Mercedes-Benz to introduce acceleration subscription fee
bbc.com
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The top comment was about "subscription fatigue".
At this point I think it's inevitable that some appliance features will require a subscription (e.g. your fridge's ice-maker is an additional $5/month).
Obviously that's just anecdotal, but was a pleasant surprise.
This feels like businesses are trying to force everyone in the debt trap that keeps the poor where they are. Having to pay a monthly subscription for basic functionality isn't _that_ different from being in debt. But instead of floating consumers a loan, these companies are selling an item that selectively breaks if they miss a payment.
And part of it, I believe, is inflation. I.e. I believe inflation is vastly undercounted and underreported, because a good chunk of it hides in "shrinkflation", decrease of manufacturing quality, lower-quality components, replacing customer service with "AI" chatbots and recently also voicebots, more ads and upsells, and - of course - extra subscriptions tacked on to everything.
It's easy to say "just don't buy it", but a few of us not buying it will not swing the balance sheets when the extra profit is so significant for the companies pulling this shit.
It seems inevitable that these types of subscriptions will slowly take over more and more areas of end consumer lives, until there's such a fatigue and hard push-back on subscriptions that it becomes profitable to create companies that sell products outright just to compete with subscription models.
As-is, launching a company that will compete with the subscription models is difficult. You will have a harder time finding investors (who will see the numbers and ask, "are you crazy?"). You basically have to do this, alongside others, just because you believe it's the right thing to do.
And then you have to not get bought up by a company that will introduce this model.
I'm not saying all subscription models are bad; I believe they're warranted or a good trade-off in a lot of cases, especially in hosted software. But knowing how significant a difference it makes, I just don't see this turning out well for consumers, even if we want to organize boycotts.
So, how do we speedrun to the part where "you own your product" competition exists and thrives?
A related issue is the increasing possiblity of devices being effectively bricked because some cloud service or online system has ceased support. Could there be a niche for a company selling improved after-market firmware for other companies' devices?
Then the whole aspect of data mining, how long (if not already) will these devices report back your usage and activity that is sold on.
For washers and dryers: Speed Queen makes some of the most reliable washers and dryers I've ever seen. You'll pay an arm and a leg for them, but they're known to last for between double to quadruple the length of the warranty. My family recently had to purchase a new washing machine, and the Speed Queen display at the store showed off the drum unit designs for Speed Queen vs their competition; Speed Queen uses a single giant gear made of stainless steel, whereas other brands use super complex plastic gearboxes.
For refrigerators: it's really a toss-up; I was able to find plenty of high predicted reliability models without Wi-Fi on Consumer Reports' website.
For other appliances: I haven't had to look for any other appliances as of late, but I always look to CR first because I personally trust their ratings. Your milage may vary.
So many products these days break down within a few years :/
My wolf stove is 10 years old. Will last 10 more. But it cost like 16k. Could have bought 12-16 normal stoves for that price.
I know it will last both because mine has made it 10 already, and I know many people with even older stoves.
On the other hand even the most advantageous subscription today just eases people into this model which certainly opens the door for far more abuse in the future than straight ownership.
Given where we are today with subscriptions I'd say that battle is already lost. People stopped owning their movies or music (that's after you realize that even having a physical copy doesn't mean ownership), and who knows how many other things. It's just one more software switch for a feature you rent rather than own.
There are already GPS interlock systems where the dealer can shut down your car and locate it for collection, just in case of such a thing.
It is for this and many related reasons that we found the exact car we wanted, took the VIN to our bank, and walked into the dealership with a financing check. The dealer financing officer called our bank, gave them the price-out-the-door, and our bank gave them a PIN to write on the check alongside the total amount.
We walked away without having any further relationship with the dealership. Despite this, they tried several times to get our written consent to run their own financing. We steadfastly refused.
Not everyone is in a position to do this, but it was nice because we didn’t have to put up with any (other) dealer bullshit. (We did have to put up with other tangentially related dealer bullshit, which I have previously written about on here.)
Edit: typo and context
One of the strategies I hear about online is working with the dealership to take out financing with the implicit understanding that you’ll wait to pay off the loan until after they’ve received their payout.
Dealer GPS tracking and interlocking is usually reserved for “credit criminals” and folks with previous repos.
We had also contracted ahead of time to buy that particular car at almost exactly MSRP, and between the overly eager sales rep who wrote it up with no dealer add-ons, and Toyota’s allocation system deadlines, they were incentivized to walk us out of there as fast as possible. We were there less than an hour.
Edit: proofreading
Now, cash vs financing is a different story, but that depends on whether you have that much cash on hand and what you plan to do with it. Most people don’t have 35K available to buy a car outright.
I prefer cash over financing. Most buyers opt for the latter, and have been for decades.
The GPS interlock systems generally aren't used by new car franchise dealers. You mostly see those at "buy here pay here" used car lots that target "credit criminals" and do a lot of repos.
I understand that this is different from subsidized game consoles since I paid the full product.
I do wonder if auto-makers might suffer some subscription fatigue themselves in the near future when these electronic features get hacked and people enjoy them without paying. The danger of giving someone hardware capable of something and then artificially limiting it is that hardware can be modified, and arguably has stronger legal support for such modification.
And now you are dead.
Safety is now software, on a subscription model.
That whole argument is as old and tired as it is wrong.
Escaping from dangerous situations is not a thing. Speed got you in that situation in the first place.
Wouldn't such a thing be useful when overtaking?
Some car magazine a while back did a side-by-side comparison of two Mercedes sedans, one with a V6 and the other with a V8. They were happier with the V6, because nobody can use the extra power given speed enforcement on highways. So do yourself a favor and just don't pay for it.
Less drastically but much more frequently, just when merging onto the freeway you'll typically choose to accelerate or brake based on what's most comfortable given the available traffic openings, and finding in hindsight that acceleration wasn't actually an option isn't going to make the road safer.
And what is that, like 0.5 seconds to make a difference? How much further will the car be when it had this subscription vs not having the subscription?
2-8 inches probably won't give you better odds of any meaningful outcomes beyond an extra few percent. 16-64 inches could easily be the difference between a miss and a crash (especially if the red-light runner swerves or counting the selection bias in which distribution of possible strike zones you're likely to have predicated on the assumption that accelerating was a reasonable course of action), or would very likely be the difference between an extremely dangerous collision with the driver's door and something more reasonable toward the back of the car (worse with kids in the back -- thankfully for the purpose of this discussion, only 15% of cars in the US have passengers).
Edit: Not to mention, lack of safety in an absolute sense doesn't mean that the safest option for a given driver (predicated on the assumption that it looked safe to go as far as the onramp and there's no way off other than merging eventually) wouldn't be to floor it to merge. In the Bay Area in particular, drivers are notoriously aggressive about both tailgating and blocking merge attempts, and faced with a tricky merge you might find that braking input is unlikely to work (no openings toward the rear), heavy braking to avoid the situation is unlikely to work (in theory you're supposed to yield to the freeway traffic, but doing so will probably result in the tailgater behind you rear-ending you), and the nearest available opening in front of you requires heavy acceleration. It'd be better if everyone could be polite and zipper merge, but in a bad situation with limited personal control you can only hope to make the best of it.
To be fair, a vehicle that does 0-60 in 10s can probably pull this off too.
Obviously... that Star Wars screen where they just dropped there bomb in the through regulator vent and need to Get Out Real Quick before the Death Star explodes.
It's a win-win-win all round.
Many drivers in slow cars think they can execute the same manoeuvre as the fast car in front of them and this is when accidents happen - often fatal too.
No-one is disputing that a faster car allows you to overtake faster.
>What if the driver is constantly breaking and accelerating?
I've found that there are two general strategies that work well in this situation.
- Simply increase distance and wait longer to catch up to the driver in front of you. This accounts for their bad driving.
- Modulate your speed using the car in front of the car in front of you. ie, focus on the 2nd car in front of you. They're likely driving with the flow of traffic properly and won't constantly be accelerating and braking. It might sound unintuitive to focus focus on a car other than the one in front of you, but this can actually be more safe: You've made enough space between yourself and the car in front you to avoid an accident, and you're better prepared for when the actual braking will occur.
The big truck example, I wasn't suggesting you overtake without view, rather increase the distance, then overtake.
In Italy you can overtake ONLY on the left, so it's not out of the blue to change lane just to overtake.
Just do it safely.
In the end nothing stops you from getting out of the highway, wait 10 minutes and resume, to be done with all of this.
Here in Ireland the highway code is almost identical given the history of British influence [1].
Giving 1.5-2m distance would imply use of the opposite lane.
[0] https://highwaycode.org.uk/overtaking/
[1] https://countrysideallianceireland.org/latest-news/changes-t...
I spent years driving a $500 shit box car. There are loads of situations where acceleration mitigates other people's mistakes. I lost that car getting rear ended - not my fault, but it could have been avoided with more power (saving myself weeks of neck pain).
Are you hitting doenshifts 100% in those situations?
I hope the people who designed/developed do not have clean consciouses.
Do keep in mind that we’re talking about a subscription to go 0-60 MPH in 5.2 seconds vs 0-60 in 6.2 seconds. The non-subscribed acceleration of 0-60 in 6.2 seconds for this specific car is far faster than the majority of cars on the road can accelerate. Do also keep in mind that the non-subscription features of the car must pass all safety standards, therefore safety is clearly not on a subscription model. There are plenty of valid reasons to dislike these auto-maker attempts at rent seeking, so let’s not be hyperbolic about them, lest we undermine the stronger arguments.
[0] https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/documents/812485...
It’s not true that non-crashes aren’t represented here- the NHTSA statistics capture the rate of crashes in terms like crashes per vehicle miles traveled, which represents both the probability of crashing and the probability of not crashing (one minus the probability of crashing). The fact that speeding is a huge factor in many crashes and that it increases the chance of death does in fact demonstrate that it’s overall less safe to speed. Speed might anecdotally help some people in some situations, but the actual stats do prove that the net effect of speeding is greater risk.
Acceleration increases the degree of control you have over your vehicle. That control could be the difference between life and death in an emergency. For example if you see a car driving towards you from the side (e.g. they're running a red light), increased acceleration could allow you to get out of the way in time.
More conventionally, increased acceleration allows you to complete an overtaking manoeuvre in a reduced time. Reduced overtaking distance is fairly universally regarded as also reducing the risk of an accident.
That’s true, good point. (But we’re talking about a sport feature of a Mercedes car with unnecessary amounts of acceleration.)
> Acceleration increases the degree of control you have over your vehicle
That’s not true. You’re exercising control by accelerating, but not increasing control. Braking and steering are also exercising control. Accelerating too fast in wet or dusty conditions reduces control. Accelerating too quickly when people around you don’t expect it increases the risk of accident.
> Reduced overtaking distance is fairly universally regarded as also reducing the risk of an accident.
I’ve never heard this before, can you back this claim up with some evidence? The NHTSA report I posted is quite thorough and does not mention passing time as a risk factor. I’m sure you’re right and it is true when overtaking into oncoming traffic, if you cross the median. I doubt this is true for separated freeways like most of the urban US interstates inside city boundaries. I’m sure your claim here is not true when people exceed the speed limit in order to overtake, which is a very common occurrence where I live. Much of the passing that goes on happens when someone overtakes another person who’s already traveling at or above the speed limit, by further exceeding the speed limit. This is not made safer by doing it faster.
A few more steps closer to paid doors to your apartment from Ubik: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7444685-the-door-refused-to...
It’s not a subscription, but the idea is the same.
It doesn’t bother me one bit: I bought the car knowing full well that it wasn’t included, I don’t need it (the standard acceleration is already more than I ever had before), end of story.
Car engines have been under the control of software for decades now, with different products differing by the program. The only difference here is that there’s now the option to change the program over the air.
Nobody would have complained if Mercedes had offered 2 versions without the option to upgrade.
Are you sure? I personally don’t like the subscription model for car features, but look at it this way: it means there will be more cars in the second-hand market that are capable of faster acceleration or seat-heating or whatever else is pay-walled. It means that people can pay for a lower model car, and then someone else can buy it and “upgrade” to the higher model. I don’t know or have evidence that this will help resale value, but it seems at least logically plausible that it could help resale by giving downstream purchasers more options than they might have otherwise. You’re right, it’s still true that the auto-maker is leeching some of the value with every transfer, and that unlocks won’t transfer, but I’m not sure that will hurt resale.
Pretty sure. As this continues, more and more things will be behind paywalls. The companies have every incentive to do this. Then more and more percentage of the value of the car is _not_ transferrable and will need to be paid (again) to the company by any new owner.
You paid X thousand for "upgrades"? Great, that is completely lost money when you sell it.
You can see this in the games market with DLC-heavy games. The physical copies of those aren't worth much because it doesn't even include most of the content.
The effect you explain does exist I think, but to me seems to be obviously overpowered by the other(s) in the other direction.
Harder for BEVs where everything is electronically controlled. It’s a different story if there’s a physical motor and you can edit or bypass the ECU.
But I’m not sure the analogy to DLC games works here, you’re talking about DLC value that you purchased above and beyond the initial price of the game. The game itself doesn’t lose resale value, it’s the value of your DLC that doesn’t transfer.
If you want a new electric Mercedes, your choices will be either buy a new one at the new-car price and subscribe to upgrades, or buy a used one at the cheaper used-car price and subscribe to any upgrades you want. Cheaper and upgradeable is still going to be attractive to buyers than more expensive up-front. Part of the deal here is (presumably) that the car was cheaper in the first place than it would have been if the upgrade features were built in and permanent.
If consumers were rational, that's how it'd work. They pretty rarely are though.
> But I’m not sure the analogy to DLC games works here, you’re talking about DLC value that you purchased above and beyond the initial price of the game. The game itself doesn’t lose resale value, it’s the value of your DLC that doesn’t transfer.
It's barely even an analogy it's so exact. You could just call acceleration upgrades and heated seats and whatever DLC, it's the same thing.
It’s great that future buyers can upgrade, I think that’s cool. But now sellers can’t recoup any of the money they spend on these features, and over the life of the car they are likely to cost many times more. It’s brutal for lower-income people relying on decent cars to eventually reach a price point they can afford, because they’ll need to effectively pay for every option like they are buying new.
True, and some of these new car subscription features are indeed being offered as one-time purchases, BMW’s heated seats, for example. The value-add of a subscription is a lower up-front cost in exchange for rent instead of ownership. You don’t have to pay for the whole thing, and you can decide to stop paying for it before you’ve covered the product’s full cost.
> now sellers can’t recoup any of the money they spend
True, and people should (and some will) consider this before buying a new electric Mercedes, right? I hope so. Their FAQ states that the service must be disabled before resale. I’m pretty sure I won’t be buying one of these new. But for people who go in eyes wide open, there’s a decent chance they’ll still sell them eventually. Hey, who knows, maybe they’ll be force to sell for less than the car’s worth because of everyone’s subscription fears.
> It’s brutal for lower-income people
We’ve suddenly skipped a few steps here. We’re commenting on a Mercedes car with an optional feature to increase acceleration to 60 MPH by 1 second. This isn’t a brand that lower-income people are buying, by and large, and isn’t a feature lower-income people will be subscribing to. Cars for the lower-income brackets are already sold with zero luxury features, so I don’t see how this option feature aimed at rich people hurts poorer people at all, and I don’t see the slippery slope clearly in this case either.
And yes, this will happen. Just look at how many games are broken already because the servers were shut down and how many cars don't get original parts anymore. I have no confidence that car manufacturers will be better with subscription servers and that's assuming they stay in business, which is not a given (see, for example, Scion and Saab).
The mental impact of paying three-four figures a year for a subscription is different from a 3.99 app store payment.
This will benefit some folks. I imagine that most people will simply pass, the same way they’ve been passing on all of the other non-Tesla car subscription/remote upgrade offers.
The mutability is the part that bothers me. Remotely disabling features and the option to hike prices for monthly subscriptions to have functionality in the car serve to erode the concept of ownership. I'm not a Tesla owner but I believe they also allow paid upgrades that neither stick with the owner nor with the car during a sale. How is that not exploitative?
For my personal case, it still doesn’t matter, of course.
But what ongoing value do I get for my subscription? Will I get free acceleration upgrades over time because they keep improving the software? Free brake light DLCs that show how hard I’m accelerating? It’s great I can upgrade OTA but what about that means I need to pay over and over?
Acceleration is not a service- there’s no ongoing cost to deliver it to owners and there’s no increase in value to the owner over time to compensate for the ever increasing cost. That’s why I think the subscription model is much more exploitative.
I don’t get the “it’s not a service” argument. It’s not relevant. There’s no ongoing cost with many software licenses either. It’s just a business model.
If I found out the cheaper car were the same as the more expensive one except for a software anti-feature locking something out, I'd still be upset.
Cars are a competitive market, so I don't agree with the pure greed sentiment. It's not like Apple or Google raising app store fees from 30% to 40%.
The only difference is that, instead of immediately opting for a chip or retune, you now have the option to pay a monthly fee to keep your warranty.
I can't imagine if Apple sells us an iPhone with 3 cameras, and we have to pay 3 different subscription tiers to access to each of them.
I guess we'll see if Mercedes is going to suddenly prevent third party tuners from doing this, but I guess not.
If $1,000ish every year was a reasonable cost based on increased warranty risk, that is a big increase in risk!
Moving away from one-time purchases to a reoccurring payment model is just a logical next step, that is familiar in many other spaces.
The end-games is that the vast majority won’t own anything at all and are stuck living paycheck to paycheck, being sucked dry by subscriptions.
You see, what really matters in the end is shareholder value. And finding growth is therefore what only matters.
Some people buy cars for status and bragging, so you need the car to be expensive. Others don't care. So instead of having too separate cars, you just sell the "base version" for $X and then sell "status upgrades". Like "skins" in video games.
The bragging person will brag about the expensive subscription, just like some brag about their AMEX/Centurion/... credit card, while the regular person will get a cheaper car since it's price won't be artificially inflated to cater to the luxury segment.
It’s just pure greed and collusion and abuse of their position in the market to facilitate these things.
All cars have their branding and model number on display, perhaps what new cars will have is some kind of fancy electronic display on the back that shows the current model number. When you subscribe to the added extras, the display will show something different to let others know that your car is one of the special faster ones and, by extension, that you are better than the others !
What's the resale value of the IntelliJ IDEA that you "own"?
Funny how HN thinks that's perfectly fine, but if you do this to cars suddenly it's a dystopian nightmare.
IntelliJ IDEA can be bought as a perpetual license [1] and the subscription just gives you access to the latest version.
The increased acceleration would make sense if it was a one time payment but as a subscription its nonsense. Mercedes has no costs for it after they produced the car.
[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/#commercial (All yearly subscriptions include a perpetual fallback license.)
That's where this is going to head.
I think it's Tesla that started with Autopilot and now others are also experimenting.
In the case of subscriptions, obviously the resale value will become based on base configuration without options with the buyer then hopefully able to get the subscriptions they want.