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Comment by 2143 | Hacker News Reader

I don't mind newspapers being a subscription, because every day they have to do a lot of work to come up with a new version.

However, I find subscriptions super annoying for things that already exist in its entirety and doesn't cost the service provider anything to give more of.

Something I find unacceptable is the subscription situation coming up in the car industry:

Some examples include:

* BMW heated seat subscription [1]. The entire hardware for the heated seats is already in the car!

* Mercedes horsepower subscription [2]. Again, the entire capability is in the car. It's not like Mercedes sends the souls of horses OTA into your car after you subscribe.

Other manufacturers are also guilty here.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23204950/bmw-subscription...

[2] https://www.kbb.com/car-news/mercedes-launches-rent-a-horsep...

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I agree with you. I simply have no words for how much this pisses me off.

I'm seriously considering importing my next car from Russia or India or some country where consumers aren't as easy to abuse and defraud as they are in the west. But getting it certified for the road might be difficult, and I'd basically be on my own regarding maintenance. I live in rural Germany with close to zero repair shops close by that are capable of servicing non-German cars. (Okay, maybe there's a Ford dealership here somewhere, but that's just about it).

Wasn't "consumer protection" something that governments were supposed to be doing? Where are they right now, as they're watching this shitshow?

The way it worked in the software industry was that the move from purchase-prices to subscription prices was a huge structural change that made it difficult for consumers to compare prices and lead to a drastic price increase.

Consider Toggl track, a time-tracking software that I like to use and that, at $9/month without any predatory subscription tactics, I consider very reasonably-priced. ...but at the same time, I can still recall a day when you'd pick up small software utilities like that from a Radio Shack. They came on floppy discs (later CDs) in cardboard boxes that would cost you maybe $20-$30. This was to own the software and you could use it for the rest of the hardware's lifetime if you didn't do any OS upgrades. (often they would even survive an OS upgrade or change of hardware). That was so much better value for money.

> I'm seriously considering importing my next car from Russia or India

I'm highly familiar with India. So, keep the following in mind:

(All of this is w.r.t European cars in India; situation is different for Indian, Japanese, Korean, and American car companies)

1. Cars manufactured in India (including Mercedes/BMW/VW/Skoda etc) are set up for right hand drive (steering wheel is on the right, and cars are driven on the left side of the road).

2. For high end brands you don't get as much configuration options as in Germany; limited choices with interior materials and colour. The flip side is, the time from booking a car to its delivery is relatively short, provided you buy a model that's relatively widely sold. ie., a Mercedes C200 shouldn't take too long to deliver. But the AMG models might take longer.

3. German cars are crazy expensive in India.

4. For most German brands, the parts are imported from Europe and assembled in their plants in India (this is called the "CKD - completely knocked down" route). Would be inefficient to then move that car back to Germany.

5. Higher end German cars (like, BMW M models, Mercedes AMG models etc) are directly imported into India from Europe. Direct imports have extremely high taxes. Again, would be inefficient to ship it back to Germany.

I wasn't contemplating a re-import of a car from a German manufacturer as sold in India back into Germany. I also wasn't thinking "luxury".

I was rather thinking of getting a Tata or Lada or whatever the locals drive in India or Russia or some country where manufacturers are still more or less forced to serve the needs of the less-well-off consumer.

It would have to be something of much lesser complexity than a German luxury car. There are still lots of car mechanics around whose shops are not under contract by any particular brand who are more than happy to fix just about any car for you. ...provided the car manufacturer hasn't gone out of their way to make that difficult for them to do. Which all the modern brands with any presence in the West actually have done.

For example, usually only a VW dealership will have proper VW diagnostic software to read out error codes. If I ask them to fix my Honda Civic, I'm shit out of luck. If the only dealerships close by are VW dealerships, as is the case in rural Germany, then I'm basically forced to buy/drive a VW.

Now, that would be a different story if I had a Lada Taiga and had it serviced by the guy around the corner who fixes cars in his shed on weekends and who only takes cash.

Re car manufacturers using remote "unlock" pricing, I will admit to being horrified when I first heard about it.

Unfortunately for my emotions, there is a strong argument to support this new pricing approach-- which might be BS in specific cases but which, from a macro perspective, may nonetheless have merit-- in that fundamentally, all it is, is a mechanism for further granularity of the age-old thing called price discrimination, which is generally viewed as good for both producers and consumers (not that there cannot be exceptions to either that view, or the circumstances in which that view is valid...)

> generally viewed as good for both producers and consumers

How so? All examples of price discrimination I can think of are basically forms of rent seeking where money is extracted without providing anything in return.

Price discrimination is basically a tax levvied by the rich-powerful-and-better-informed entities of the world over the rich-but-powerless-and-poorly-informed.

For example, people who gladly pay premia for organic/green/ethical products while accepting any and all claims about the product actually being organic/green/ethical at face value are, to me, rich-but-poorly-informed.

Private health insurance in Germany is another good example: The cost of the service they're providing is mostly driven by insanely expensive therapies, like cancer treatment or dialysis, that you may or may not ever need. The catalogue of such services that insurance needs to cover is prescribed by law with only very minor deviations permissible, so you'd expect that premia for different insurance products are in a very narrow range. Not so. One such permissible small deviation is coverage of single-bed rooms during hospital stays versus five-bed rooms. That's financially just small change. But the premia for single-bed often cost as much as twice (or even more) as the entry-level premia. The folk who pay them, to me, are simply poorly informed. They don't work through the math of getting the low premium while paying for the single-bed room out of pocket.

A third example: This one is more about situational power than it is about smarts. If there are multiple different modes of transport and railway companies competing to provide transport in a given country, market forces will lead to an equilibrium price for rail transport. This is the price after deduction of the discount you get from the rail card. A tourist however, can't hand in an application for a rail card at the station and wait for 2 weeks for the card to arrive in the mail. So they have to pay full price, without the discount for the railway card. That premium is basically a form of rent seeking, where the rail company extracts a higher price from the tourist, merely because they have the power to do so, and without providing anything of value in return. A plain-and-simple form of rent-seeking. Economically as destructive as can be.

If you think it is not good for producers and consumers, you are not disagreeing with me as much as with economic theory. Personally, I think there are many distortions in practice that can lead to exceptions, but that in the bigger picture of things, it nonetheless holds water.

I will not try to recreate the arguments to the theory but here is a basic one to start with from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price_discrimination.as...:

--- Wouldn’t Consumers Be Better Off If Everybody Paid the Same Price? --- In many cases, no. Different customer segments have different characteristics and different price points that they are willing to pay. If everything were priced at say the "average cost," people with lower price points could never afford it. Likewise, those with higher price points could hoard it. This is what is known as market segmentation. Economists have also identified market mechanisms whereby fixing static prices can lead to market inefficiencies from both the supply and demand sides.

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