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".
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.
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.
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