you just installed an extra switch to put them on.

If you try and hack through the DRM on the controller, they might try and get you for copyright infringement on the software on the controller. But if you just write your own controller, things might be different.

Having features like heated seats tied to a subscription crosses the line. It's one thing to install them in all cars as an additional feature that can be enabled, but charging a subscription for it is ludicrous.

I don't mind soft-locked features too much since it can be cheaper for the manufacturer to just install it on everything than to build two separate models; plus it can be nice as a consumer to still have those additional features available if you change your mind later.

Well, Tesla has started some time ago - the most basic model 3(the one you can only order over the phone and in their centres) comes with heated seats disabled by software and you can pay Tesla to unlock it for a fee. But at least once you did they stayed unlocked forever*

*Well, there's been one case where a second hand Tesla lost all the extra features that were paid for by the previous owner and Tesla argued that the new owner had to pay again, but I think after media complained they backed off and reenabled it

> But overall, I think I like the world where people are free to experiment and create.

Then get a guitar or a paint brush.

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