Audi owner finds basic HVAC function paywalled after pressing button
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
That car was manufactured 17 years ago. The only difference seems to be in the language used in the message.
It’s a poor UX but I don’t necessarily think it’s anything new.
I'd love it to just activate Siri / Google Assistant on my paired smartphone, but actually they'd like to charge me £200 to use their own dubious voice control.
Whereas here, if the multi-zone AC system is actually not physically present, it may be somewhat more involved to upgrade on your own.
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[0] It's a Bluetooth module supposed to go in a compartment in the arm-rest. There's already a connector present. But since I don't care to use my phone in my car I never purchased the module, so I don't know if the full wiring is in place and if the radio would use it without fuss.
My 08 Jeep Grand Cherokee had a UConnect radio, but if you touched either of the UConect buttons you got an angry NOT EQUIPPED WITH UCONNECT message. Apparently a $400 dealer add-on. Looked at installing it myself and half of it was reprogramming the vehicle with specific software to tell it it had the module, and then "update the sales records" to make it appear as an option on any future Moroney labels.
(shhhhh don't give them any ideas)
I've had a satellite radio button in my cars for years, but never subscribed. The hardware is there to receive the satellite radio, so it's a content (and software) license I'm missing. Do people not complain about that because satellite radio is not seen as a feature intrinsic to the car?
There already is a sensor to detect a passenger in most (all?) airbag enabled cars sold in the US, so we're already on our way!
"Four bags of groceries detected"
It will be amusing if car licensing pushes people towards other forms of transportation, like bicycles.
Hopefully consumer rights will catch up, and make nonsense features like this go away. But I expect manufacturers to resist this as much as they can, probably tying it into certified safety systems and playing a "think of the children" argument.
Software is almost always licensed, not sold/owned.
>If it's not, why am I expected to pay full price?
This isn't really a good argument. For one, it implies that if it's on sale for black friday or whatever, that it's magically fine because you're no longer paying "full price". Moreover, the concept of a "full price" is nebulous at best. Suppose the "full price" of a product is $999,999,999, and the discounted price (with locked down hardware) is $1,000. I doubt that would alleviate your concerns.
The minutiae of if software is generally licensed or sold really doesn't matter to their argument, and you acting like it does is strange.
Everything comes with software or anti-consumer legalese these days, and I could argue that one should be allowed to modify a local copy of one's software despite a license, but you know what? I don't care. These practices are a direct attack on consumer control and autonomy, and the legal fig-leaf of "licensed" doesn't change this.
You can let them keep chipping away at what rights we have left, or you can fight back. But don't use mere legality as some kind of justification for these practices, or, worse, as a reason to not resist them.
Not really. What people usually mean by that is that the IP to the software is licensed, but the copy is owned. Copyright only governs copying and redistribution, not use.
That could mean anything from a source-available, non-redistributable, personal-use-only control and media system published by the manufacturer with a mechanism to allow me to upload my changes, through to an open enough system that I can just replace the whole thing. There are middle grounds (eg packages or apps) that adhere to set interfaces. You could just replace the HVAC module here.
Without that sort of control it's very easy for software systems to rot away well ahead of the hardware. We've already seen a multitude of subscription-maintenance options for mapping and entertainment. I've had enough. It's my computer running in my car, let me operate it my way.
Would be appropriate too, I think. It is one thing to just not include a certain feature, but it is another thing to still include a button that only has the function to remind you of a possible paid upgrade.
People thought that they bought a car, but they also bought a relation with a company. Like people who buy a smart TV and think they bought just a TV set. Actually they bought a TV set and a relationship with a TV producer who now keeps sucking up their data and shows ads on top of the programs that they intended to watch. How should I call this? Smartphoneification of everything? Is this a good thing?
The actual story is much less interesting.
Of course modifying the software isn't cheap, unless you're going to learn how and do it on your own time, but that's not a marginal cost
Disclaimer: My private daily driver runs Ubuntu and LibreOffice.
So not only was the maginal cost exactly zero, some engineer actually spent time building the gating logic.
I mean, I "hate" having to pay for stuff in stores too (markups and all). Like it or not those "zero marginal production cost" products don't have zero cost to develop, so "induced scarcity" (aka. charging the user) is basically the best way to recoup development costs.
I do not have a solution for this, but the fact that it's a problem is obvious to me, and the fact it will only get worse with time is also obvious.
I don't see how the first sentence contradicts the second sentence. Audi is solving problems (a hot car) for people, by providing a product (an AC). The fact that they're "inducing scarcity" or whatever is orthogonal to this.
>I do not have a solution for this, but the fact that it's a problem is obvious to me, and the fact it will only get worse with time is also obvious.
The fact that you don't have a solution for this suggests that this is a necessary evil that has to exist for society/the economy to work properly. I find it pretty undemocratic and unjust that the government has forces me to make payments to it (ie. taxes). That doesn't mean it's "corrosive" to a democratic/free/just society.
> The fact that you don't have a solution for this suggests that this is a necessary evil that has to exist for society/the economy to work properly.
My, or your lack of imagination as to a solution for this does not prove a solution does not exist, nor does it prove we should not search for one. If everyone along history thought like that, we would still be living in caves.
If you're talking about utility, the standard argument in support of it would be the same one used for copyright/patents, ie. "even though there's utility to be gained by prohibiting such restrictions and granting access to the product for everyone, the lack of scarcity will eliminate the profit motive from future endeavors, and will therefore eliminate future investment/research making us worse off in the future"
>My, or your lack of imagination as to a solution for this does not prove a solution does not exist, nor does it prove we should not search for one. If everyone along history thought like that, we would still be living in caves.
That's true, but at the same time it seems rather pointless to complain about how something is "corrosive to capitalism" when there isn't an obvious solution. Going back to my previous example, I'd love to live in a world where we can get public services (comparable to today's levels) and not pay any taxes. However, if there's no viable alternative in sight I'm not going to complain about it. I also recognize that even though there might some yet undiscovered funding model that doesn't involve compulsory payments, it realistically doesn't exist or is hundreds of years away, so searching for it seems like a fools errand.
Which is actually NOT part of the capitalist model at all, but rather social engineering (i.e. socialism) where the government circumvents capitalism for the sake of inducing a particular desired social outcome. In the capitalist model property rights only exist as a consequence of natural scarcity. Copyright does not exist in the capitalist model.
I consider changing good products to use emotional and marketing manipulation to make customers feel bad about not paying enough "abusive". Just like every other action that prioritizes maximum money extraction over paying customer satisfaction. It doesn't make for a happy society.
This entire statement seems like a stretch. Do you also find it "abusive" that freemium products try to upsell premium features, or that a cloud storage service prompts you to buy more storage after you ran out?
>Just like every other action that prioritizes maximum money extraction over paying customer satisfaction. It doesn't make for a happy society.
By the same token, as a paying netflix customer I'm pretty dissatisfied that I have to pay $15/month. I'd be much satisfied and happier if it only costs $0.01.
Even if features have zero marginal cost, they are important for market segmentation, which is important for reducing the cost for most people by allowing less price-discriminating purchasers to pay more.
Imagine instead this was a button that was labeled, "I'm rich" and pressing it echoed back "Yes you are".
That could be similarly paywalled and used for market segmentation.
Instead, they choose to paywall a feature that has minor benefit like "climate sync" (I'm not sure I even understand what that means, I live in temperate climate).
I doubt it, More likely “manufacturer gets better returns from car model thus increasing projeted profits> Stocks go up”
Porsche should be close, being part VW
“Audi was – and still is, but was maybe more so in the past – known for this joy of use, the haptic sensation when you push and toggle buttons. This is exactly what we wanted to bring back in the car, but combining it with the touch-less [gesture control] interaction with the car. We believe… this is like an expensive watch, which you can really use often, and even show off to your friends. For sure we will have [physical controls in the future], yeah.”
[0] https://www.carscoops.com/2021/09/audi-will-keep-physical-bu...
I guess it's good you are not Audi then.
Simple as that, AND with the needed trial following not just to obtain a ful refund + expenses BUT also to escalate to a laws that forbid selling things with plugged-in services.
Dear co-Citizens beware: being in a Democracy does not means that anything will go well by nature, we need to enforce democracy every days with common democratic instruments or we will discover that democracy have quickly change for a dictatorship.
Some cases like that already passed court trials like famous Windows reimbursement fee for computers, I see no differences for cars. Such practices must be annihilated with so much force that no ones for many years to come would try pushing them again.
Similarly ads from a device, not a third party service like ads built-in in SmartTVs or modern Windows desktop must be illegal and societies who try to push them sanctioned so badly that no one else for many year to come would not try the same again.
The meaning of private property need to be reinforced and extended to the "digital"/"hybrid" world before the infamous and criminal "in 2030 you'll own nothing".
I can see an argument that hardware for stuff I haven't paid for adds weight and hurts my mileage. Or maybe the slippery slope argument: for now it is an option that you pay for up front, next year it's an option that you pay for every month.
If something is not there it's not mine. If it's there and disabled it's mine but I can't use it, and that's totally unacceptable.
What does "control" mean in this context? Obviously there's nothing preventing you from modifying/manipulating the car by whatever means you see fit. The software that's included with the car is simply refusing to operate the AC. I don't see how that's any different than buying a piece of software that refuses to do a given functionality, even though all the requisite hardware (ie. a CPU) is present.
Pulled up an archive here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220404040127/https://www.thedr...
Although I agree that if the car isn't capable of a function, it shouldn't have a button for it, that is a very different story. It's not a paywall any more than any other hardware addition is a "paywall".
The most vaunted feature of teslas, "Full-Self-Driving" (note, not actually full self driving) is also a clear example of this.
It's $10k, and it's a 100% software update for all modern teslas. The FSD stuff, as I understand it, is all on-car (i.e. no remote tesla-run service involved), so you really are just paying to unlock use of hardware already there.
It's not immoral to charge for software. There's a difference between charging money to add a toggle button for already existing heated seats on the touchscreen vs. charging money to license the most advanced driver assist software available to the public, still under development.
Introducing scarcity dynamics where none exist, is to me, one of the most immoral of willful actions to undertake.
Now, a situation where I agree with the core thesis of "to introduce scarcity dynamics where none exist" is around, say, virtual real estate, or the most obvious one of them all: NFTs.
And yeah, the calculus here was to outfit every vehicle with the hardware, whether purchased or not, because the cost of the hardware is made up for not merely in potential future conversions/purchases, but in the ability to collect reams of data from a fleet of vehicles constantly annotating and sending back information to their model.
To wit, the FSD stuff is indeed all on-car, but the FSD-as-a-work-in-progress-constantly-evolving requires significant tesla-run services: they ML work is being done centrally, and then updated models are pushed down to the cars to, hopefully not run down innocent pedestrians in the street.
It really depends on how a manufacturer does it but in some cases, it's cheaper to install the part and just deactivate it if the user doesn't purchase it instead of tooling two different lines in the factory
Maybe I misunderstood something but isn't that the whole problem discussed here?
The important quote is this one: "Blank buttons aren’t rude," wrote the owner. "This one is reminding me that I’m cheap.". Obviously nobody expects to have functions when they haven't been paid for, but having a hardware button for it plus a message telling you you haven't purchased what was attached to this button is pretty bad.
That's how it is in older Audis. You don't order a feature - you get a plug for a button. If you retrofit it later, they add a button. What they did here is absolutely 100% tacky, shame on them. All of it, but especially the wording of the message.
I sure hope they learn from this and never do it again. Saying as a die-hard Audi fan.
Of course they should've had a "Customer experience" department who would've told them how this improvement of their workflow would annoy the customer and look bad for them.
According to the reddit poster, the Denmark e-tron doesn't come with multizone climate standard, unlike most of Europe. And the function on demand store doesn't appear to have rolled out to Denmark yet, and climate zones doesn't appear to be one of the functions you can buy elsewhere (because it's standard outside of Denmark?) So it is literally true that it's not a post-sale option/paywall right now.
But I strongly suspect that whatever hardware is needed is actually there and that this specific car will get the option to purchase the usage of it in the future once the store is rolled out to Denmark.
[1] https://www.audi.com/en/company/sustainability/core-topics/p...
So if they want to upsell this feature in the future, the actual cost of installing the physical button (five minutes in a workshop) would dwarf the cost to install the hardware (0, already there).
And so they decided to apply asshole interface design towards these customers. That's not a great solution.
What if the owner simply stores his vehicle and doesn't drive it? In the interim, Audi (as Google is known to do) end of lifes the service? Then what?
Let me point out that this particular service isn't the only one. :)
Which services are essential? A/C in Texas? Certainly. What about in Norway? Maybe not. What might be essential for you may not be to another customer.
Interesting that no one mentioned IoT or baked-in Sims.
> If this is a pure software function that can be purchased, it is linked to the purchaser.
Yes? Lots of things you buy are associated with your name on the vendor side. No issues there.
As the article say, if you buy a car without a feature it might come with a blank button. And that's the equivalent of it here
You’ve always had to pay extra for extra features.
Edit: or maybe not, other comments indicate there is additional hardware required as well.
I used to be up in arms about this after watching Benjamin Mako Hill's talk in 2010: https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/antifeatures-talk
In Hindsight, this was one of the first times during my university days that I thought "maybe tech isn't going the right way."