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Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

This is just a financing option, they even call it a "lease plan" on the web page. The unusual and positive benefit here is it doesn't go to recovery, you get to keep it and just pick up and continue your payments later as if nothing happened. I wish all my financing plans offered that option!

* I'm totally and utterly baffled by all the downvoting. It seems like many people did not check out the product's web page and are left with Vice's misleading interpretation.

Here's the description I'm talking about, right from the product page: https://klimsitecontent.s3.amazonaws.com/contentblocks/2021%...

It says "Membership: Lease or Buy (No Subscription!)"

Maybe they goofed by using the word "service" in the description, but this is just a financing plan. And it's not some kind of crazy safety issue where they shut it off while you ride, they appear to have designed it to prevent that.

And it is, in fact, more lenient than my mortgage, my car payments, or my credit cards. I don't get to pause or cancel any of those without pretty severe repercussions.

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If it was financing, lack of payment would just use collections like every other financial product. It’s a solved problem, your problem is with the bank and not the product manufacturer. They are acting like a lender and insurer (for themselves) at the same time.

It’a a strange pay-for-non-existent-service scheme designed to artificially reduce MSRP, while using fear to reduce their risk. On a personal safety device. It’s disgusting.

> It is not financing if you have to continue payments after covering the full cost.

You don't have to continue payments, they offer a buyout plan for $99 after three years. (They also offer the buyout up front plan.)

BTW, jeez, I realize I seriously sound like an ad for the company just because I'm trying to help explain the flood of misinformation in this comment section. I ride motorcycles, but I have no affiliation, and I like the idea of an airbag vest and I like the idea of being more easily able to afford to try safety gear... even if it's more expensive in the long run. (Like everyone, I generally dislike rent, subscriptions, and financing plans, but I do have to acknowledge the utility.)

> It’a a strange pay-for-non-existent-service scheme designed to artificially reduce MSRP but increase lifetime value.

That seems accurate, except that it's not at all strange, it's utterly commonplace. Like millions and millions of people, I have a mortgage and a car payment and a credit card. Most of the money I spend would be reduced if I were to pay up-front.

> It’s disgusting

I'm very confused about this part, I don't understand why that feeling is so strong in this thread. KLIM's financing plan is better than most, just be open to reconsidering your idea here. You can cancel without notice, and you get to keep the vest. You can pick up where you left off and continue paying later. You can pay only in the summer when you're riding. Those consumer friendly options aren't available on any mortgage or car plan or credit card anywhere.

> Like millions and millions of people, I have a mortgage and a car payment and a credit card

That’s not the strange part. Volkswagen cannot deactivate your car if you stop paying - it’s the banks problem. Same with your house. There are legal mechanisms to kick you out or recover property, but none of them involve a subscription and remote deactivation. Imagine your front door stops opening if you miss a payment.

> Volkswagen cannot deactivate your car if you stop paying

Yes they can, they will come boot it or tow it or remotely deactivate it, if you finance from them instead of the bank and stop paying. And they won't give it back, and you can't decide to pay later.

There absolutely are multiple car brands on the market that can be remotely deactivated: "A Quebec teenager's car was remotely deactivated by a dealership after he refused to pay to remove a GPS tracking device" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8Enmspjbjo

"How auto lenders can disable your car if you miss payment" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6LU20sAn9c

This vest thing was spun as a subscription model dystopia, but that's not really what it is. This is really an actually very consumer friendly financing plan, it was just marketed badly and then framed as FUD by Vice.

Think about it- this is a financing plan where you get to pause for the winter because you're not using it. Neither Volkswagen nor the bank offers that kind of flexibility.

The fact it has done before doesn’t make it good, or change the argument. You may think nothing of it, but most people don’t want this kind of invasive tracking and do find it dystopian. This specific case is much worse - in the worst interpretation possible, the threat of death or injury (deactivating the airbag) is being used as a motivator to lower default rates.

Financing is dealt with by a bank, the seller is fully paid and has no business messing with your property afterwards. It’s a better model for all parties involved, unless you think saving a few % is worth having your personal items tracked by the manufacturer forever. I don’t.

> the threat of death or injury (deactivating the airbag) is being used as a motivator to lower default rates.

Come on, man, that is unreasonably hyperbolic and simply not true. They do exactly the opposite of that and design the product and ensure the buyer that accidental injury/death is not possible unless they’re not paying and willfully ignoring payment notifications and willfully ignoring the power-on state of the vest. The financing model is that you can have the thing if you pay for it, like all other products including all other safety products in the world.

> Financing is dealt with by a bank

Aren’t most car and motorcycle financing plans executed at the dealership by the dealer? (Just looked it up, and yes, two thirds of new cars are dealer financed... also called “captive financing”) Maybe I should, but I’ve never actually gone to a bank first before buying a car.

> invasive tracking [...] personal items tracked

Looks like the goal posts have just moved pretty far. Sure, I’m worried about tracking too. This isn’t what we were talking about, and tracking doesn’t compromise safety. Tracking isn’t new and isn’t related to the financing model of this airbag vest, right? It feels like you’re rationalizing now.

>I’ve never actually gone to a bank first before buying a car.

I don’t think you’re paying much attention to what you sign when buying a car, you don’t go to a bank, there’s a person at the dealership who sets the loan for you from different banks. There are buy-here pay-here which is financed by the dealership but that is usually for conditions that banks won’t accept like rebuilt title vehicles, heavily modified or too old.

> ensure the buyer that accidental injury/death is not possible unless they’re not paying

Exactly. You don’t seem to get it.

Is there a service being provided via this remote functionality? No. It’s only purpose is to “ensure” people are paying. It’s purely an insurance mechanism for their financing.

Yes, it’s a financing plan. Correct, it shuts off if you don’t pay. Not during your ride, but before you ride, when you try to turn it on. Can you die from it, is there any danger of misunderstanding? No, none whatsoever. Are they threatening danger if you don’t pay? No, they’re doing the opposite and making access to an expensive safety product more convenient and affordable.

We’re going in circles now so I guess you’re pretty convinced by Vice’s hyperbole that this cannot be anything other than terrible, despite the fact that it’s a way more lenient financing plan than anything else you’ve ever financed before...

It’s good for Vice and their profit margin that they can so easily and effectively stir up a bunch of malleable people to get mad about something that isn’t really true. It’s a shame that they shit on a real business with actual safety conscious engineers behind it. Hopefully this thread full of negative and unfounded speculation has no sway on their bottom line, and they figure out how to better market their financing plan so that people understand the benefits and it doesn’t get so quickly misinterpreted.

Why is it more lenient than other financing plans? That makes no sense. This could literally be a traditional lease with no cloud syncing bs involved, at a cheaper cost.

You’re accusing me of being manipulated but I have no horse in this race. You think this is a sexy idea for risk management in lending, I just find the idea abhorrent, that’s all. You’re falling into the modern polarization trap, we just don’t seem to share the same values re. privacy & property rights.

Not looking forward to the day my car airbag stops functioning because a collection agency is after me, or I’ve been targeted by the government, or they just decide to refuse service because I said something awful on Twitter. That’s our dystopian reality right now.

> Why is it more lenient than other financing plans?

It’s weird you would ask this, when I’ve explained it here in this thread like three times already. It’s almost as if you’re not listening...

It’s a financing plan with a pause option, a cancel option, and a resume option, all with no penalties. No other financing plans offer those kind of consumer-friendly options. You can try this vest for half price, and then not pay the other half, and still keep the vest without the airbag functionality.

You were manipulated, but it’s not really your fault, so don’t take it personally. Vice wrote the article and framed it as something it’s not. The only problem is it went one-sided and stayed that way, you haven’t been open to checking whether the conclusions you jumped to are actually true, which is what a bunch of people here did, assumed this was bad because Vice framed it that way, and doubled-down without bothering to research what it was.

Consumer friendly, yes. That’s funny.

Could you please? I barely read the article. My opinion is based on a strong dislike for this kind of remote kill switch. I made my argument several times but you simply ignore it, and go on to repeat why you think it’s fine and everybody would be fine with it if only this evil article hadn’t been published!

There is zero service being provided. It increases the cost and complexity of the device for the lender’s own and sole benefit. Who the fuck wants to pause their airbag subscription? I really can’t understand how you can see this as customer friendly, unless you work for them.

And that’s ok. You can take it or leave it, but don’t try to disqualify me because “I’ve been manipulated”. That’s incredibly dishonest and of course will be taken personally. I suggest you learn to disagree without resorting to personal attacks.

"This is really an actually very consumer friendly"

This is morally bacrupt and tyranical

Except what if the company has an outage and their license servers fail to respond? Or if there is an issue with their auto payment and they don’t notice it get cancelled?

Then the vest won't turn on, and you'll know before you ride that it's not protecting you. It says that on the product page.

If I buy a car with airbags, I am buying the confidence that they are there to protect me. Indirectly I'm also buying the confidence to not need to check them before setting off.

In this instance, if I need to check the safety of my safety equipment before using it, that's a negative for me.

As a daily motorbike rider, I can definitively say that I will not be buying one of these because they have the capability to remotely disable the functionality. That's an absolute no-no for me.

I think that's fine to decide against purchase for that reason. All I'm saying is 1: you always have to check your safety equipment before using it, that's true with your motorcycle, and in this instance it's not some kind of crazy burden, it happens automatically as part of the device's functioning power-on, and it doesn't require you to do anything special that you wouldn't already have done. If you re-read your sentence about not wanting to check your safety before you ride, you might regret saying it that way, it doesn't sound very good. And 2: perhaps not your motorcycle, but your cars and phones and computers already have remote disable functionality.

I take your point, but maybe a more nuanced phrasing is that I don't want to check arduous parts of my safety equipment on every ride. For example, I might bend down and check that my brake pads are still OK before each ride, but I'm not going to unscrew the brake fluid reservoir to check for again or bleed the lines. I do accept that this airbag has a pretty straight-forward indicator that one would easily check before riding, and so it's fair enough to expect a user to check it each time.

However - no one can remotely disable my brakes over the air! So I can get to a position of not worrying about them much. In practice, I probably check the pads for wear every month or so. And that's good enough because I have an expectation that they're not going to change by themselves overnight.

With this airbag, the capability is there for someone to disable it without me noticing. I 100% agree they're not likely to do this intentionally. But it is under software control, as is the warning indicator, etc, etc. It's possible. And it's my life at stake.

Also, re #2 - my phones and computers aren't safety-critical, and no, my car does not have remote functionality. It's one reason I don't drive a car with over-the-air upgrade or CANBUS access functions. The safety benefits of more modern cars do not outweigh the added risks of turning them into internet-of-shit devices, for me.

So if you wake up ready to commute to work in the morning, and you see that your vest won't turn on because AWS had an outage, what are you supposed to do? Just not go to work, or drive without it?

Have you read the product page yet? It does advertise off-grid functionality. I don't know what it does when the servers go down, but the evidence I have appears to suggest they've thought about this, it is an adventure vest ffs, meaning it's expected to be offline at times, so the pure speculation and searching for a reason to continue believing they're wrong seems misplaced to me, fueled by an article that clearly misrepresented the situation.

It's only an adventure vest if you pay the extra $8/mo...

( https://www.klim.com/Ai-1-Airbag-Vest-3046-000 down near the bottom)

The cost is irrelevant to my point, which was it was designed to support adventure modes, which I would guess comes with design constraints because adventuring means off road and off grid.

Sure, but I think you are just adding risk by adding an additional way your safety equipment can fail. If you have a way for a non-payment to disable the vest, you have a way for a software bug to disable the equipment.

There should be no way in software to make it not work.

I can totally agree with the general ideas about reducing risk and failure modes.

But with or without a payment switch, this is an electronically controlled airbag. It’s designed to have a way for software to keep it from inflating at all times, just like your car’s airbag has. It has a heuristic algorithm that tries to anticipate a crash based on sensor inputs, and the fundamental operation of the thing is that software is going to decide whether to inflate. Like your car, its default mode of operation is don’t inflate. The software switch is nothing new, nothing out of the ordinary, and you’re already relying on software switches daily.

There’s no evidence or reason to believe the payment system adds any additional risk beyond the fact that all airbags are already electronically controlled. It is possible for the payment system to be isolated so that it won’t affect inflation during a ride, and they explicitly stated their intent to do exactly that. So there’s no reason to think that non-payment can lead to failure during a ride, and there is evidence to suggest otherwise.

All the pure speculation in this thread about payment affecting safety was stirred up by the Vice article suggesting it, despite the product specs.

There's a difference between a black box without any user input that always does what you expect of it - and one with an on/off switch. Where the switch can be set via software - either the official one ... or some unofficial one.

That is true. I think the comment you replied to had already acknowledged that, but in case it wasn’t clear, yes of course there’s a difference. Does that difference contribute meaningfully to the conversation? Switches that can be set via software, for better or worse, are now the norm in vehicles, so why the concern about this vest? Software switches control ABS brakes, airbags, steering, and throttle in nearly all new cars sold today, and online features are mixed into many many brands. Whipping up incredulous concern about this completely optional motorcycle safety vest over software switches isn’t just speculation, it’s being willfully ignorant of today’s standard engineering practice.

Have you ever worked on vehicles? E.g. for Airbags, there's one single box whose whole purpose is to decide whether to pop the airbags or not. This box is separated from the rest of the car's systems and only puts out status messages via the CAN bus. And apart from cutting power to it, there's no way to disable this box - and thus the safety mechanism it provides. Also the software running there is verified by multiple people and certified to always do what it's supposed to do.

Same for the other safety features - there must be no way to disable them. Or take control of them from the outside. (Yes, there was a case where hackers were able to gain brake/steering control of a Jeep, but that's definitely not the norm.)

I think in the end it comes down to trust. Do you trust some startup from 2016 (In&Motion is the company behind the airbag module) to get the software 100% correct?

> Yes, there was a case where hackers were able to gain brake/steering control of a Jeep, but that’s definitely not the norm.

And that’s not because Jeep removed the remote control or the software switch, it’s because Jeep improved the network security. Now, there are a whole bunch more brands of cars that use the same remote access system Jeep is using. And there are a bunch of other systems in other car brands. How would you place a Tesla or other self-driving car into your black-box philosophy? The brakes and steering can run 100% of the time on software.

Are you sure KLIM’s airbag vest doesn’t have a CAN bus and a verification process?

I don’t trust Boeing or Toyota to get it right, so no I don’t trust a startup either. The point I’m making is not that I trust them, it’s that the vast majority of this comment section brought out pitchforks to rail against a straw man idea that Vice wrote about but does not match reality, and haven’t bothered to even read the product description that directly addresses things people here are speculating incorrectly about.

"There’s no evidence or reason to believe the payment system adds any additional risk"

Thats not how safety critical analysis is done. YOU have to prove thats it's physically impossible for the system to fail.

We already had boeing kill 300 people with crappy software and sensors in a plane.

You will not wish that if you took advantage of an unexpected nice day in the off season, got all geared up (but didn't remember to re-up your lease), and then crashed and your protective device failed, leaving you crippled, and contemplating that for the remainder of your life

We could also celebrate the mafia-types who don't send debts to recovery, they just come by and break your knees if you don't pay -- hey, it's just a "you keep being able to walk as a service", and they never damage your credit score by sending it to collections!

> and then crashed and your protective device failed, leaving you crippled, and contemplating that for the remainder of your life

Where did you get the idea that you wouldn't know it wasn't working before you ride? The vest notifies you before you ride, it signals that it does not engage the protection... even if you happened to miss the payment, and the grace period, and ignore all the notifications along the way.

BTW, I am a very safety-conscious motorcycle rider, and I read both the article and KLIM's product page that the article links to. The fear that it will shut off and kill someone is the misleading impression that the Vice article left, but the product was specifically designed so that that can't happen.

It is also specifically designed to require an otherwise completely unnecessary link to a remote server, and need to rely on that. Sure, it should notify you, but there are a whole bunch of dependencies just for such a notification.

With this level of aggressively pathological design, I would not trust them to have considered every contingency and ensure a fail-safe in every failure mode, particularly since their primary failure mode is fail-unsafe - by design.

Try a different scenario, you need to go somewhere, your vest does notify you, but you need to go anyway, and that's your disaster. Yes, that is a bit more on you, like deciding to go anyway without your helmet which just got stolen, which is pretty stupid but can be necessary - but in this case, the theft is digital and enabled by design.

Sorry, this is rent-seeking at it's worst. I'm sure they'll find fools to subscribe, just as Zuckerberg found plenty of "dumb f*ks" to trust him with their data, but that does not make it right.

Good luck, and stay safe out there.

> this is rent-seeking at it's worst

It's a bit sad that their marketing and Vice and this thread of misinformation has convinced you of this. Because their financing terms are in fact more consumer friendly than the vast majority of financing plans out there, likely including all the monthly payments you're currently making. It's a missed opportunity that the marketing message got so lost here.

Sure, pay for whatever months you want is nice and friendly.

But

Specifically designing, building, & shipping a product with a deliberately most-dangerous failure mode (vs fail-safe) is sociopath-level pathology. The user, through a variety of readily conceivable of technical or user errors, could easily use the product, thinking they had protection (which demonstrably decreases risk-aversion), and end up with serious injury or death.

This could have been done much better. E.g., don't disable the protection, make it so it needs to be stored with the zipper locked, and require payment to unlock the zipper, so the user cannot even wear it. Even this is DOS, but at least as unambiguous as keeping a helmet locked in a case.

> deliberately most-dangerous failure mode (vs fail-safe) is sociopath-level pathology

Is that a clinical diagnosis? Are you aware that many car brands have multiple levels of software deactivation for every safety critical feature, onboard and remote? Are you saying that all vehicle makers are sociopaths, or that you’re unaware of today’s designs?

> The user, through a variety of readily conceivable of technical or user errors, could easily use the product, thinking they had protection

This is speculation based on FUD and willfully ignoring the process they described, and it seems unlikely to me.

> This could have been done much better

Yeah probably, especially the marketing.

>>...car brands have multiple levels of software deactivation for every safety critical feature, onboard and remote?

Can you provide some examples, particularly where the cars disable safety equipment for lack of payment? Cars/lenders are already heavily and rightly criticized for disabling cars from being driven at all for lack of payment because they could prevent someone from making a critical trip.

>> thinking they had protection >> This is speculation based on FUD No, any long chain of technological links, especially including wireless, and including users, is easily subject to many modes of failure. It is not particularly speculative at all.

>> could have done much better. >> marketing Marketing may have to do better, but management & engineering is the real location of the fault.

Marketing has an impossible job now, since Mgt & Eng have chosen to implement a fail-dangerous mode as their primary feature.

Mgt & Engineering need to implement it in a fail-safe way, e.g., so the device cannot be worn, even though it could require greater design effort and work. With an actual safe-mode lockout, marketing's job becomes possible, but even then, "X as a service" is still a rent-seeking biz model, which is kind of deplorable overall but may work for some people.

> Can you provide some examples, particularly where the cars disable safety equipment for lack of payment?

Sure, I did here already https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058509

And it's generally pretty easy to find yourself, if you want https://www.google.com/search?q=cars+disabled+for+lack+of+pa...

> Cars/lenders are already heavily and rightly criticized

I'm sure you're right, but it still exists, and it's getting more common not less. Besides, the remote switch ability is there regardless of whether it's attached to payment. It's also being attached to cameras and GPS and auto-driving featuers, etc., etc. Your concern was about the safety of remote switches in general, right?, and those are incredibly common.

> "X as a service" is still a rent-seeking biz model, which is kind of deplorable overall but may work for some people.

You've already stated your opinion about this, and I don't appear to be making headway by pointing out that it's lowering the barrier to entry for some people, and that two different buyout options are available, and that they allow you to pause the rent at will.

So... I guess my question is do you finance anything at all? Do you have a car, or house, or rent, or credit card? If it's "deplorable", why participate? Don't you think the ability to pause payments at will sounds like a good thing? I do, and it doesn't sound all that rent-seeking to me that they're offing a buyout option, and a no-penalties cancel option where you get to keep the stuff.

> have chosen to implement a fail-dangerous mode as their primary feature.

I hear your point, and in the absence of any design information about this product, I agree with the general idea that attaching remote capability to safety equipment could be dangerous, whether or not it's common. That said, passing judgement on any given product requires seeking out and understanding of how the product was actually designed. A remote switch is not necessarily bad engineering. Cars aren't the only vehicles getting them, airplanes are too (and some people consider it a good thing, no possibility of hijacking.)

Stay curious friend!

> This is just a financing option

For $400? My whole non-IoT riding suit already cost $1200. My insurance costs $1200/year. Who is this financing option _for_, exactly?

People less rich than you? I don't know, but you can finance a $200 helmet too. https://www.revzilla.com/motorcycle/bell-mx-9-adventure-mips...

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