75 Percent of car buyers don’t want features locked behind subscriptions | Hacker News Reader

75 Percent of car buyers don’t want features locked behind subscriptions

thedrive.com

I suppose one could count me in that 75%. This is just my personal preference but I will never buy any equipment that requires a subscription or that has telemetry.

As a side note I just bought a 1947 Ford Ferguson 2N tractor and already love it. To my pleasant surprise there is a massive community of people and manufacturers keeping these things alive. Might there be similar communities for the older cars and trucks? Which older cars and trucks are the most popular to keep running in the U.S.?

Yeah, no shit we don’t! It’s disgusting they think it’s an option.

I really would like to meet someone from the other 25%. Just out of curiosity to experience a completely different kind of reasoning.

Perhaps they believe the product would be cheaper with abdicating the feature?

> Perhaps they believe the product would be cheaper with abdicating the feature?

Or, perhaps, believe it would get updates? Software in cars tends to grow stale quickly, which is an annoyance if you plan to keep for more than a few years. My eight year old car, for example, has features (had features) that don't work properly anymore because the software didn't anticipate how the rest of the world would change around it and there isn't an update provided to restore it to the original working condition, let alone adding new features that would be nice to have.

Exactly, and cars aren't that hacker friendly. Underneath the design isn't that bad, can-bus makes sense, most modern cars have a good sort of internal network. But there is zero documentation to allow anything aftermarket to plug in later or software to be upgraded past what the manufacturer provides.

And car manufacturers are still very much in a mindset that you make a certain model-year, release it, and then forget about it while you work on the next ones. No upgrade path on software whatsoever.

I can think of one feature that I'd pick the subscription over the upfront cost: Tesla Full Self Driving (FSD). It's $12,000 or $200/month. Five years is the breakeven point, assuming that the prices stay the same (which is a bad assumption). $12k is a big chunk of change - could be around 10% of the car's value. There are also some question marks around whether the FSD is transferable to a new owner.

I've driven in a Tesla with FSD, and it's underwhelming. There's no guarantee that in five years, it will perform significantly better - maybe even require additional hardware or a newer car/platform.

Tesla "Full Self Driving" is vaporware so far.

In previous versions "Autopilot" as a name only implied self-driving to some customers, while it wasn't. Now they've gone a step further and branded advanced driver assist as FSD, which really isn't all that self driving at all.

To me, the only people who might not care about such limited-duration features are those looking for a 2-3 year lease. Maybe the manufacturers are trying to get everybody to lease but man, it just pisses me off. Wonder if the state/province's lemon laws can get involved when sh*t just stops working.

But based on our top-of-line 2019 RAV4 the computerization of the car is way more brittle and pointless than the traditional engineering. I expect to have a collection of dead stuff long before the car dies.

I believe the correct term is "financial masochist". Who are we to kink shame?

If it becomes ubiquitous I'd expect an underground market to form around activating features which are physically present but locked out by software.

And now I'm curious as to what the legal consequences could/would be of something like that, especially when you go to resell the vehicle later.

Lockout from features happens on medical hardware - I’ve seen it regularly on MRI scanners from Siemens, GE and Philips. Send them money and the feature gets unlocked.

Some options are less expensive, some more. The most expensive I’ve seen is US$50k for enabling a feature. They do it then you restart the system to enable it.

I know of a physicist who used to be able to unlock some things, but now there are much more elaborate security measure.

That does seem pretty different from a subscription.

> ... what the legal consequences could/would be ...

I would expect a judge to determine that someone has exceeded their authorized access to a computer and, as such, their behavior is in violation of the CFAA.

(Granted, this is actually clearly in the spirit of that particular law. Not saying I agree or disagree with it but there you go.)

> ... especially when you go to resell the vehicle later.

That reminds me of the Tesla that wrongly had a feature enabled, which was then disabled after the car was resold as a used car.

> I would expect a judge to determine that someone has exceeded their authorized access to a computer and, as such, their behavior is in violation of the CFAA.

How would that work if the computer is owned by the supposed infringer? Has there ever been a judge who ruled that the CFAA applies to computers the defendant owns?

I guess I'll start my second comment related to legal matters by stating that I am not a lawyer. :)

I don't know about the CFAA, specifically, but to my knowledge DMCA 1201 has been used to stop independent car repair shops from accessing the diagnostics computer by encrypting it and saving the encryption key in plain text right alongside the encrypted data. Accessing that encryption key to decrypt the data in a computer that's ostensibly now owned by the person who's trying to authorize the decryption has (at least seemingly) been found to be in violation of the DMCA. I have no idea if that's ever actually been challenged (though I would assume it has).

In that legal environment, the aforementioned potential CFAA ruling seems likely.

I think its pretty unlikely that car companies ever go after customers who modify their own vehicles and test that legal theory directly. Making it so that enabling the features requires reflashing firmware and leaves a trace so that they can deny warranty claims seems much more like the kind of thing they would do.

I guess considering this, they'd be more likely to go the DMCA route in regards to, e.g. a discussion forum that has many posts detailing how to bypass feature authentication. It's a good point that they probably would not target individual consumers.

That’s not how car warranty works. In the US Magnuson-Moss protects you from this.

You can literally engine swap your car and still make hassle-free warranty claims on your suspension.

> If it becomes ubiquitous I'd expect an underground market to form around activating features which are physically present but locked out by software.

There already is, just read any car forums.

Wait, 25 percent of car buyers want features locked behind subscriptions?

Well, I can understand maybe, for example during the summer months, you can disable the renew for the “heated seats”, or during the winter the “a/c in car purchase” etc… I font have other explanation.

> Cox Automotive’s Research and Market Intelligence team conducted a survey from Jan. 19 to Jan. 26, 2022, of 217 consumers who intend to buy a new vehicle in the next two years.

So, paying for wifi hotspot should be handled through my cell company, not my car manufacturer. Same with vehicle tracking (through onstar, not the OEM), XM radio through XM.

I don't mind paying a one-time fee to have the hardware installed, and if they offered a version of, say, XM radio or OnStar or a wifi hotspot with unlimited internet for my duration of ownership for a larger one-time upfront fee, I would consider it.

I can't think of anything that I would want my automobile manufacturer to be responsible for as a continuous monthly payment in addition to my loan and insurance though. Not a damn thing. They're trying to charge monthly fees for built in safety features like advanced braking? That's a lawsuit waiting to happen. "GM allows family to die in burning agony because they did not pay their $9.99 braking fee for 2 months" will make excellent headlines.

It is better to closed the system so that its state machine can be fully anticipated by its owner than to keep introducing new state machines for its owner to constantly relearn … and be mocked by the press, hated by the survivors and shunned by consumers.

After all, airline manufacturers keep things steady and all options available … within a model.

Or there will be no end to Press Headlines like:

“Opted-Out ABS Family Killed”

“On-Star Ad Pile-Up”

“$5/yr PopUp Snuff 7”

“CarSeat Crush 1, Killed 9”

“Racist Camera Mow 11 Down”

“Expired Sub Left 3 Afire”

“AI Car Influenced To Kill”

“Easter Bunny Strikes Again”

“Cosmic Ray Crippled AI Autos; Muscle Cars Survives”

“Elec. Tape Shortage; Pesky AD Blinds At Night”

“Driver Convulsed; Strobe AD Fault”

“Digital Mower-er For Hire”

“Driver Fought Upgrade and Died”

There is no end until a closed system is attained.

There's an important distinction that this article doesn't make: features that exist entirely within the car and that the manufacturer already paid for in full when they made it (e.g., heated seats and key fob remote start), vs. features that involve external entities and do have real ongoing costs (e.g., with OnStar, paying the salary of the advisers you have on call, and paying for the car's cellular data). Only the former is evil.

Remember when Kindle had free data forever everywhere in world, for like extra $20?

In most places you can get smartwatch esim for like $5? And of course there’s places where this buys unlimited data.

Kinda think gov should just pay for cellular data in exchange of your location data for traffic planning and security purposes. Like why OnStar shouldn’t just be part of 911?

I was ready to purchase a new Rav4 this year. But apparently you need to pay a subscription to use the remote start. So now we're looking at Fords.

I personally will never buy any car from a company who does that. That dystopian future is not the one I want and I’m never engaging with any company who does it.

People ask me for my advice on cats often. I’d never recommend one from a company who does it.

I can’t believe 25% do. I don’t even like subscription software

It depends on the feature. If the car’s map was a subscription I’d prefer it, but only because car maps suck compared to Google and Apple, so it would save me money.

Who are the 25% that do?

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