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Comment by basilgohar | Hacker News Reader

> I’m amazed a car manufacturer could resort to these games. If they want to increase profits, why not just focus on customers and give customers what they want?

The name of the game now in more and more industries is rent-seeking and extracting money long term, on a regular basis. This new business practice disincentivizes building quality products because then you can sell a shoddy product and include "maintenance" and "updates" into your subscription plan.

If it's not stopped legally, it'll only get worse.

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> rent-seeking and extracting money long term, on a regular basis

recurring revenue is what you're talking about, it's a financially desirable thing for them, but it's not the same thing as rent seeking. Rent seeking is not receiving payments over and over on a regular basis, rather it's a term economists use to mean making money from your position in the market without contributing anything of value to the market (without putting in any work, so to speak). For example, "monopoly rents" are the extra parts of the prices that monopolies can charge because they face no competition.

add-ons to a major expense like an automobile can qualify as rents because once you buy the car, you are essentially trapped into buying the add-ons from the one manufacturer, like being forced to get your car serviced at the dealer.

hrm, interesting... by that definition I would argue that the business model of car dealerships is specifically rent-seeking. They not only don't contribute anything of value, they actively detract from the value proposition by marking up far over MSRP and, like someone posted in another comment, engaging in shady tactics like selling your vehicle to someone else after waiting for 3mo because your bank isn't open until tomorrow. Just to scratch the surface.

The vendor still had to invest money to put the feature there, so it's a legit business transaction, even if it sounds silly. Presumably the monthly cost will be a lot less than the hundreds it would cost to buy the feature outright. Or are they charging people twice?

Precisely. This is the kind of legislation that benefits all the residents of a state.

Subscription predation is poorly regulated. Starting with cars seems like an obvious target.

Considering the volume, why not start with software?

The kind of software that truly depends on a server or some live resource that must be actively maintained and kept running can genuinely make a claim to charge a reasonable recurring fee to use said software. But for software that is essentially a standalone product which needs no upgrades, one should be able to buy the current version of the software and keep using that specific version of that software indefinitely, just as if one had bought a hammer or some other tool that will permanently belong to you, with no monthly subscription.

That just creates a loophole. Perhaps it is a "smart" heated seat. You can make anything need a live internet connection by putting some adaptive "benefits" in it. Now they'll just monetize your minute-to-minute-butt-temperature data too.

That’s mostly in industries without meaningful competition.

In competitive industries, customer-hostile choices are much less common.

That’s the party line. In reality cars are one of the most heavily competitive consumer markets, and guess what? They still behave like assholes.

The brands compete. The dealers are local monopolies. Usually by law.

The brands compete on the kinds of cars they want to sell. When it comes to less profitable kinds of vehicles, that's where lobbying and regulatory capture comes in to kill competition. Thus we have the chicken tax, much stricter fuel economy standards for small trucks than big trucks, and the extreme protectionism in the inflation reduction act when it comes to EV tax credits.

But the locality is typically only a town. Emailing all the dealers in the area for a quote and driving a bit out of your way to pick up the car isn't that hard.

It's the brands trying so sell you subscription seat warming, not the local dealers.

Interesting point!

There’s a dozen GM brand dealers within 15 miles of where I’m sitting right now. They absolutely compete.

In competitive industries, customer-hostile choices are much less common.

How many brands of TV are there? How many of those brands still make even one consumer model that isn't "smart" in user-hostile ways?

Having lots of suppliers doesn't necessarily create effective competition in the customer interest. If there's a customer-hostile practice that makes lots of money and is sufficiently obvious that all suppliers can adopt it without any need for legally questionable forms of cooperation then what is going to happen?

Effectively forcing subscriptions or other after-purchase limitations and costs on customers when there is nothing in it for those customer to balance what they lose is exactly the kind of predatory behaviour that government regulation should protect against.

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