Mercedes Reveals EQE and EQS 'Acceleration Increase' Subscription Pricing
caranddriver.com
caranddriver.com
I guess it is in part that there is a monthly subscription model that is being pushed, for faster acceleration, but also for seat warmers. And that irks me in the sense that it alters what it means to own a vehicle. It also leads me to think that they will try to crack down on aftermarket mods: If all that keeps your car slow is a chip, replace the chip (i know, easier said than done these days). Its also that it means maintaining a constant relationship with a company. Right now, I buy a car, I'm pretty much done with them, but this way its one more account that takes money out of my bank.
Because "your" car is betraying you and obeying a different master. Once you cross the bright line of "items should be loyal only to their owner", things get dystopian very quickly - subscription seat warmers, DVD players that won't let you skip commercials, TVs that embed ads and spy on you, printers that secretly embed tracking dots on your documents...
It all adds up, until you find yourself living in a cage, with little control over your environment. And trying to take back that control is not only technically difficult, but thanks to anti-circumvention legislation, often outright illegal.
The car companies seem intent on forcing them down our throats anyway, just like touchscreens.
I would avoid buying such a car. If i happen to own a car with such a feature, i would be highly motivated to hack it.
And why would they need to do it. Anyone who drives like that is already paying them more in servicing, brakes, tyres etc.
From what I've seen in the USA, it's not unusual for a 3 year old Mercedes to need $10k of dealer maintenance.
The first purpose of a car is transportation, the second purpose is service revenue.
I had two Mercedes and they cost way less to maintain than my Honda, and I’m not kidding, though could be lucky.
Same with 'FSD', which setting aside it's actual self-driving, I would be more willing to pay for that package for a few weeks / month when the family is doing a road trip and having it for highway use is handy.
I wouldn't pay up front for either of those feature, I just don't think they're worth the price, or would be used frequently enough to warrant the expense. I don't need FSD that often, and I don't need to blast off the line a second quicker every time I drive the car, but once in a while? Sure, if the price is right.
That trick only works from a standstill…
After that, experienced EV drivers tell me that using all that torque eats tires. One said he had to replace the factory tires after 20,000 miles, even with rotating them twice.
What makes this a hard sell for manufacturers: no badges on the outside saying this is an M class or performance or whatever. Maybe they have to add outside screens on the car to show the extra-cost options currently active.
If any automakers starts doing this (and Mercedes is one of them, see the heated seats options), they won't have my money.
I hope I'm not the only one who finds this strategy stupid, especially given the fact that you don't get a discount on the car base price thanks to these "options".
I find that quite surprising.
I've seem people replace the antennas with resistors so the device thinks it's still working, since Toyota routes part of the speakers through it, so disabling entirely would render some of the sound in your vehicle disabled too.
Many automakers already push OTA updates, and the holdouts who had been trying to preserve a dealership and service network by saying you had to take the car in are I believe mostly moving to OTA.
Literally hundreds of things made better about the car over the last 5 years, truly useful features that didn’t even exist when I bought it like Dashcam and Spotify, and even safety features, improved performance, and just countless little convenience features added over the years.
Updates for better maps, navigation, routing, faster charging, better AutoPilot, Summon, better hard braking performance, improved pedal feel for regen, better driver profile settings and memory, better SMS integration with iPhone, vastly expanded entertainment options, better iPhone app controls, and truly could go on and on. [1]
So here I have a 5 year old car with 50k miles with absolutely zero reason to consider trading it in for a new model, because it basically IS the new model.
IMO it’s a major advantage of owning a Tesla is getting to enjoy truly meaningful and useful software upgrades that consistently make the car better in basically every possibly way.
It’s just a different level of commitment to their customers than I think any other automaker delivers, versus the legacy “if you want new features you’ll have to buy a whole new car to get them” approach.
[1] - https://www.notateslaapp.com/software-updates/history/
From my perspective, everything that you are describing is software enabled and software has no place in my car. The idea behind eschewing over the air updates for your car isn’t that we like old software; it’s that we hate software and don’t want anything to do with it.
Put another way, if you look at all the features that I want in a car (robust safety cell, powerful propulsion, quiet, smooth ride, rare) none of them can be upgraded without physical modifications. And in fact, once those things are achieved, there is really very little reason to change anything.
In general the trend appears to be in favor of your style of consumption which is cool for you, but I for one am a little concerned that when I get a hundred or so thousand more miles on this 98 SL500 there’s going to be nothing out there I want to buy.
Auto makers have gotten away with basically walking away from their software once they “ship” a given model year, and then leaving their owners to deal with whatever issues are present. And the issues are certainly plentiful, and I don’t just mean in the infotainment system.
Cars are also now required in the US and EU to have a myriad of advanced safety systems which require complex software which often performs poorly. Emergency braking, lane departure warning, emergency lane keeping, drowsiness/attention monitoring, intelligent speed assist, etc. All this software will be constantly evolving as technology improves to better avoid false positives and false negatives, but most brands will only provide the best software for their newest model years and leave the existing fleet with whatever they were able to achieve at the time it shipped.
Then there are features like intelligent speed assist which alerts drivers when they are speeding, which requires up-to-date maps and speed limit recognition in order to maintain accuracy.
This is all before we get into further developments of more advanced driver assistance and drive automation that will eventually be achieved.
The reality is that driving kills hundreds of thousands of people and causes trillions of dollars in economic damages every year due to human error or human callousness, and software is the only way out of this bloodbath.
So despite a niche desire by some drivers to own “legacy hardware” the market through strict regulation will continue to incorporate highly advanced and complex software features into automobiles, and ultimately human driving will be a relic, along with the massive toll of lost human life that went along with it.
In the meantime, given that complex software stacks are a regulatory requirement for every new car today, it’s a massive advantage to have that software maintained and upgraded across the whole fleet instead of only releasing upgrades with each successive model year and leaving the existing fleet with sub-standard safety systems.
What could possibly be horrifying about the idea of technological advancement saving millions of lives and vastly improving quality of life all across the world?
And how else would you propose to stop the carnage? Or is the carnage somehow worth it to cater to Nostalgia for antiquated and dangerous modes of manually-operated high speed personal transport?
Yesterday I got a message from a bank that my account was inactive and might be considered abandoned by the bank. If that happened they would turn it over to the state and I would have to jump through hoops to get it back.
So I called them up and inquired: I’ve been using this account and it’s not inactive. What’s up?
A person in a faraway land, presumably working in the middle of the night authenticated me and then started clicking in their computer. They agreed that there was activity sufficient that the account was not abandoned. But then they found a “strange message” associated with some “strange activity” on the account.
I asked if we could freeze the account while we sorted it out. I am flabbergasted to report that they said no.
I went down to the branch to close my account. They were able to zero the account out and give me a cashiers check, but because necessary systems were down, they could not close my account. I had to return today, and now after two visits and a handful of phone calls, I am no longer concerned that my money will disappear.
Having worked in technology integration for some time, I could see echoes of bad software in every single one of the obstacles that I faced.
I was alive in 1985 and I had a bank account then. If I contacted my bank then for similar help, I would have received prompt, courteous service.
The difference between these two scenarios is that the one that happened yesterday and today was infested with software.
Now if you want to look forward to a future enabled by good software, you go ahead. Maybe that will help you create that future. I wish you luck. But right now, we live in an unending hell of bad (and badly integrated) software.
I reject your false dichotomy. Drive slower, build more robust crash cells, and invest in roads that don’t suck and public transport.
NHTSA says that improved safety technologies have saved over 600,000 lives between 1960 and 2012. Updates make the car safer for the driver, and safer for everyone they share the road with.
Updating the whole fleet’s safety software as the algorithms improve would save thousands of lives and that’s enough reason to make automakers keep updates flowing after the point of sale.
Of course it can and should be done without tracking or spying.
ADAS software is already required in all new cars sold in the US and EU.
And just this week for example Tesla released an update to its AEB (Automatic Emergency Braking) software to improve its performance.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/newer-cars-are-safer-cars
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-automatic-emergency-braking-...
Second, your claim it's a time bomb waiting to kill someone is unsubstantiated. They are not perfect technologies, but the data show they are safer than the average driver and therefore accurate to call them life-saving technology, even if they don't save every single life when they are active.
The data show: the more cars that have and use this technology, the less carnage and death we see on the roads.
disclaimer: I own a 2019 M3.
IIRC Tesla's acceleration boost (powerful propulsion) upgrade essentially keeps the front engine correctly-aligned at all times to make the most out of the usually-unused torque. AEB and TACC were upgraded multiple times over the years, becoming better and better and solving issues (smooth ride). As for quietness, MS and MX got active noise reduction through software upgrades. All of this was done using existing hardware, and I didn't even mention the constant data-driven tweaking of battery pre-conditioning to allow faster charges while still extending battery life (powerful propulsion/smooth ride), or the camera features (dashcam recording, blind-spot camera pop-up, ...). Some are amazing tweaks you didn't even know you wanted, but are a constant time-saver (blinkers auto-off). I'm pretty sure that also the other high-voltage components handling also got the data-driven treatment (better regulation of currents to extend component's lifetime, for instance).
These kind of software modifications were also seldom done when I brought my old ICE cars to the dealer for the regular checks - "remapping the engine parameters to better handle some cases" - but in reality I recall this happening at most once in the lifetime of the car.
I believe that new features can be developed using existing hardware in new, unforeseen ways. What I agree on is that this needs to be done in a secure and non-intrusive manner. Some UI reworks were definitely controversial at first, but Tesla has a good track record of listening and adapting to user requests at least. I cannot say the same for any other brand I've had a car from.
I'm kind of ok with the $90/mo price. If I want to spend the spring months driving around (yeah would that I have that option these days) & doing trips, like, sure, $180 for some appreciably snappier driving performance could be a fun & reasonable splurge. That said, I've almost never driven a car with >150 hp, only been driven around fast 5 times in my life, so like, I don't actually understand the value proposition of fast cars very much & this might all be nonsense, but there's some sense to me here, & I'm kind of ok with feeding the meter for some extra turbo sometimes. Buying the base unit & having free upgrades sadly makes some sense to me.
It's wild that I'm saying this. Part of me definitely looks at this new emerging trend with absolute horror. Intel has a like 8 dimensional matrix of pricing options you can unlock as either (depending on your hardware vendor) "activation" or "consumption" (usage based) "On Demand" server/Xeon chip services. The list of features: Software Guard Extensions/SGX (at 3 price points), Quick Assist Technology/QAT encryption/compression, Dynamic Load Balancer/DLB for telecomm, In Memory Analytics/IMA for data compression again, Data Streaming Accelerator(DSA) for some new direct-memory-access/DMA engine acceleration. Variety of boxes to subscribe to here.
Part of me gets it, don't pay for what you don't need, hopefully create some more accessible price points. But also, if you want your chips to win, I just feel like you should be getting the tech out so the world can play with it & figure out it's best uses, and gating a bunch of new features just means a regression from this Democratic software philosophy to authoritarianist & closed, where very few have all the decision making, get to learn & advance the thing/feature and that's that. https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/22/intel_reveals_paid_xe...
Also notably with Intel's new "On Demand" system, not a one of the things you can software enable is - to my knowledge - more clocks/turbo. Yet.
Also worth pointing out, we've been here before. Here's Intel doing it in 2010. Software updates that did unlock more cache and HyperThreading for consumer PCs. https://www.engadget.com/2010-09-18-intel-wants-to-charge-50... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5819750
On the other end of the spectrum, we are creating more general programmable matter that hopefully people are permitted to find creative use for, real soon. FPGAs were in total doledrums for a while going on where, but there's been a spate of improvements (particularly coming out of Lattice) and there's reason for some hope AMD+Xilinx CPU+FPGAs could legitimately create really fast software reconfigurable accelerators, with whatever the use case demands.