Mercedes locks faster acceleration behind a $1,200 annual paywall
theverge.com
theverge.com
With all these subscriptions and other crap being added to autos, seems I will be only buying very old cars. My current auto is pushing 20 years
I think all luxury manufacturers will experiment with this unfortunately. Best you can do is don't buy into it...
If it ever gets back into Tesla's hands, they have the option to remove the features.
There WAS a case where someone bought a used Tesla from a non-Tesla dealership that was sold with FSD and Tesla then removed the FSD, and there was a lot of outrage behind it, but like many cases of outrage, it was based on a misunderstanding. That car was never supposed to have FSD. There was a bug at some point that gave FSD to cars that weren't supposed to have it, and that car was sold before the bug was fixed, removing FSD, but the dealer sold it as having FSD because at the time, it did. Of course, IMO, Tesla should have just gone ahead and granted FSD in order to save face instead of generating a ton of negative PR and creating a massive amount of misconceptions.
And this wasn't a feature when it first came out, but I wonder if Tesla planned it from the beginning, or if it's something they decided to start offering only after people started noticing that the motors and battery on the LR AWD were the same as the Performance and started asking for a software unlock.
These things require access to accurate and up-to-date road and traffic info, need updates to stay compliant with local regulations, and may (need to) include insurance.
These are all factors that nudge towards a monthly subscription, instead of a one-time purchase. Once the seller goes bust, you wouldn't be able to use your 'purchase' anyhow.
Which they will probably steal from the regular drivers, so you will be effectively paying for your own data.
And not so luxury as well, they might start by giving you the features and financing that by playing/showing you the ads and giving the incentive to pay. I imagine in not so distant future even the microwaves for plebs will have ads.
I just made a note on my phone today about how in future if there wasn’t some kind of a law to protect “owners” of hardware they “purchased” from cross promotion or added inconveniences due to upselling services I would be quite sad.
For e.g. the experience of backing up your iPhone photographs to a external hard disk could be A LOT better if Apple was satisfied with the money they make from selling the device and didn’t want to sell us their iCloud service.
I so hate growth at all cost mindset that is visible in every business these days. I wish investors would just get used to lower growth rates.
A VM running macOS and a script. Open Photos.app and sync with ‘Download Originals’ checked. Quit Photos.app and rsync the folder ‘Originals’ out of the app bundle and onto a NAS. Once finished, reopen Photos.app.
It’s quite horrible getting the script to run as permissions get tricky with chrontab, so I used Lingon X to schedule it.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD821AM/A/lightning-to-us...
But, yeah, I have lightening drives that connect directly to download pictures onto (well, purchased as a gift).. They even also have USB to be read in a computer.
But you can also have it connect to a computer over wifi and auto-backup. Does Google let you do that?
To some extent this was eventually solved by third party vendors laboriously creating lightning flash drives and creating an app to talk to them.
But it is definite that you cannot backup your phone. Even apple's backup method is crippled.
I would like an image backup - where you could back up every bit of phone data - but apple gets in the way of that.
But compare that to an Android phone, where I have no idea how to get access to anything more than pictures without ADB.
afaict it doesn't back up apps and app data. You can restore your phone, but the apps download again and app data is lost.
I believe this means if you are on version 10 of an app and 11 is the latest, a restore will upgrade you. And it you have say kindle books downloaded, you will have to re-download them again.
Car companies can't offer anything close; this subscription features thing from Intel, Mercedes and BMW is bold-faced grifting and needs to be stamped out with extreme prejudice.
It's a classic masterpiece of platform gatekeeping: Getting money for doing nothing, but being the only one who can do it.
Capitalism.
It used to be about making a great product, and people would buy it.
Then it became "We can generate a fake demand with various psychological tricks" to get people to buy it.
Then it became "Give away the razor and charge $$$$$$ for the blades".
Then it became "Buy the thing and subscription and save!"
Then it became "Buy this crippled thing so we can sell you the subscription for recurring income" <- This is where we're at.
Point being, it's not about making a great product. It's about using emotional tricks to get people to buy a thing AND a subscription, to get what 10y ago would have been a lump-sum you-own-it thing.
And at this moment in time, the "best" strategy is to milk customers with recurring purchases. And it turns out the value-add didn't work. So feature-removal-and-sell-back recurring purchase is the current phase.
We're seeing that everywhere in IOT, gadgets, kitchen consumer gear, vehicles. Basically, it's the manufacturers exerting control post-purchase with the implicit threat that they can and will brick your stuff.
To put bluntly, we need government oversight over these realms. First-sale doctrine needs to cover "functionality sold at bill of sale". "No bundling" (of additional services that "complete" a thing) also needs to be strongly enforced. And if/when companies do stuff later and remove features (PS3 for an easy example), that they need to be dealt with as if a hacker did that - as C-level ordered felonies with prison, direct massive compensation to the wronged parties, and massive fines (company-ending if need be).
Free markets are not always providing perfect solutions, but I am absolutely sure government intervention could only worsen the situation, never improve it.
> Still the devices I currently own are the best devices I ever had.
"Own" - that's the key word here where the contention is. If the entity you bought this thing from still retains control over your thing, that's a rental.
> And the services I subscribe to are incredible services that never even existed before.
Considering you're not naming said "incredible services", it's irrelevant to dispute.
> Free markets are not always providing perfect solutions, but I am absolutely sure government intervention could only worsen the situation, never improve it.
Absolutely sure? That sounds extremely over-simplistic to reduce every possible legislation and governance down to "always sure government intervention worsens the situation".
And part of my recommendations are not needing new laws, but maintaining product truth-in-advertising in the face of remote access. And frankly, if I put in remote control, sold the machine, and then remotely destroyed it, I'd be brought in for felony hacking charges.
But really, the level of discourse of "guvernment baaaadddd" is damned distressing, and unfortunately a result of Reagan's very successful campaign to say that, defund public facing gov orgs, and then point at lack of performance for underfunded orgs, thus doing another round of underfunding.
We don't live in anything remotely resembling a free market. Tens of thousands of pages of government regulations govern every facet of our commercial markets. The only question is how these regulations should be written.
But of course there are a zillion other examples, if you bother to look, it's just that those benefits disappear into the fabric of society.
Luckily usb c sucks less, but: What company will now have any reason to research a better connector to replace usb c when it’s not allowed to put it on the market?! Any innovation in this area was made illegal in the EU. Luckily we still have USA not yet succumbing to the madness.
These kinds of shortsighted decisions are why the EU stopped growing and innovating and started falling behind while becoming dependent on cheap Russian energy.
Even if well meaning and well written (two big ifs), the actual price of regulation is extremely high, it’s stagnation. But nobody realizes it because that lost opportunity cost forever disappears into the fabric of society…
Of course if you mandate a very narrow standard, completely inflexibly, you may have this kind of problem.
But from where I am, it looks like the 'swashbuckling free market' has stagnated due to monopoly power (Apple lightning), whereas the 'evil plodding government' has ensured compatibility, reduced waste, gauging, etc, while accommodating the incredible evolution of the USB standard.
Apple will have no problem complying as they already had a separate European nano SIM model. Or maybe they were ready to switch to USB-C anyway (a standard they helped develop), as they did with iPad Pros and MacBooks. While us users will swallow the cost as always while bitching about downgrading to USB-C.
But now innovation in this domain was made illegal. There is no way a company will invest in researching a new connector when they cannot legally bring it to the market. So Europe is becoming dependent on American creativity in yet another area. A small and maybe negligible one, of course, but this is a symptom of a larger disease: the EU is voting to mandate stagnation. And the worst part when outlawing innovation is this: you don't even know what you are missing. Because nobody is allowed to invent that future anymore.
I drive a truck. I think I'm going to get my favorite body style of F150 (late 70s/early 80s) and put a brand new engine in it, and whatever else it needs to make it 100%. I don't need any tech except one of those things that turns AUX into FM radio.
When I bought this truck, it replaced a 1996 Jeep Grand Cherokee with 318,000 miles (512,000km). I can live without luxury. I'll miss my heated steering wheel, though.
It was genuinely, with no sarcasm, my favorite vehicle I ever owned. It was mine and it felt like freedom. (Also, with no upholstery, no amount of smoking could stink it up, so an extra helping of freedom).
I miss the shit out of that busted old pile of junk.
• depending on your era the radios are easily replaceable with something that has aux in and bluetooth.
• towing insurance, the kind that actually pays for the tow, not the garbage my insurance includes which will pay part of a really expensive tow leaving you with more than you will find if you shop around.
• a flexible schedule.
• a greater than average tolerance for vehicular death.
I use a 1990s F250HD when I need a truck, love it, can't stop to put fuel in it without someone coming over to talk truck stories. It has more miles on it than the Artemis space capsule. But, it does strand me from time to time (water pump bearing, transmission, instant total brake failure on a downhill grade into a contested intersection with 4 tons of boat on the hitch…)
As much as I use it for its truck super power, I would be money ahead to sell it and just rent Home Depot/Menards truck for in town use and an Enterprise 3/4 ton for long distance towing. But, its "my truck", and I'll keep it until the next transmission or engine.
You're free to drive into a tree of your own accord, but please don't let your personal choices kill my girlfriend or mother. If you drive an old vehicle, especially if it's a large truck used for towing, ensure before any drive that the brakes will not fail, and that you have the requisite backups required by local law.
And many more places with 75 - which people effectively treat as 80.
Why? There are speed limits greater than that in a few states. The flow of traffic in Southern California is often even faster.
Which is exactly the problem GP wants to fix.
I'm more worried about the growing pedestrian deaths since vehicles have no requirement, like in Europe, to be as safe as possible when hitting pedestrians.
pedestrians being struck at speeds in excess of 75 mph while crossing freeways?
But it's a good thing that we should make sure can continue, not a problem that needs to be fixed.
Reminders of scale aside, I posit that the limit for vehicles needn't be speed or size, but braking distance. If a manufacturer can make a 6600 pound SUV that stops from 75 mph in the same distance that a 3300 pound sports car with track brakes and extra grippy, super-wide tires, brakes from 75, I say more power to them.
Until then, this metric will naturally lead manufacturers to downsize, and for the ones who still produce SUV's anyway, they will need to be as good at stopping as regular cars, which might make them more cost-prohibitive and dissuade their ownership via market pressure.
After all, it's not speed or size that cause automotive fatalities, it's cars being unable to stop in time before impacting other vehicles, pedestrians, or impassible barriers.
The speed-unlimited sections of the German autobahn have far fewer accidents per million miles travelled than any US highway, in spite of the fact that many people are routinely doing 150+ mph / 250+ kmh on a daily basis through those stretches.
If you're arguing from an environmental perspective, just remember that even if the entirety of the USA and western europe hit net zero carbon emissions tomorrow, it would still be impossible to avoid 2° C of global warming thanks to India and China alone, to say nothing of the rest of the world.
I forgot which study it comes from, but I read that several dozen Chinese coal-powered industrial cargo ships produce more CO2 than all North American personal automobile emissions combined.
I'm not a climate denier, and we should do more to improve things but what would the impact be if 32 million people cut back?
We already have massive taxes on our gas, and now we have a "carbon charge" on top of this.
if canada's consumption fell to zero would the world notice?
If we really want climate change, we need to stop focusing on small consumer usage and look where the real problem areas.
Convincing people in Saskatoon to buy electric cars, which are powered by coal plants is not going to "save the planet".
Helping remove coal as an energy source globally will.
Locking quality behind a subscription is 100% incompatible with that pattern. Some short-sighted executives just sold Mercedes’ long-term future for a couple extra bucks.
Just blacklist and ignore them, they’ll figure it out eventually.
Instead of endlessly debating if Mercedes should have done this or not, vote with your wallet. if you dont agree with what they did dont buy the product.
If enough people dont buy it, they will change. it isnt like Mercedes has a lock on the market like you see in other areas.
if it wasn't for these regulations I think there would be a huge market for "dumb" cars that just have the essentials without a bunch of added stuff. Same goes for TVs, I' love to buy a dumb flat screen TV
at this point seems like corporations are using dystopian sci-fi for ideas and inspiration rather than as something to avoid. Stuff like this a few years ago was literally parody material, now it's actually happening
Past conversations about this on HN suggest that this is almost certainly a complete fabrication, not something that has actually been documented.
This will affect used car sales, maybe like used video games with activation codes and the like.
Say a clutch that would normally last 7 years and costs $7,000 for parts/hours lasts half as long if users do regular full throttle accelerations to 60 MPH (like say an on ramp)?
I suspect this is merely an experiment to see if people buy into this stuff (Hint: I believe they won't).
And it happens all the time. Functionally - I don't see much difference between a misbehaving control module and a driver having a stroke.
You can also solve both problems with a single stroke by making public transportation effective and preferable in places where density is likely to make this a problem (cities).
In the age of the accelerator and break going to software systems instead of mechanical systems, it is 100% possible to crash that software and all the sudden you cannot break.
this is only because we have incredibly high safety standards when it comes to cars.
There’s a huge difference: one can be reasonably prevented. Unfortunately we can’t reliably prevent people from having strokes.
Nonsense, we can implement draconian licensing laws and Orwellian medical record sharing laws to keep the at risk off the roads. The peasants can have all the strokes they want, just not on the roads.
(The above is satire but it's proximity to viewpoints that aren't satire should make people uncomfortable.)
Or take it to the limit and make driving so inconvenient that nobody drives, thereby solving the problem once and for all.
I’d say we can choose to place that line somewhere between “regulating modifications to cars” and “draconian health examinations for licensing”.
In your satirical scenario the methods needed in order to prevent strokes while driving are far less reasonable than the methods needed to regulate modifications to critical systems of cars, from feasibility of implementation to the effects on personal privacy and liberty. Therefore I think we can pretty easily distinguish the two and they are not really that similar.
Medical events, mechanical failures, software failures, they're all in the long tail of "rare causes of accidents". The fat part of the curve is made up of various flavors of willful dumb driver behavior. It is pure foley to direct more resources at those problems than the bare minimum needed to look like you're "doing something" so that the people who don't understand how likely these events are are placated. The bulk of resources spent toward safety should be allocated toward reducing dumb things drivers do.
Legally binding regulations for auto maintenance? Legal stops on the road for tire wear checks? Legal scrapping of cars that don't pass certain safety standards? Legal checks for dementia and vision for the elderly?
Basically - why is this one the one that you draw the line at? What makes it special? Most folks can agree that neither the driver nor the public want a vehicle with a malfunctioning control module. It's not like there are misaligned interests here. Tuning should be expected to work just as well and any other after-market modification. Are you concerned that it provides more torque, or more speed? Because the same thing is true of just buying a different car...
Should a sports car be illegal because it has more torque?
Should we ban red cars because - statistically - they're more likely to be involved in an accident?
Should no one be allowed to drive a subcompact because crash mortalities are nearly double those of the average vehicle?
Why? Why does this require regulation that you're proposing? What warrants the loss of control for the individual, in a case where it's pretty clear interests are aligned, and there are dozens of other nearly identical risks?
We have total control over not installing aftermarket safety critical software, which may or may not allow a driver to break.
You can tinker with the powertrain but it still has to pass smog.
If you're worried about people surreptitiously breaking the law then it doesn't matter what the law is because those people are breaking it regardless.
"Well we shouldn't" is also a very reasonable response to this. Cars should have speed and acceleration governors. The main reason they don't is that they haven't, but in this case "personal freedom" is basically just the enjoyment of the driver.
There are very very few other domains where we allow people to risk harm and death to other nonconsenting nonparticipants just because it's enjoyable to them. We should bring cars in line with our other social norms, not increase the degree to which they are an outlier.
Wouldn’t the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act still apply?
After all, your engine must have been running hot and accelerated the wear on the mount. Oh, logging shows it wasn't? Must be a malfunctioning thermostat. That'll be $3,000 for the mount, the thermostat, and the labor. Not including any extra charges, fees, surcharges, taxes, or overcharges.
Car dealers are no different from insurance companies. Whether it's warranty or insurance, they make money by denying claims. The ECU is enough of a black box that practically anything critical can be blamed on it if it's not using factory settings.
Consider, how much just a single lawyer cost per hour I don't think it would be worth it a lot of the times unless the entire car was basically destroyed or something very expensive has failed to have enough value to justify it. Otherwise the repair is gonna be a lot times in a similar ballpark cost wise (for most cars) as a law suite.
-Edit- Moreover if the case is not decided quickly or settled it could also end up costing a lot more.
Yes, but only if they think they can get away with it. This kind of thing happens all the time.
Arguably, the fact that the ECU was modified is evidence enough. It's pretty difficult to argue that an aftermarket stereo head unit, or air intake, or "ooga" horn caused engine damage. That would be a fairly easy win in court if the dealer is foolish enough to think anyone would buy that explanation.
Remapping an ECU is very different. If an ECU is remapped, that likely means the engine is operating outside of the intended parameters, and dealers would probably argue that the ECU is not intended to be modified by 3rd parties. From their perspective, why should they foot the bill for damage caused by changing how the engine functions? The dealer can deny your warranty claim because they know there's a 99.9% chance you won't fight it, and that you'll probably lose anyway if you do.
In the case of Mercedes and their paywall for faster acceleration, they could argue that any "hack" to enable faster acceleration is not only a form of piracy but that a hack could lead to dangerous situations; when say a bit is flipped to enable the acceleration, but the rest of the conditionals in the programming aren't aware of this change, the behavior of the vehicle can't be entirely predicted.
I don't necessarily agree with any of that reasoning, but this is how car companies not only defend their ability to deny warranty but extract more revenue from its customers going forward into the digital future.
In the case of Apple it's pretty hard to justify the court costs for a 1000 dollar device. So Apple rarely has to prove that the Jail break was the cause of the failure. They technically can't deny warranty claim if a modification was not the cause of the failure. However, Apple operates basically by default for almost all failures if Jail Broken you get no warranty which is technically not legal.
And naturally, case law as well.
The act is intended to allow voiding the warranty after modding the ECU (even though the act predates ECUs and so doesn't mention them). Well your radio warranty would probably still apply, but modding the ECU has potential to damage the engine, and therefore the engine is out of warranty if you touch the ECU code.
Thankfully, a lot of us live in better-governed states than California. And even if it is illegal where you live, stuff you own shouldn't try to enforce laws against you.
I mean you already here such arguments from smart TV makers and their fans as well as in other industries.
The real truth is all of this stuff would be fixed if a new standard and baseline was set for them so none of them have to do any of this stuff to survive. They'll find other ways to compete.
They aren't doing those things to survive but for extra profit. That said TV ads is the reason their prices have dropped so much and can block them by simply not connecting them to the internet. You still get a superior dumb monitor for their cost.
And do you really want to mess with a central component of your drive by wire system?
I envision insurance companies running batch queries against Mercedes future API to determine which drivers have unlocked higher speeds and then adding a "High Risk" fee/tax to their policy. Mercedes could charge for access to this API and who knows what it could be used for.
Even more dystopian would be a future where governments can access some API that allows them to Geo-fence drivers into an approved area after a traffic conviction or limit the drivers speed. The more evil side of that coin would be access to a secret encrypted application API bug to stuck throttle accident dissenting voices.
Having technology aid in enforcing those sentences (such as the breath-test ignition interlock required by some sentences) seems OK to me. I think I'd include geo-fencing into that same level of balancing society's interests and the freedom of someone convicted of multiple DUIs.
We should have significantly better public transit, to make this more humane. But so many people drive dangerously and cause huge amounts of deaths. I think a better long-term fix is to have good public transit so that people have better options and don’t feel like they need to drive everywhere.
And of course this is motivation for drunks to oppose transit, if there is minimal transit the law is more likely to take away a license. Minimal transit of course it so bad you wouldn't use it unless after 5 DWIs you have no other options, and that punishment means everyone else sees no value and so won't vote to expand it.
Your city needs a serious transit redesign in favor of getting as many people as possible on because it is a better option (cheaper and not much less convenient). Then get those riders to support expansions. Good luck though.
My concern is that when such a process starts to utilize a simple remote computer interface, it will just be a matter of time when the scope of such controls are broadened and abused by humans, or worse, by some machine learning that makes decisions based on calculated risk rather than an in-person court hearing. Maybe this never happens, I surely hope it doesn't. Over time I have lost confidence in people to do what is right vs. what is easy.
Another concern is that computers will set the Geo-fenced parameters by specific GPS limits that cut off some streets required for access to work or the store without implementing soft-limit buffer zones. At least I could see people accidentally leaving out such a safety feature and then the former DUI convict crosses over an arbitrary line, their car signals the police, the police press a button, car pulls over and driver is off to jail thus forcing that person to feed the prison industrial complex even more.
In short, when they implement this, there had best be a buffer-zone warning alert to keep drivers away from the edge. [1]
That doesn’t seem dystopian at all. Drivers are expected to follow the law but kill tens of thousands of people annually and injure at least an order of magnitude more. Requiring a high-powered bit of heavy equipment to be geofenced like a 20 pound rental scooter often is would save a city’s worth of lives and billions of dollars every year, and it’s not doing anything outside the democratic process which sets traffic laws in the first place. It also does so without any of the well-founded concerns that traffic enforcement will be inconsistently applied to different ages, ethnicities, income levels, etc. and would have zero privacy implications.
That already exists. It's the horse power figure on the sticker.
They snoop at how you drive your car - and take appropriate action with their tesla insurance company.
Additionally, they do the same thing for "self-driving" firmware - not allowing you to use it unless you are a "safe driver"
I was shopping for a new car couple months ago and skipped Tesla because I don’t like Elon as a person. I certainly would not buy a car that does that!
At that point, this seems like simple hedging "Sure, you can go faster, might burn out the motors, but we'll replace them under warranty".
Why do they need a fucking green man (circuit chip) in a car I own that obeys only their remote services to unlock this feature?
Basically - Either I own the fucking thing, in which case I have all the keys, or I'm just licensing access. Let's not fuck around with this awful gray area where companies try to weasel out of consumer protections.
Tesla has been doing something similar for a while on the extended range model 3 where you can pay a one time fee to get a boost in performance.
Interestingly, there is a Canadian company that has reversed engineered what happen when it is unlocked and is selling a device that you plug on the car CAN bus and you get the same performance boost. They obviously sell this for less that what Tesla charges and as far as I understand, the only risk is that you might void your warranty if Tesla "catches" you doing it.
So I kind of agree that it seems similar to getting a factory approved chip tuned. When you chiptune your ICE car, you will often pay several hundred euros for a shop with the right hardware to modify your car (and loose your warranty). In this case, if the setting change is increasing failure rate but your warranty is not affected maybe it's not such a bad deal.
this is an attack on the used car market
It's quite intentional - it's bad behavior - I'd like it see it made fucking illegal as soon as possible.
---
We're in this weird period where manufacturers have realized that software controls on embedded circuits allow them to retain far more control over devices than they should ever be given the right to have.
The last stop on this train is clearly digital slavery - you own nothing, everything around you is a subscription or licensed access. The moment you stop paying - the device degrades, not because it has to, but because it's the stick they use to beat more money out of you.
I want legislation passed fucking yesterday that states that I must be provided ALL of the damn keys to a device when I buy it. I don't give a fuck whether that key is physical or digital. I get them all, or the manufacturer gets fucked out of existence.
The above assumes - probably incorrectly - that Mercedes will repair the car as part of this, and thus the increased cost mostly represents their costs in more repairs needed. If you have to pay for repairs, then it should be a one time fee.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-finalizes-intel-on-d...
I prefer the one-time purchase to subscription models for big-ticket purchases though. I don't like the mental overhead involved with addons.
I've been in the room when making this exact kind of product proposal (not MB). The pushback from drivetrain and electrical on warranty, repair, battery life etc was intense and directly related to future satisfaction. Sure, you can push the envelope on the spec, but it does tend to come at a cost.
Say they give this option for free... And it reduces the battery life/capacity by 10% over the course of a year. Pretty sure people would be clutching their handbags in horror.
You buy a car with a spec. Aftermarket mods are definately a thing to increase that spec, and they've been around for a while, both for ev and ice. They've always been available at a cost. This time it's from the MFG and we all lose our minds.
Generally, modding anything beyond the ECM / TCM / PCM will be visible to the service center and claims will be denied.
If you stick to software alone, you're generally not looking at more than maybe 15-50 hp difference in most cars, depending on your starting point (you're getting a small percentage increase, so more powerful cars will see more of an increase).
Most ECM / PCMs do not have adequate tamper protection to detect being modded and then flashed back to stock, which is a common practice in the auto enthusiast world, and leads to people who technically shouldn't be getting repairs under warranty to get them.
Newer ones are getting better at detecting this.
They can only deny a warranty if the modification caused the damage. However, they can claim it did and deny you even if it's not true.
Leaving you basically only two options payup or pay lawyers and court fees ect.. to sue them.
I’m way more likely to pay let’s say $300 to enable this feature for the weekend to impress a visiting friend or hell at a light next to an annoying BMW M owner that you suddenly need to smack down.
Make it a more affordable impulse buy, they’ll make a ton more money that way.
Your engine will be shut off if you fail to update your payment information.“
Click here to link your car, phone and playstation together to enable cross platform loot.
You are the annoying car owner.
[1]: https://a16z.com/2011/08/20/why-software-is-eating-the-world...
That would be an accomplishment if they did it in hardware. ;-)
The "right to repair" movement, for example, seems on the surface to be closely analogous to freedom 1 of the Free Software Foundation's four essential freedoms[1].
[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms
In the long run customers aren't going to pay more. The auto industry is highly competitive and that competition will keep profit margins in check.
In the olden days they used common parts because the manufacturing and the tracking of the parts in your inventory system was expensive.
Now we're gonna push to reduce part counts because the cost of the engineer and the amortized cost of corporate process in which he works are expensive.
So I guess subscriptions alone don't cut it, you still need to sell the car as well. That said I heard from multiple people that car manufacturers earn most of their money with the service and spare parts for cars (not sure if this is still true) and that the buying price is even slightly subsidized. So from that perspective adding a subscription on top of the purchase price makes sense. In the end people will decide whether it makes sense to pay for that, and I think there will be enough competition in the premium segment, so consumers can just chose to take their money somewhere else if an offer is not good.
Are we surprised here? MB’s leadership has one primary goal: satisfying shareholders and the broader market.
We’ve been in a race to the bottom for a long time now. Inferior construction, cheap parts, overseas labor (or for the car market, labor in the US, Canada, or Mexico but also because of cost optimization).
This is the latest in a long line of cost cutting measures and patterns where the customer ultimately loses. I’m not even mad at Mercedes Benz. They know the game they’re playing, and this is what it takes I suppose.
My son in law bought a new C Class a few months ago. He and my daughter were very pleased. Now me, I’m an old goat, and so when I saw a massive iPad on the center console instead of buttons, I’d tell you that car wouldn’t be my first choice. And they had me sit in it and try it out. It is certainly a nice looking interior, but I pressed on the passenger side dashboard area and on the armrest between the front seats. I heard plastic crackling noises. It’s all plastic, even though it looks like some much superior metallic material. It was just some skin/vinyl on top of plastic.
How well will it hold? Time will tell, but it goes to show you the generation gap. I think he said he paid upwards of $50k for the car. With all the plastic, I can never see myself paying that much money for a vehicle. But hey, Mercedes Benz has a market for these things, and so it’s reasonable to believe that no matter what I think of the $1,200 subscription, there’s a market for that too.
Don't even get me started on Teslas which is essentially a tablet with a large car-shaped case around it.
Why can't I burn my garbage in downtown San Francisco, instead of having to pay The Man? And if my homebrew wiring job torches down the neighborhood, well, my house, my rules, bucko.
Traction control prevents this these days.
It still happens, of course, because idiots WANT to spin their tires and so turn off the traction control. But spinning tires != going fast. Usually sports cars flooring from a stop are interested in speed, not tire smoke, so the TC is still on.
That said, I know in my Model 3 Performance, I've floored it from a traffic light in the rain and had very little spin. It's insane how effective traction control is in an EV.
But yeah - I don’t necessarily agree with regulating it away for safety - people need to have personal responsibility. But regulations could make car companies optimize for other variables though (like distance and economy) which could be good.
Bonus points for maximum performance acceleration without overshoot to the speed limit if I am the first one stopped at a red light when it turns green.
Adaptive cruise control is awesome, but the implementations I've used are unaware of the road's speed limit.
Unless you're going downhill this defies our known understanding of physics.
Probably not what they meant in that comment though.
No it doesn't.
Re-reading that, I didn’t write very clearly - and thankfully my car doesn’t require braking to stop accelerating indefinitely.
What I meant was, in a combustion engine, there is still some acceleration that occurs as the engine drops from 6-7k RPM down to idle. If you’re running acceleration from 0-60 in 2 seconds, that continued acceleration after you take your foot off the gas and the engine runs down to idle may be another 10 mph. In my experience, acceleration for a combustion engine to hit its best time is usually pedal to the metal and isn’t a smooth stop at that exact top speed (which would require letting off the gas ahead of reaching the top speed so you don’t overshoot).
In context of the parent and regulating speed vs acceleration, my point was that fast acceleration can lead to people overshooting the intended speed / speed limit.
That said, power delivery for electric motors (that would be in the 2-3 second 0-60 range) may not have this ramp-down period, so acceleration would stop immediately (and maybe slow down aggressively with regenerative braking).
Not in any vehicle I've operated. The moment I pull off the throttle completely, it stops flowing any more than idle speed fuel mixture into the motor. Without that combustion power, it starts to act more like an air compressor almost immediately, causing negative force output. It is taking energy from the crank to try and compress a mixture which, when combusted (if even combustable, most likely not), results in less expansive force than the force it took to compress. This is even more pronounced at high RPMs as that action happens more times every second.
If I let go of the throttle on my motorcycle at 9krpms and like 70mph or whatever it feels like I pressed hard on my rear brake instantly, for all intents and purposes. You'll feel your weight get thrown forwards immediately.
If your car continues to accelerate after you've taken your foot off the gas something is wrong with your car.
1. Low speeds, the car will accelerate a bit to where it moves at idle speed. (Usually very slow. Like 2-3 MPH.)
2. High speeds: If you lift off the accelerator, the car will slow down. In a manual transmission car, this slowdown is much more pronounced, and can often be used instead of the brakes in non-emergency slow deceleration conditions. In an automatic the slowdown is less, but still there.
Joking aside, acceleration can be a real problem. I ride a lot my motorcycle to work, shopping etc. I am closing to an intersection, I see a car that has to yield and when I am close enough, I am pretty sure I will not be hit even if the car is not yielding, which happens quite often (many drivers don't see motorcycles or ignore their rights). With a very high acceleration, the risk of getting hit is a lot higher.
It was actually the acceleration causing the back and forth (threw me off the seat before I let go causing it to stop).
Rimac is about to ship a car with a top speed lower than the 412kph (258mph) its capable of. It has a speed governor which employees unlock after ensuring safe condition of vehicle and track.
On the other, people have been paying hundreds (thousands?) of dollars for digital tunes to reflash their ECU to add more horsepower/torque for years now.
That is a one time fee as opposed to a subscription, so maybe therein lies the problem.
Arbitrarily restricting capability just so the manufacturer can make more money is the problem.
Even ignoring that, by the time the engine needs expensive maintenance it is old and likely to go to an independent mechanic.
While there is warranty issues, there will be such with electric motors and their controllers as well.
However, the ICE is about to need a valve clearance adjustment this year or early next year. It is not that old of a car, but it still supposed to be done every 60,000mi on my car. There's another $300. It should probably also have a coolant flush and a transaxle fluid drain/fill/inspection. Another $400ish in maintenance. This year's ICE-exclusive maintenance budget is now at $900, assuming everything's fine with things like vacuum hoses and fuel lines and what not. It is not guaranteed they're fine; there's a reason why the manual tells you to inspect them every so often. And I imagine most people probably have no idea what they're looking at, so unless they're paying someone to inspect it that work probably isn't being inspected right.
If you're only getting oil changes on your car, you're probably not following the OEM maintenance schedule on your car.
My EV-only maintenance cost for the life of the car so far? $0. I'll need a gear oil and coolant drain and fill at 130,000mi, but other than that there's nothing scheduled other than things the ICE will need too (tires, suspension, wipers, brakes, etc.)
There's definitely millions of cars on the roads which don't have hydraulic lifters.
And while hydraulic lifters increase the interval time for adjustment the preload may still need adjustment throughout a hydraulic lifter's life.
Interesting that it is not even mentioned once, on the other hand the accent on "German auto manufacturer" is loud and clear
Also Intel shamelessly wants to join https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/22/intel_reveals_paid_xe...
I don't understand why these companies try to sabotage themselves, do they want to buyback their stocks for cheap?
Obviously these will all fail. I suspect the Chinese will make dirt cheap BEV's which have very finite lifetimes (in the order of a decade or less) to offset the drop in revenue and for Western car makers to follow suit in making similar junk-cars.
Just the other day the Ford CEO exclaimed that a BEV would require 40% labor to make [1]. Think of the savings that would bring!
[1]: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/11/16/ford-ceo-40-less-labor-...
https://www.thedrive.com/news/new-jersey-legislators-aim-to-...
Sometimes I wonder if there would be a market for a "maximally analog electric car" where, for example, the accelerator pedal is a potentiometer.
What else do you think is being used for accelerator pedals?
Having a a capability engineered into a product but making it unavailable to a subset of consumers in the lower price bucket has a long history.
I do not endorse the practice, but there's a tendency to sell things at prices the market will bear, with little basis on unit production cost. I must say, the HN crowd is typically more sanguine about SaaS and the virtues of recurring revenue when the subject is a software company. I'm more of a boxed-software/buy-it-once guy, but that ship seems to have sailed.
1. I became aware of this when Tesla temporarily unlocked additional range for Florida residents so they could flee a hurricane
Current VW from 2012 is going strong, other than a bit more oil and some paint fixes I haven't had to put much money in.
My next car will likely be a Hyundai or Toyota in the "gold" tier suggested for the Comma 3.
Props to MB for finding another way to grift rich people and suckers who are financing the car to pretend to be rich!
Even in the past multiple models shared the same engine with minor modifications to offer different performance at different price points. E.g. a C180, C200 and C250 all used the same 1.8l engine. You paid more to get its full potential - and the extra cost was far more than the number of modifications to the base engine.
Now it seems like the extra cost just moves from a one-time bump to a subscription model.
I don't agree with either thing being paywalled, but I also can see nuance on things being paywalled; if there is a legit service cost to the manufacturer associated for example.
Does that answer your question, or is my answer not clickbaity enough?
That is not true. In the past you have owned a car you bought. Who is going to pay for seat heating if a seat has to be replaced? Who is paying for the fuel caused by the extra weight for stuff you didn't want. What happens if you decide to modify the car you own and run the seat heating yourself?
https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM?t=57
You can pay a recurring subscription fee to access features that they own.
There are tons and tons and tons of things that HN type crowds like to think are good predictors of something but are really way below the noise floor.
There's way lower hanging fruit, like buying access to ALPRs data for "problem" stretches of road. IDK if insurance companies have openly admitted to doing that yet but the ALPR data sellers market as though it's a use case their customers have...
This is another copy paste article on the subject that offers no details just to spark outrage and clicks. If the tax also applies to bought and payed units feel free to rage. But until some real journalism clears that up...
You can see the option for yourself here:
https://shop.mbusa.com/en-us/connect/pdp/Acceleration-Increa...
It would also apply to leased vehicles but to your point is not nearly as offensive there given you already have car as a service as the underlying model.
Anything less is bound to be despised as an anti-consumer effort.
I Have Too Much Money and Not Enough Taste
Buying one is like opening a vein. You've given permission for them to take all they want.
Debatable...
For those that do admire the reputation of Mercedes for being tastefully done, if they can actually afford the newish model of their dreams, wouldn't it show even better taste to purchase a vintage model instead?
Made back when the company was profiting from selling its own brand of luxury & performance rather than renting it out directly.
Makes you think there must be other designed-in compromises that would never have been acceptable when the executives were still focused (by tradition if nothing else) on making the major purchase itself be as satisfying as possible.
It may be the same company, and technology has certainly advanced, but today's executives themselves are not as advanced as people used to be in previous decades.
This is a plain ordinary decision-making deficiency.
Remember at one time a Mercedes plant was doing extremely well simply manufacturing the vehicles and letting any aftermarket leasing be handled by third parties. Now it's plain to see they're struggling to squeeze the consumer in ways that are simply distasteful compared to higher-class operation under more respectable higher-performance executives in earlier times at the same company.
It's a slippery slope, first you're raking it in simply building luxury homes and selling them for market price. If that's not enough then leveraging what's built by renting out the same asset instead of parting with it is a consideration but it involves a lot more financing arrangements. There's always been more to be made through financial work without having to build anything new, so eventually you reach peak time-sharing.
I like executives and engineers who are effective enough to prosper without any predatory shenanigans, whether financial or not.
That's something I just never developed a taste for.
An old Mercedes has class. A new Mercedes is just vulgar.
There could be an argument for open source ECU mapping tables and other software. But, the reason is the same as reasons for OSS, not that the customer has paid for the 'physics' that already exists.
It would be easier to swallow if it’s a rent-to-own model.
You often see this in startups and business plans and models. Same for whale users.
This says a lot about capitalism.
Certainly adding arbitrary “upgrades” or higher end models specifically to milk less discerning consumers has proven to be a good business strategy.
I could see laws against arbitrary software gates limiting hardware gaining traction though. I’d like to hope that the manufacturers who don’t use these tactics win out naturally though
For example, the 2022 Ford Maverick XL was not available with cruise control, but it's only locked out in software. All cars have computer controlled throttles now, so cruise control is a software-only feature with no additional hardware.
Some other hardware that's commonly limited by software is CPUs, GPUs, and such. I had a triple core AMD CPU that I unlocked into a quad core, and an ATI GPU that I reflashed into a higher model. This has become less possible as manufacturers start using lasers to destroy parts of their own product instead, so that hackers can't re-enable disabled functionality.
If laws came around to prevent software from being used to limit hardware functionality, that's what we're going to start seeing: more money and effort spent to intentionally remove or destroy things from products. That sucks compared to just switching it off in software.
Angry Birds made a fortune by targeting every phone user for 79p. Apple far more so by putting a phone in millions of pockets. Amazon makes money based on lots of small transactions by non-rich people. Bugatti makes money by targeting a few rich people. You can go big, but have a few customers, or go small and have loads. This is why we have any products to buy - you can do well selling to all sorts of income levels. You just need the right product at the right price.
It’s always trivial to squeeze more power out of these cars with software modifications. The cars do not come out of the factory like that because of reliability concerns.
To me this just reads like manufacturer-warrantied chiptuning. The interesting question will be whether or not this can actually compare with external chiptuners when it comes to performance.
HN doesn’t like subscriptions, but 1.2k/yr for a warrantied high quality tune from the manufacturer would be a great deal compared to what is available right now.
If they fuck this up and piss off their customers, that’ll just mean that BMW or VAG will take the sales instead.
The used market will probably demand to know if this was ever enabled so they can pay less for your abused car.
The used market will probably bypass cars with heated seat subscriptions (at least where it gets cold) to the point where they have to make it permanent just to keep the trade in value high enough that the old owner can afford the next car.
You should learn to read and understand English before making yourself look like a complete idiot by autistically screeching about fallacies.
I’ll hold your hand: Not all slippery slopes are fallacious, I never suggested that the one presented earlier was. I suggested that without supporting evidence it’s a weak argument, that’s strictly different than calling it an outright fallacy.
You’re just demonstrating that you don’t even know what ad hominem means.
“edgyquant is an idiot; therefore he is wrong” is an example of an ad hominem.
“edgyquant is an idiot” is merely a statement of fact
How does it feel being so pathetic that you have to substitute “insult” with “ad hominem” in a desperate attempt to seem smart?
The world will be a better place once you’re diagnosed with a terminal illness, hopefully that day arrives soon.
This is thousands of dollars of year to change the MAX_TORQUE_ALLOWED to a different value already tested, nothing more.
Selling a warrantied MAX_TORQUE_ALLOWED increase makes perfect sense.
Of course, it’s tough for us to know without getting someone to leak internal numbers.
We don’t get upset when adobe or Apple hides software features behind pay walls, we shouldn’t be surprised if everyone starts doing it.
Sure, but if it's cheaper to only make the better model, then they should just only sell it as such, rather than making something you own withhold features from you.
> We don’t get upset when adobe or Apple hides software features behind pay walls
Yes we do. Don't you remember the Pantone Photoshop story from less than a month ago?