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Comment by yurishimo | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, not surprising. Motorcycles are a time-limited recreational activity in many countries around the world, as 2 wheels become extremely dangerous on public roads when ice and snow are present. It seems like a decent idea on it's face to save money when you don't need it, but I would question why it needs any online capabilities at all. All of the processing needs to be done on the device, as we're talking about fractions of a second to decide if inflation is required in the event of a crash. Not enough time to ask an API if your subscription is valid.

KLIM made a mistake here and should have priced the device in such a way to support it for the life of the product. If that means you're buying into a 5 year life after purchase, so be it. Instead, they're purposefully selling a product that could be deadly under the guise of, "but you save money!". I expect the airbags in my car to work all the time. If I buy a safety feature, that safety feature should work 100% unless I explicitly disable it.

What's amazing is the world of motorcycles already has this concept in production. Most bikes with ABS have the option to disable it for offroad use. After disabling it, I then can ride around and do all the crazy stuff I want and turn it back on when I'm ready. Heck, some manufacturers even re-enable it automatically after the bike is shut off and started again.

Bad move by KLIM imo.

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Worse, even if you agree, missing payments without noticing it is easy. You might get your life saver disabled even though you have plenty of money and are willing to pay and think you set everything up. For example, it works for a while, then you overdraw one of your accounts because a transfer is late (you still have plenty of money overall), the bank stops the payment from that account.

Even if they don't disable right away, add a few more delays. I had an address change once and they sent the notice for a missed payment to the old address of my business - so I only noticed it when the service was cut off. The bill also had been sent there so I never knew I had to pay.

Do you want to say "tough luck" to customers who rely on the protection and miss a payment only because of bad luck? Is even forgetfulness (so 100% "their own fault") worth a potential death sentence?

Note that the address change issue also once happened to me after I had already informed the other party of my new address. It was the IRS, they still sent their requests to my old address, months later, and then got a court order to get the money from my bank account without my knowledge or consent. I never knew they had wanted something from me, and I had given them the new address. So it can happen even if you do everything right.

> Not enough time to ask an API if your subscription is valid.

Common misconception. The subscription check is done when you turn the device on, not during a crash.

> KLIM made a mistake here and should have priced the device in such a way to support it for the life of the product. If that means you're buying into a 5 year life after purchase, so be it.

They offer that option. You can buy the vest in one lump sum with no subscription.

Kind of an interesting dilemma. Charge full price, only rich people can afford it, poor people die. Charge a subscription, poor person affords it for a while, bank account gets overdrafted, poor person dies. On the other hand, charge a subscription, poor person affords a safety feature they previously couldn't use, saves their life. Isn't that the more ethical option? If the full price is $800 then they're actually selling the vest to you at a 50% discount and hoping to recoup the costs through the subscription. You're getting a safety product for 50% off and you don't even have to pay back the other 50% if you don't think you'll need it. Hm.

>Isn't that the more ethical option?

No. As a civil engineer that routinely works with and designs safety-critcal systems, and understands the concept of "public trust" and personal liability as Engineer of Record, whoever designed this is an absolute psychopath.

Exactly. That's why "software engineering" will never have the equivalent of a PE. Terribly inconvenient to "move fast and break things" when you're obligated to give a shit about the collateral damage when something breaks.

This is not true at all. There are entire, large sections of the industry devoted to creating safety-critical software. These areas of the industry are well disciplined and highly regulated. This software is designed in such a way to make collateral damage impossible in all but the most exceptional scenarios. This popular silly web programming stuff is truly only the tip of the software engineering iceberg.

No, it's completely true. There are relatively tiny, quite niche sections of the industry devoted to creating safety-critical software in a systematic, engineered manner. I've been part of it. My company has more people writing Java/Cobol business apps than all of NASA has writing true high-reliability code. Even then, while folks writing mission critical code might be 'disciplined', there is no equivalent of the NSPE regulating what someone needs to know to do this, no universally agreed upon standards for what constitutes "safety-critical" or even consensus metrics for how to assess whether something is or not. There are literally hundreds of different guidelines for "how to engineer safe software", but no canonical guide. Even stuff like "can you use C to write software 'in such a way to make collateral damage impossible in all but the most exceptional scenarios'" is a matter of furious debate; some say yes, some say no.

Not just that, but in PE land, the Engineer of Record is PERSONALLY liable for what they stamp, and no corporation can really stand in the way and protect them from that liability.

The automotive industry has standards that govern the systematic development of safety-critical systems (hardware and software). The most significant is probably ISO 26262, which defines an “Automotive Safety Integrity Level” and methods for ensuring the safety and reliability of components at a given integrity level. There are also standards like MISRA C, which are basically defined code quality and software development guidelines to reduce bugs in critical software.

So...exactly my point? Each niche has it's own idea of what the standard is.

Thank you.

> whoever designed this is an absolute psychopath.

Yes, if the product were to refuse to protect you after you started riding, that would fit your description, and I would agree. I think it doesn't do that though.

From an engineering perspective, what are the safety risks here, exactly? Did you review the design spec or read the product page?

"3. If I suspend/pause my subscription and forget to reactivate it, will the vest still detect a crash and inflate?

"Answer: No, because in the first place you won’t be able to turn it on into ride-ready status before your ride. It will not “trick” you into thinking it’s active when it is not, because the LED indicators will warn you that it’s not active. If you ignore the LED indicators warning you that the airbag isn’t active, you can’t expect it to work when you’re not actively subscribed."

https://www.klim.com/Ai-1-Airbag-Vest-3046-000

Given that description, what are the failure modes you envision that are "psychopathic" and would endager the rider and/or erode public trust?

>If you ignore the LED indicators warning you that the airbag isn’t active, you can’t expect it to work when you’re not actively subscribed.

On the things I work on, where public trust is at stake, there are typically several layers of redundancy in not just the design, but also the regulation, all designed to prevent human error from occurring at a later date.

Here's a very simple example for a very common and low key activity: In my county, wastewater treatment regulation is based on the assumption that 100 feet of horizontal separation provides sufficient treatment and protection between a groundwater well supplying potable water, and a septic system. Now, both of those require permits to install which requires a site plan and coordinates, etc. (Check number one.) It is especially illegal for well drillers to drill a well without filing the permits and record with the county. (Check number two.) You cannot permit either a well or a septic system within 50 feet of a property line. (Check number three, which helps to ensure 100-feet between systems even if someone makes a mistake about what is occurring on an adjacent property.) When permitting a septic system, you must dig a deep hole to investigate and make sure that there is sufficient distance to groundwater through the soil to provide treatment before reaching groundwater. (Check 3, this provides redundancy in case there is some form of short circuiting, or a well get's drilled nearby anyway). The soil type is lab-verified to ensure it does not drain too quickly, compromising the treatment before effluent would hit groundwater. (Check 4: redundancy) In many cases, a monitoring well is required with a minimum of 6 inspections to further ensure that groundwater is sufficiently deep year round to avoid compromise. (check 5). Many of these steps require BOTH a licensed engineer and a county representative to be physically present. Etc. etc. etc. And this is an example with compartively VERY FEW regulations and checks to ensure that someone nearby you doesn't get sick.

>Did you review the design spec or read the product page?

Yes, I also ride motorcycles and have reviewed several motorcycle airbag options.

>... "If you ignore the LED indicators warning you that the airbag isn’t active, you can’t expect it to work when you’re not actively subscribed." ... Given that description, what are the failure modes you envision that are "psychopathic" and would endanger the rider and/or erode public trust?

1.) Human error to notice, identify, and correctly interpret an LED indicator light.

2.) Human error to properly correct an LED warning light indicator for a variety of reasons. ("I called them and gave them my new credit card so I should be ok, even though the light is on.")

3.) Inability to correct the situation without first continuing travel to an area with cell or internet service. (Date changed, subscription expired, have been traveling and haven't had reliable cell, internet, or mail for 2 months.)

4.) Hardware failures of a huge variety, which can exist in a system which has an inbuilt mechanism to DISABLE airbag.

5.) Programming errors and/or network errors.

6.) Hacking: The device is "connected and upgradeable". Enough said.

This whole thing is a terrible idea, to the point, where, I WOULD NOT TRUST the device even if I purchased the non-subscription version, lest it somehow fail after an unauthorized update, or revert to thinking I'm on a subscription service.

...The thing is, in engineering where public trust is involved, you simply DON'T DESIGN SAFETY SYSTEMS THIS WAY. You design them to be as hard to screw up as possible even in the face of substantial human error, or negligence, or malicious intent.

Would you feel ok entering a building where the fire exit required the building owner pay a subscription service to unlock?

Thanks for the detailed reply. So it seems like your objection has nothing to do with the payment model, right? All of these are just generic engineering concerns with any product at all that has the ability to electronically enable or disable a safety feature.

Why are you concerned about and this particular product, as opposed to say cars, which affect orders of magnitude more people? Modern cars have many safety systems that can be digitally activated and deactivated, including the steering, brakes, throttle, and airbags, by design. The ECU alone in any vehicle, car or motorcycle, is hackable and could kill you (did in Toyota's case). All vehicles have LED lights to indicate safety critical problems. Nowadays, it's more commonly Android-driven LCD panels with many, many more failure points than an LED.

I mean, I hear you that electronic systems have many failure modes. But electronic control is more than routine today, it's utterly ubiquitous, so what's the cause for such extreme concern here that words like "psychopath" are justified?

Tesla alone is putting more electronically controllable cars on the road than all highway motorcycles combined in the US per year. Should we even talk about the failure modes possible with a Tesla or other self-driving car?

> Would you feel ok entering a building where the fire exit required the building owner pay a subscription service to unlock?

If I had to manually power up the entry way, and the building warned me before I entered about the subscription status, it wouldn't bother me that much. Please do at least try to be fair to the perspective of the business Vice has misrepresented here.

Before I reply, I want to recognize that as the actual licensed engineer, you have more of a say in this than I do, a non licensed software developer, regardless I would like to continue the conversation to better understand why I am wrong.

Your core argument seems to ride on the idea that public trust is paramount. I can definitely see this on projects such as bridges, buildings, wells etc. I struggle to see it on a private consumer good such as an airbag vest. If I want to cross a river I'm forced to drive across a bridge, and the bridge doesn't come with an instruction manual. It makes sense to engineer for the lowest common denominator here so that the functionality is predictable.

But I'm not forced to use the airbag vest. Every issue you listed is a problem with almost all motor vehicles. On my car dashboard the LED that pops up to indicate low tire pressure is tiny and the label so abstract I had to look in up in the drivers manual to figure out what it meant. In many situations low tire pressure means you could be seconds away from losing control of the vehicle, yet the engineers trusted that dashboard LED would be safe enough for consumers to understand. This is also true for ABS, traction control, stability assist, brake failure, and whatever else gets its own LED.

Even disregarding the subscription service, it still makes sense to have a device that shows a status LED to confirm the system works. What if the battery died? What if some wire internally disconnected? What if some hardware component failed a startup check? An electronic system can alert you to failure conditions far better than a mechanical one.

> 4.) Hardware failures of a huge variety, which can exist in a system which has an inbuilt mechanism to DISABLE airbag.

On any modern passenger car the passenger airbag is disabled if a weight sensor in the seat isn't tripped. These systems already exist and are deployed en masse.

> 1.) Human error to notice, identify, and correctly interpret an LED indicator light.

> 2.) Human error to properly correct an LED warning light indicator for a variety of reasons. ("I called them and gave them my new credit card so I should be ok, even though the light is on.")

> 3.) Inability to correct the situation without first continuing travel to an area with cell or internet service. (Date changed, subscription expired, have been traveling and haven't had reliable cell, internet, or mail for 2 months.)

> 5.) Programming errors and/or network errors.

From the site: https://www.klim.com/Ai-1-Airbag-Vest-3046-000

4. If I’m subscribed monthly and miss a payment or my credit card expires, will the airbag suddenly stop working?

Answer: No. In&motion will reach out with a 30-day warning prior to your payment method expiration. After expiration or missed/forgotten payment, In&motion gives you a 30-day grace period during which the airbag functions completely the same. You will receive notifications about the missed payment. After the 30-day grace period, the airbag will stop detecting crashes until payment is resumed. You will not be able to turn on your airbag vest into ride-ready status after the 30-day grace period, so you won’t unknowingly ride with a non-functioning vest, unless you choose to ignore the LED indicators warning that it isn’t active.

5. Would In&motion turn off my vest mid-ride if I pass the 30-day grace period?

Answer: No. In&motion will not turn off your vest mid-ride for any reason, even if you’re at the end of the 30-day grace period and it elapses during your ride. The only way for it to turn off during a ride is if you didn’t charge the In&box and the battery dies (LEDs indicate battery level, which you see when you turn it on) or if you manually turn it off during your ride.

> Would you feel ok entering a building where the fire exit required the building owner pay a subscription service to unlock?

This is a false premise because fire exists are required by law and factored into the cost of the building. There is no legal situation where you can skimp out on fire exit costs. Also, a motorcycle isn't a shared space. Whether another rider chooses to wear protection or not has no impact on me as a car driver.

Not a dilemma, it's just shitty.

Where does the $800 figure come from? As far as we know, it's just a number they made up. I have strong doubts they would be able to sell the vest at that price if only the "full price" option were available.

For context, the price of a non-airbag motorcycle jacket is typically $150 for a basic one, $250-400 for a good value, and up to $1000 or more for a high end jacket.

Also, the cost of a major motorcycle injury is easily six figures before insurance.

The ability for the vest to check if your still paying the subscription costs more money to build than an always working vest.

If it actually costs 800$ then you can give people the option to make 40 payments of 20$ a month easily like how many people buy iPhones and sofas.

This is a great point. The IoT subscription model can be avoided by using a more traditional rental model. I don't think anyone would have qualms over financing plans about this, but the IoT angle makes it more controversial.

There's nothing to subscribe to, no actual service being provided at the operational level. It's a financing scheme similar to a leasing arrangement; the only internet check here is whether your payments are up to date.

Imagine a helmet that you paid for in installments, but that lost its structural integrity if you fell behind.

Or an alarm system that left your house open for the same reason.

Yes, it's a financing plan. Their web page says so plainly. Unlike your mortgage, if you fail to pay, you get to keep the vest and restart the payment plan. When you pay for a helmet in installments and stop paying, it's worse than losing structural integrity; a collector comes to take the helmet away and you have no helmet.

There’s a difference. If a collector comes and takes my helmet, I won’t get on a bike without it because I’m a stickler for keeping my brain inside my skull. If there is a bug anywhere between the global payment system and this product, I may not even know.

> If there is a bug anywhere between the global payment system and this product, I may not even know.

Why are you speculating about this and suggesting it will operate in a way that directly contradicts their documentation? It states clearly that the system has to be turned on and will reach "ride ready state". This means that you will know whether it's functioning before you ride, even if there is a bug in their payment system.

And what if there is a bug in their payment checking system and it incorrectly indicates that the vest is functional?

This idea is just not something that is possible to defend. It is a really bad all around. Not everything in life can or should be made into a subscription service or a financial instrument.

I think I know what the universe’s great filter is. It is that in any society eventually a biologist will lapse on his bio-safe subscription so that it, according to contract, releases the world ending pathogens into the air conditioning system.

> what if there is a bug in their payment checking system and it incorrectly indicates that the vest is functional?

Then you get a free day of airbag protection. The vest won't tell you it's functional and then stop working while you ride. The functionality and payment check happens before you ride, if you read their product description. https://www.klim.com/Ai-1-Airbag-Vest-3046-000

> This idea is just not something that is possible to defend.

I think you have the wrong idea about what it is. I am a motorcycle rider, I'm extremely safety conscious. I might buy this vest, because an airbag is good protection, and they're making this cost less to try out. Not sure if I would lease it or buy it outright, but I wouldn't hesitate to lease it over safety concerns, if buying wasn't an option for me.

I choose not to trust documentation when a company shits all over everything we know about building reliable safety systems. To be blunt, if they're dumb enough to think this is a good idea, they're too dumb to make safety equipment. This is an awful idea and it's impossible to defend with any kind of integrity.

Your strong language and hyperbole isn't convincing me there's something wrong. What is the safety risk, exactly? Can you elaborate on specifically what is unreliable or why this is awful? The vest will clearly indicate the lack of protection before a ride, just like a car or computer or any reliable safety system. What is the alternative that this product should be doing that would make it safer?

Isn't there a much higher safety risk of using safety products as a user, and not reading or trusting the documentation?

In short, the safety issue is that a company that makes gloves and jackets decided to build a passive safety system with an on/off switch tied to payment networks. The alternative is obvious - get rid of the on/off switch and just sell the thing. Not everything in life should be reduced to a monthly subscription.

> Not everything in life should be reduced to a monthly subscription.

Hell, I am in complete agreement with that. I'm just as tired of rent-seeking subscriptions as everyone else.

They do just sell the thing, that is an option. They messed up their terminology and marketing message by calling it 'subscription' and 'service'. They should have stuck strictly to "lease plan", which some of their marketing does say. If everyone here had the exact same information but had never thought of this as a subscription, I'd bet all the pitchforks would still be tucked away in their sheds.

Ok maybe they actually implemented this extremely poor idea correctly, but it is nevertheless an extremely supremely poor idea.

If this takes off, which I sure hope it never will but given our collective idiocy I’m not optimistic, how many years before someone implements the system incorrectly?

I’m an embedded systems guy. A computer chip can be useful in many circumstances. A safety vest, for this purpose, it is not providing any value to anyone except a slimy money person.

> it is nevertheless an extremely supremely poor idea

Can you elaborate on exactly what's wrong here, now that you know more about the implementation? Are you sure this isn't a case of getting the wrong impression about what it is because Vice said so? It's not a safety issue, the vest will notify whether it's working before the ride.

> A safety vest, for this purpose, it is not providing any value to anyone except a slimy money person.

The irony of your statement here is that KLIM is offering an expensive product for a half price down payment, and allowing the consumer to cancel it after trying it out without having to return the hardware or pay any penalties on the remainder. Or they can resume payments a year after lapsing. You don't find this kind of presumably money-losing proposition with any other financing plans I can think of.

You may be right, according to what you’ve said about it then it seems that maybe this company actually did design this thing properly.

What I’m having a visceral reaction to is the generally wasteful idea of a physical product being rendered useless via software is being applied to a safety critical product.

Like I said, even if these people got it right, it’s only a matter of time before someone doesn’t.

> The vest won't tell you it's functional and then stop working while you ride. The functionality and payment check happens before you ride, if you read their product description. https://www.klim.com/Ai-1-Airbag-Vest-3046-000

Given it connects to an external server on the internet (even indirectly), it presumably has updatable firmware.

Are you confident enough this company understands secure boot chains well enough to prevent a rogue firmware being flashed? And that they have protected their Bluetooth stack (?) well enough to prevent a firmware being flashed that way?

It's likely (but impossible to tell without doing a teardown) that you could indicate the device is functional via firmware, while not being armed and ready to deploy, if the LED or indicator is on a separate GPIO.

If this was to happen in the supply chain (like used to happen with grey market mobile phone imports getting loaded with adware), that could become a real problem...

What you're bringing up now is a general engineering safety concern that applies to any product at all. You should be equally scared of your car's airbag and other safety systems. This is a straw man in this context, and has nothing to do with the payment plan. Because the designers are making a safety product, unless there is evidence otherwise, I would speculate/assume that they have thought about whether it's possible to indicate protection and then not provide it. But, no engineered product is 100% safe, I'm not under any misconceptions about that.

When you introduce the functionality to disable a traditional safety product, you have to think about the dependency chain and how you design that system to prevent issues. Vehicles with a switchable airbag tend to display a fairly prominent red light when the airbag disable switch is used. I'm pretty sure that on some vehicles I've had, it's hard-wired to light up when the switch is used to disable the airbag. You'd have to break the light to "override" that warning.

It is possible the makers of this product have done likewise, and the arming of their system is done with the same signal that's used to display a green light. But given the sheer complexity of it (Bluetooth, app Integration, server side checks), it seems likely this won't be the case - maybe the light is only momentary, in which case such hardware failsafes won't be in place.

Nonetheless, adding complexity to a safety critical product should be scrutinized and held to the level of engineering as any other safety critical product.

A safety critical product which will cease to function in its safety role without the ability to call home to a server seems to fail at some early hurdles of being engineered as a safety product, so I would respectfully disagree with your starting point that they've thought about this and engineered their lockout as a safety system (since it fails unsafe, rather than safe).

Sure, I completely agree with everything you said about engineering and safety in general. I don't understand the speculation on your part about it seeming likely to you that they're making obviously and absurdly bad safety critical design decisions just because it's complex and you haven't looked for or seen any evidence that they're not doing that.

I'm saying there is evidence they're considering this issue, because they wrote about it in the product page's FAQ. They at least intended to design the system so that lapses in the financing plan do not compromise safety in any way, and they wrote about that intention explicitly. That is evidence to indicate they've thought about it. All speculation otherwise is just FUD.

Because the safe thing is to not do something unnecessarily dangerous in the first place. You don't secure your core system by being very careful with your backdoor access -- you secure it by not introducing a backdoor in the first place.

A critical safety device should have absolutely no way to be disabled, intended or not, without severe intervention or total and complete failure of the device.

They've introduced greater potential for absolute disaster in their edge cases. And more likely than not, very little has to go wrong for a user to end up dead.

Also of note: why is the battery LED on the back of the suit? If the battery dies mid-route (or a bug disables the vest), there's no way to tell? They don't note any audio cues.

I agree about everything you said about safety design, but Vice and uninformed comments have guided you into being mad about this today, and it is not the safety issue you think it is. The article was spreading FUD with the idea that the subscription lapse could cause a fatal crash. The product was designed to prevent that. Yes, there are reasons to be careful with electronic control of safety critical systems, but despite that fact, we are completely surrounded by safety critical systems with electronic control. Every vehicle you own, use or ride in has them.

Electric controls are not the problem here; it's designing anti-failsafes into the component. AFAIK cars could be shut down remotely (which is bad, and fairly stupid), and warning systems are optional and conditional (e.g. pedestrian warning, emergency braking, etc) but the core safety systems (seatbelts, ABS, airbags, etc) follow the rule prescribed: It works, or it's been disabled by significant intervention, or it's totally and utterly failed. You don't play with uptime when it comes to this kind of device.

That is, they don't intentionally introduce a backdoor to disable the system. Or rather, they don't intentionally increase the risk surface of critical safety devices. The death star is not supposed to be your design inspiration.

It's not fair to frame it as an anti-failsafe, when it was designed to prevent shutting down after the ride starts. The core safety systems in modern cars that you cite can all be disabled electronically. (BTW, think a bit about a Tesla.) This really isn't a the good example of pro-safety critical design you think it is, cars have exactly the same "back doors" as this airbag vest at the engineering / electronic control level.

>This really isn't a the good example of pro-safety critical design you think it is, cars have exactly the same "back doors" as this airbag vest at the engineering / electronic control level.

You're going to have to back that up to convince me of that, because as I said, AFAIK that's the not the case (not that I know much on car safety mechanisms -- but I've yet to hear/see anything suggesting to the contrary beyond this statement).

>It's not fair to frame it as an anti-failsafe, when it was designed to prevent shutting down after the ride starts.

You know what; that did the trick. I'm convinced.

You're right, if they designed it as purely a boot-up flag (it turns on, or it turns off, but it's designed to be 100% up unconditionally once on) then it doesn't conflict with anything I've said. There's no additional risk being introduced that I can imagine from this setup -- beyond that inherit to the problem.

I still find the framing pretty dumb -- they should have just called it a rental -- but otherwise I'm fully convinced this is a non-issue.

Yeah, agreed, the marketing angle seems to be miscalculated.

I love your last paragraph - it's well written, makes a very strong point and manages to be very funny at the same time. Thanks friend - that's some great writing and thinking!! :)

Thanks for the kind words :)

This makes the most sense. The remedy for non-payment should not be endangerment, it should be the well established route of civil suit and debt collections.

I start my bikes and cars inside a garage where there's limited RF signal due to no line of sight to towers. If this thing fails to initiate service correctly, the maker of this product will be in for a world of hurt after my heirs sue them into the ground for failing to deliver their service.

Air bag makers like Takata know the high cost of poorly designed airbags all too well. Inviting [b|m]illions in liability through a service model that requires a successful login before every use is nuts.

Login failure could also happen inside a parking garage w/o signal, or in a large city where RF shadows from tall buildings block signal, or in a woods that's too far from cellular towers to receive a signal, or it could fail on restart after the engine stalls on the road.

I wonder if the maker will choose not to sell their product in the US where personal injury attorneys are probably already licking their lips.

This service model may make sense on a racetrack, but not so much in the real world.

So if Klim’s security/build/release processes are imperfect, I’ll die??

I’m going to pass. This is fucking insane.

A determined commuter can ride bicycles/motorcycles on ice just fine with the right equipment. Just need tire studs and some good winter tires. They do it in Netherlands and northern Europe all the time.

https://www.amazon.com/Estink-Anti-Slip-Chains-Spikes-Motorc...

https://www.amazon.com/Schwalbe-Spiker-Studded-Mountain-Bicy...

I don't think they 'made a mistake'. They just realized that they wouldn't sell many at $800, and that they'd probably make more by appearing the cut the price and flogging a subscription model. Unfortunately for them they hired a comms director who comes off as a sociopath and thinks hostage taking is a reasonable business model.

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