Auto giants like BMW, GM and Toyota make drivers ‘subscribe’ for basic features

This is explicitly why I'd never buy a PS5, and really didn't touch PS4 except to play Bloodborne. All digital services seem to eventually become anti-consumer. You become reliant on the service, the service keeps changing for the worse or becoming more expensive, and it becomes harder and harder for the user to extricate themselves from it.

Even in cases where it's easy to step away from a service, it almost always either degrades over time, or else morphs into something you don't have any interest in. It's like a ticking clock. You can't even enjoy this product because you know it's totally ephemeral. Eventually it will be worse than it was, exploit you in some way, or price you out of it.

There are a few exceptions here, but they are rare, and I suspect they are still going to go extinct at some point as well, they will merely take longer.

I suspect this is... not always the case.

> I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further

There isn't much from stopping the manufacturers from changing the "up front" deal under this model. (Unless it becomes egregious enough to become illegal.) We'd like to get out in front of this and stop it from getting to that point.

That last is not blackmail but a crime against humanity committed by politicians and citizens who allow that.

I wouldn’t object to a model where I was charged a lot of money for a subscription in exchange for lowering the up front cost of the car.

But nickel-and-diming me for features like heated seats forever after I have already paid a huge price for the car? It seems like a petty cash grab, especially for a supposedly upscale manufacturer like BMW. And why would I even want to have to keep track of that subscription? Yet another stupid tax on my time and attention — when I could just buy a Honda instead and pay entirely upfront and be done with it.

Should it be illegal? Probably not, as long as the manufacturers aren’t colluding and I can still just buy from a manufacturer that doesn’t do this.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150316090012/https://purchase.... https://www.youneedabudget.com/pricing/

If I buy a car with heated seats physically there then i own them.

On that note, if someone just enables them without payment i'm curious of the legality. (or selling devices to enable it)

Absolutely not: manufacturers should forget about having their cake and eating it too.

It's not a digital asset that costs nothing to produce/host/sustain. These are raw materials, refined, that will someday end up in a landfill.

Many products use a consistent manufacturing process with binning... a qa step where their performance is measured and then sorted, so you pay more for the top 10 percentile. That makes sense to me... but things like this always seem wasteful regardless of the industry.

But there's no connection between adding it to every car and charging a subscription to use it. You could just as easily add the heater to every car and only allow people to use them if they pay a one-time charge, similar to the model today where you pay a one time fee to add the option at build-time.

It's like how it's "cheaper" to farm some foods and ship them half way around the world via plain and ship, than it is to farm the same food and ship it 100km across land. The "cost" doesn't reflect _in any way_ the resource/energy usage, or pollution emission of the system: only the human "cost", which is biased and lobbied strongly towards maintaining existing power centres.

Our systems stink.

This is not true. They are binned by capability, and sold at different price points.

I don't mind that idea - if it turned out installing heated seats failed in say... 28% of installations, fine - charge me more for a model with functioning heated seats.

Instead - this is introducing a fixed, recurring charge, and undermining the concept of ownership. That heated seat has zero cost for the manufacturer after installation, and that should be reflected in the costs to the consumer.

I find this a pretty un-ethical (appalling - really) attack on ownership, and long term, a way to undermine the used market for these goods (attack on doctrine of first sale).

Frankly - I think this should absolutely be targeted with regulation. This is literally rent-seeking, with no potential upside.

I could tolerate car "binning", but only if it was burned into the hardware/firmware by the dealer and always transferred along with the physical vehicle.

What on earth kind of CPU or GPU have you bought where basic features require a reoccurring subscription?!

It's a way for companies to extract more revenue. They hope that customers don't mind too much that they are segmented into groups.

But they do. They feel hurt and outraged if they discover that they paid more than the neighbor for the same product or if the product could be elevated to a higher level at no cost for the producer if only someone had the right key. Companies then try to be clandestine, to mollify customers with cheap added value or offering opt-in by a complicated process for free (loyalty cards, coupons, rebates with conditions, and so on).

It's a fundamental conflict between producers and consumers.

If you want a perfect market economy price segmentation should be avoided. It causes confusion for customers and therefore prevents price transparency. It enables rent seeking by companies.

What they could do is allow you to enable that feature later, albeit at higher cost. Imagine what that could do for the used car market? I buy a car where the previous owner hadn't enabled heated seats. I contact the manufacturer and say I'd like to enable the heated seats. Heck, why stop there? The manufacturer may respond asking whether I'd like to purchase an option package instead that included a bunch of other features. This seems reasonable and pro-consumer. Subscribing to a feature does not.

Leasing is just a different form of buying the car, in a sense. Yes, the contract/agreement is not equivalent to a purchase, but in essence what you are doing is transforming a set of unknowns (will I have to repair my car twice in the first three years? How much will I spend? How many kilometers will I drive?) with more known quantities ($X/month, Y miles per year included, etc), and you don't have to pay the car upfront, but pay a monthly installment. (approximation, give me some rope here).

Instead, paying a monthly fee to heat my car seats is an aberration of the economic model. It doesn't make any sense, from a customer perspective.

Of course, we are all moving towards a subscription economy, and most customers will simply be royally f*cked up by that, and regulation/government will turn the other way in most cases. Good luck to us.

If I live in London, then almost everyone I see regularly will be living car-free. If I live in Weasenham in Norfolk, probably far fewer of my friends and neighbours will have a car-free lifestyle.

Of course the Auto industry hasn't got the clout to make states serve them the way the Entertainment industry does, yet.

Hacking these features to work is treating the symptom, not the disease.

Obviously, it's not your fault that someone else interpreted the headlight as an invitation to pull out. And indeed, it's probably one of the most widely ignored rules in the highway code. Nevertheless... it's still the other driver's fault. I've personally had it where other drivers think I've flashed them out, but I had actually just gone over a bump in the road.

(I'm assuming you're British because you say junction.)

As an aside, one option I like to use to get people behind me to turn down their high beams is to orient the side view mirror so the high beam goes back to them.

There is a solution though: regulate size. It's objectively measurable. The Mazda example that GP gives is legit, but it's on the knife's edge of disappearing -- one more wave of consolidation and it will be gone. But of course regulating bigness is a very pre-2007 solution. In the modern world it's all about ever-increasing bigness. Because everybody loves zombie megacorps living off of an IV drip of cheap debt.

Serious and not serious at the same time. My point is that demand is what drives change in a free market, people chose phones without a headphone jack, expandable storage and replaceable batteries so companies chose to sell what consumers wanted, if the demand for these things were so large then more companies would be producing devices with those. Also remember sometimes what people say is not really what they believe or how they act. I know being a techie it's kind of hard to have perspective on it, but as far as I see most people don't give a flying ** about these things, even though I do heavily agree that they should :)

That may have been an option, but I wasn't made aware of it. I had to sweet talk the Subaru support to get the free 3 years.

I was also under the impression it had remote start, which it does via the app, but not via the key fob without the remote module installed.

The hard part is designing regulation that curtails the oligopoly without preventing new enterprise.

It is easy to fall into a steady state of high corporate extraction + high regulatory barriers.

People are most willing to pay for things where they understand that there is an underlying cost to providing the service, and where they derive value from updates or ongoing service. The service should also be provided at a competitive price - for example you cannot charge for navigation in most cases because people can use free nav services (Google Maps etc)

This is distinct from something like heated seats where yes, if it works it works.