Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month
cnn.com
cnn.com
A farm truck or tractor makes a lot of sense in the middle of a farming community to do work. The same truck or tractor in an urban downtown will kill children and crowd out transit.
2. Remove parking minimums. https://www.strongtowns.org/parking
3. Allow mixed use in neighborhoods. Japan is really great at this. Allow families to turn garages into small bodegas. Allow small businesses to flourish by not forcing them into isolated strip malls surrounded by pedestrian hostile parking lots. https://www.archdaily.com/search/projects/categories/mixed-u...
4. Narrow roads and eliminate on-street parking to create additional pedestrian and cycle infrastructure.
And so on... There are hundreds of plans that are extremely well thought out and just need to be implemented.
Suburbs can support great public transit, and it would be cheaper than cars for everyone.
Suburbs cannot support the bad public transport options they get though. The lack of density makes it harder to design a great network (network is critical here!), you cannot make mistakes as there is no density to save you from mistakes.
While I agree... there is no way Americans will forgo cars. Americans love our rural and public and wild lands too much to not be able to simply visit at moment's notice.
Having lived in Europe, I understand how this works there. Europeans don't have the same relationship with nature that Americans often do. The ones that do usually have cars.
Cars trips in the US are, in their vast majority, short and between common places like grocery stores, gyms, schools, etc.
Look... I live in the inner city. Realistically, I walk everywhere most of the week. However, I keep a car so I can get to the mountains 50 miles away. That is the main reason I keep a car and my main usage of it (and to also visit family and friends who live more rurally).
When I go to the mountains in America I hear the constant drone of cars and generators...
Public transit and alternative forms of transportation such as bikes, are about
1. Reducing traffic, less people driving means less traffic for those that need to drive.
2. Improving safety within cities and suburbs, a car is far more dangerous than a bike or public transit
3. Reducing the cost of infrastructure maintenance, cars are heavy, especially EVs, a reduction in the number of cars on the road would lead to massive savings in the cost of maintaining our roads.
4. Removing the car burden, cars are a expensive depreciating asset, and for low-income folks they are a massive tax just to be able to travel to work. So folks who don't want to, or don't have the means to own a car, they should be able to travel without paying a huge time penalty.
5. Health benefits, less cars on the road means people who prefer to walk, bike can do so safely and gain some health benefits.
6. Cars are noisy, noise pollution is linked to bad health outcomes, less cars = less noise on public areas.
Just because we can't eliminate all cars doesn't mean we can't/shouldn't have great transit. Focus on make a system that is useful for people for the 90% of trips at less cost than the one car they are getting rid of to pay for it.
My point is that covering America with train tracks would cost $trillions. Yes, there was a time when we built something on that scale: The interstate highway system. But those days are long over. American politics is now far too gridlocked to build a public bathroom, much less a trillion-dollar public transit system. Even if it ended up saving money and the planet.
Yes building those trains would cost a lot. It shouldn't be trillions (that it will be is a problem we should fix!). Lets not be defeatist: lets demand better of our politicians. We have good ideas of where things are going wrong, but politicians see transit as a way to throw money at union labor and consultants (democrats); or a complete waste (the Republicans). Both sides need to do better.
>Or a train. Massive numbers of passengers.
>cars seem useful in low-density, very spread out regions.
Well, while I'm here already . . .
Urban trains can be counter-productive in unintended ways.
The electric "mass-transit" Metrorail in Houston runs at street-level on many streets that were originally designed for horse & carriage.
Taking up space that was previously available for freer movement of buses, but worse with the rail crossings which almost always require more passengers in cars to idle much longer while waiting than there are passengers on the trains at the time.
Electric buses would have been much better and less wasteful of finite resources.
The light rail was originally intended for ambitious people who could not afford cars to have a quick commute to downtown jobs, reach Texas Medical Center & Astrodome area to the south, and higher education to the north.
"Massive" numbers of passengers outside of rush hours mainly only occur during Rodeo time or other special events where massive numbers of visitors come from out-of-town.
The rest of the time passengers are quite sparse, somewhat divided between workers & students versus those carless and/or on the streets whose ambitions do not include either. Some of these passengers can be quite predatory on ordinary citizens, and this gives them more efficient ways to travel or gather in places where prospective victims can more likely be found at different times, and a quick way to escape after a crime has been committed:
https://abc13.com/metrorail-violence-light-rail-harris-count... >6th violent incident on or near METRORail in 2 months
I still ride it weekly but never would bring my laptop or even cellphone outside of rush hours since there are always at least one or two questionable characters and that's the only time they are usually well outnumbered by ordinary riders.
But the collisions are quite common and these could have been more amenable to better engineering planning:
3 MAY 2023 "Video of the crash". Notice how the bystander throws up his hands knowingly right after the 1 minute mark:
https://abc13.com/houston-news-ambulance-turns-in-front-of-m... >On Tuesday, METRO said the investigation is over, and no one is being cited for the crash that resulted in multiple people being hurt. ABC13 also called HFD on Tuesday to ask, specifically, if the ambulance driver is still operating ambulances. But they are still citing an open investigation, an investigation we know is closed.
For both of these parties this time liability is limited, same range as for buses:
>Why METRO bus crash victim has to pay up - despite being innocent https://abc13.com/metro-bus-crash-houston-tort-claims-act/62... >Even if everything goes his way, Leger will still be out hundreds of thousands of dollars because he was hit by a bus. >That's because METRO's buses and the rail is protected by the Texas Tort Claims Act. >It caps their expenses regardless of if the victim dies or is severely maimed at $100,000 per person or $300,000 total. >"If a negligent METRO bus driver runs a red light and hits a van that has 14 children from a daycare and kills them, the most that METRO would ever be responsible for is $300,000," said Matt Willis, Leger's attorney.
If the full monetary damages of every incident were to have been recoverable, Metrorail might have been bankrupt long ago. But they still have money to burn going forward:
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Met... >Unfortunately, we're already all too familiar with low ridership on light rail. The $1.4 billion Green and Purple lines have dismally low patronage.
A while ago there was an article posted on HN about an old Japanese rail line that still maintained an end-of-the line terminal which was now only used by one passenger. This seemed to be a benevolent gesture. I was thinking how much more benevolent could it be in Houston where they built new rail lines for almost nobody to use very much?
>So how should Metro redeploy that $2.45 billion light rail budget instead?
Sometimes (or even with some currencies) there can be more environmental emissions earning the money to begin with compared to spending it wisely later. Depends on the scale and how wisely:
>For future planning purposes and MetroNext, it really does not matter if autonomous vehicles become available in 5 years or decades in the future. Anything built in the MetroNext plan can be expected to be in service to the year 2100 and beyond. MetroNext needs to be ready for autonomous transit, if and when it comes. The plan also needs to maximize mobility benefits of transit investments if autonomous transit is slow to develop or has a minimal impact. Practically, that means concrete guideways with rubber-tired vehicles than can evolve as the technology does.
IIRC rubber tires are a more modern & versatile technology than rail.
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/southcentral/2017/12/2... >Some drivers said Metro should turn its efforts internally instead of policing drivers. >“Why don’t they ticket their own drivers for blocking intersections or not blowing the horn?” said Salvadore Martin, who drives downtown daily. >Other drivers said Houston should have anticipated safety problems with a street-level rail system from the beginning.
Engineers are usually aware of things like this more so than bureaucrats, but you can't fix stupid either way.
>“This is why you build a subway,” said Georgine McDonald, another driver in the area.
Not in downtown Houston, 20,000 leagues under the bayou floodwaters ring any bells?
Naturally Houston has the most light rail collisions under a number of terms, averaging about 90 per year in recent times:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/lig...
https://abc13.com/metro-traffic-accidents-pedestrians-killed...
>"Everyday people go in front of that train thinking they can beat it," >Those near misses happen all the time. >If anyone should know better, it's Jim Robinson, the chairman of METRO's public safety committee. >"I was thinking about something else and almost stepped off in front of a train," Robinson said. "It got my attention when he blew his whistle." >"There's still work to do," Robinson said.
As for flooding and subways. The Dutch are literally 6 feet below sea level and seem to manage just fine.
Or a train. Massive numbers of passengers.
I've never enjoyed public transit, here or in Europe. It's a pain in the ass to some degree, no matter how good it is. An individual car is the epitome of freedom, so you would need to convince me (and others who like our cars) why we should swap.
You mean like roads?
What California light rail project are you thinking of?
What do we get for it? Being stuck on the 91 choking on the exhaust.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/2/28/odot-proposes-...
Cities aren't bankrupted by roads, roads are what give cities lifelines. Trains and buses are an incredibly poor substitute in all but the densest of regions.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/1/26/roads-and-debt
> Trains and buses are an incredibly poor substitute in all but the densest of regions.
This is patently wrong. Buses, trams and trains are the most efficient, safe and affordable forms of transportation known to man. They are superior on every metric I can think of. Combined with last mile micro-mobility and you just can't build a better transportation system.
Cars take up more space, kill more people, destroy more land, kill wildlife, and pollute the air. Worse, they are slower due to traffic.
Nailed it. The car is the symbol of liberty and freedom, and not without reason. People who present public transit as an alternative to cars confound me. I will choose my own car over any kind of public transit every day. I even try to avoid flights if I can drive to my destination in ~12 hours. I can take a lot of luggage, stop and relax at my leisure, have good food, not submit to security checks. Cars are literally better in every single way to train/bus/tram etc.
If a car is the only form of transportation, your freedom is contingent. Think of what a privilege driving is. Even better, great public transportation makes driving much more pleasurable.
One of these days, you should try traversing 8 blocks in a wheelchair and see how convenient a bus stop feels! lol
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/26/1064764/diversit...
https://driversedguru.com/drivers-ed-training-exercises/stag...
In all my decades of driving I have never seen anyone do this other than myself. People are so committed to passing they literally run people off the road while going head on with tractor trailers and family cars. I've thought I was going to see people die more than once. It's insane how ignorant and self centered people get behind the wheel.
Used car buys will look at this as the without model. Maybe this will work out as a lot of used car buyers don't care about speeds they won't go anyway (though they should ask if this was ever on as that does put more wear and tear on a car). I don't think this will work out for things like heated seats: the buyer will want a car with heated seats and one with a subscription for heated seats is worth less money to price sensitive buyers.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/flyout/flyfeature...
A mechanical engineer can lose their license if their work results in deaths.
A software engineer can't lose their license because they don't have one.
Perhaps a professional license may improve software development and thus better software in consumer products like cars where bad software design can result in deaths.
BioE doesn't have anything like that yet either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomedical_engineering#Trainin...
Looks like while there is not a particular license for BioE they can be licensed under other disciplines.
In very rare cases where a flaw is found, it is updated at dealerships via recall.
Easy quick and frequent updates done modern silicon valley style are dangerous and absurd for something as safety critical as a vehicle. Things are practically guaranteed to intermittently break while you own the vehicle, because there is no way the extensive factory testing is repeated for each minor update.
Most vehicle ECUs are traditionally made with very simple C or assembly software that simply maps inputs to outputs via a lookup table... and the same basic ECU firmware is used for decades and shared by numerous car manufacturers (e.g. almost all cars use BOSCH fuel injection ECUs). If they have a complex algorithm or model to generate these tables, that code never goes on the ECU itself, to minimize the complexity and make it reliable and predictable.
So the car manufacturer doesn't even develop any code, they only produce a table of numbers for flashing into the ECU, eliminating the possibility of algorithm errors. Once you physically test in diverse conditions that hit every possible value in the lookup table, there is very little room for an unexpected problem to pop up later on. Recalls updating the ECU tables have been mostly to reduce emissions and improve performance, but the vehicle still works fine under all conditions without it.
One thing I find really fascinating, is that old fashioned diesel engines had a mechanical injector pump, which was basically a sort of simple mechanical computer that in some sense works the same as described above. All vehicles pretty much used the same pump, but each had different "lookup tables" physically machined into a steel block as a curved ramp.
I like the philosophy explained in this article, that mentions Dieter Rams thoughts on the Porsche 911 design:
https://www.classicdriver.com/en/article/design-furniture/mi...
I don't buy the idea that this philosophy can't be applied to make safe and modern electric vehicles.
Still, I don't want to have subscriptions for basic auto features like heated seats and how fast the car can go. I don't even like that Tesla makes you pay for access to the full battery, but at least that is a one-time purchase.
Yes, but that doesn't require I give up freedom or control. The number of years a vendor provides upgrades adds value to the product (i.e. long term commitment or not). The cost of a car is so ridiculous any more that expecting a lifetime of software updates is probably a rational demand from a consumer.
> but a lot if for safety reasons
Yes, so? I wrote software for vascular ultrasound devices in the 80s. Those could do really bad things to humans. Upgrades were provided for free and accounted for in the price of the product because... SAFETY IS NOT OPTIONAL and should never be relegated to a subscription where if you stop paying YOU ARE UNSAFE.
The Mercedes HP subscription is not safety related, but it is true that at some point stopping updates will have some affects on safety, but don't forget that "legacy" cars locked you with its initial hardware and software, many times only later models upgraded safety feature based on experience.
I'm sure 80s and early 90s era vascular ultrasound devices are long obsolete, out of service and not supported. The point is cars are VERY expensive these day. It is ridiculous that a product that costs $35,000 has a $30/mo subscription for updates or features. This is majoring in the minors.
If this can’t happen then I’m cycling or taking the bus.
The dealer had the software and would update it for free (typically part of a recall) on my 2004 bmw, you can get this software and tune for only premium fuel (less safety)
The "you will own nothing" advocates will continue to keep pushing for stuff like this.
Who are these "advocates"?
>You will own nothing and you will be happy.
Alternatively it could have a darker interpretation: you will be a slave and you will be happy, because that's all you're going to get.
I suppose it depends if you look at the WEF as a benevolent institution looking to benefit humanity or very rich people looking to solidify their own position at any cost.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-wef-idUSKBN2AP2...
It seems like it is, but read it closely. Reuters here is not debunking the phrase was said by a WEF politician, they are debunking that is is a goal of Agenda 30.
Nobody made that claim in the first place.
The article I linked provides context and paints a different picture; not sure why you consider that to be unrelated.
Given that happiness is often a cultural construct (wildly different things make people happy dependent on the cultural context), and that many WEF members are cultural influencers the critics response is that the current people will not really be happy, but the WEF will arrange the culture so that future people are. Any outside group conspiring to change your culture is a normal cause for alarm.
Literally every time I have seen the quote brought up in dissenters' milieus, it included the "and you will be happy" part.
Unsurprisingly, because the implicit paternalism makes it almost as repellent as the first part.
Really? No remote access, security notifications, navigation facilities? No watching TV while charging? No OTA updates that obviate the need to take it to the dealership for routine fixes? No open source location analytic API?
I mean, I'm sure there's some bad stuff that happens too. But this is very much throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I won't tell you what you, personally, want in a vehicle. But the market as a whole absolutely wants their cars on the internet.
The only semi-valid reason for connectivity here is navigation, but even then I'm already paying for a connection for my phone so I'll use that instead. I don't even want a big screen on the dashboard anyway, which means having navigation software built-in would be a worse experience than using what I already have.
Everything else can be solved using your phone/tablet.
And yes, it undoubtedly would be a nicer experience to have navigation done entirely on the in-car display. But IMO in-car displays and interfaces are universally terrible.
I've never owned a car that does any of these. I'm very happy with my car. I do not see the benefits of them outweighing the downsides.
6-speed manual, adjustable seats, a GPS/nav screen and radio/aux, and a damn cupholder is all anyone needs from a car. Everything else is just a bunch of accessorial crap that usually detracts from the form factor of a functional car.
Of course my only car with nav is 11 years old, maybe there are other features of more modern systems worth having. I doubt it, but I have to allow for the possibility. The real key here is the car is 11 years old - if you only buy new cars you may fail to realize how bad features such as nav age. When my car was new 3g cell networks were the fast service (4g existed but it was in the early roll out phase), and thus what I would expect my car to have: now 3g is gone - so even if my car had a NAV subscription it couldn't get OTA updates.
I'm not saying that these are inherently bad. Hell, I'd enjoy having programmable 2-driver power-adjustment settings for the driver seat. That, dual zone climate control, and google maps built into the nav are basically the only luxury features I think really add value to a car. But I'm not dying without them. Meanwhile, my wife wants all that, android auto, ventilated seats, a moonroof, the side-view mirror blind spot assistance things, automatic cruise control, an auto-dimming rearview mirror, automatic lights/brights, being able to start the car remotely, etc.
I can't even find anyone who will sell me one with those features disabled. My only option is just to buy cars from before those features existed, and it gets harder every year.
I'm not telling you what to desire in a vehicle. I'm just saying that reactionary ludditism makes for poor market analysis. People want connected cars, period. I don't make the rules.
Engine (drivetrain really) power, torque, efficiency, durability and reliabilty are core aspects of a vehicle. Being able to accelerate (and brake) when needed is important. Watching a YouTube vehicle in traffic is not. Carmakers should be focused on improving drivetrains, handling (chassis, suspension, brakes, etc.), safety in collisions (including pedestrians/cyclists). Not on introducing a bunch of superfluous luxuries that only serve to drive up the cost of a car (and make people worse, more distracted, more selfish drivers).
Edit: It's not ludditism to oppose needless 'improvements' that increase the complexity, cost, supply chain requirements, weight, and fragility of a vehicle. It's utilitarian.
Well then they should learn how to fucking navigate. Learn where North is and go from there.
This measurably improves fuel economy. Not sure why it's grouped with the others.
This study says 3% - 6%. [0]
The fact that inefficient vehicles exist doesn't seem like a reason to make more efficient ones even more efficient.
[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S111001682...
The baby is dead and should be disposed of.
However, I REQUIRE an air gap between the Internet and any electronics that are involved in piloting the metal box that is currently transporting my squishy flesh at 130 km/h.
So no, no self-driving Tesla for me.
(As an aside, what kind of person gets excited over "open source location analytic API[s]"? Do you actively enjoy being tracked by your corporate overlords?)
Or just don't put so much software in it that you need security updates for remote access in the first place, how about that?
> navigation facilities? No watching TV while charging?
Why would I pay to have the same features as my phone/tablet/laptop but with the added disadvantage of not having access outside the car?
They're talking about being able to get notifications about the security of your car (e.g you left the trunk open, someone is opening the door etc). I'm guess you don't have a modern car, but having a security system for your car is super useful, especially if you live in left-leaning crime-friendly place like SF.
> navigation facilities? No watching TV while charging?
> Why would I pay to have the same features as my phone/tablet/laptop but with the added disadvantage of not having access outside the car?
Because you can access it on a 15-30" screen rather than a 6" phone screen
Displayport over usb-c would also solve this problem.
What would that be useful for? If I am away from my car, I absolutely don't need to "access" it. It is not a home server or something like that.
> security notifications
What are those? Notify me that my car is being broken into? Maybe it is good-to-have, but far from crucial.
> navigation facilities
No thanks, I have a phone for that. I can connect it to my car's screen if needed.
> No watching TV while charging?
No, it just takes a couple of minutes to fill up. You should try one of these new-fangled internal combustion engine cars. They are amazing!
> No OTA updates that obviate the need to take it to the dealership for routine fixes?
What routine fixes? My car has never needed a software bugfix in the decade I have owned it.
> No open source location analytic API?
Huh??! Is this a satirical post I've fallen bait to?
Umm, no.
Allow me to correct this misprint.
Unless you pay an extra $60 monthly your already-expensive vehicle will not give the full outstanding performance that your particular hardware was engineered to do.
TBF - this depends how well they streamlined their manufacturing process. As yield goes up; getting a perfectly stable 3ghz chip binned as a 2ghz before a flash lock becomes increasingly common. It became common to hunt for specific chips for this reason back when I actually had time to pay attention to it.
But even that unique case is very different from literally blocking features in a chip for extra money per month (you couldn't pay Intel to up-bin an i5 to an i7, except for the 1 or 2 times they actually tried that)
So it's really matured in the same direction only further.
The most effective & consistent mass-production processes do not always produce components as identical as would be ideal, and not all equal in ultimate performance capability, especially in the most demanding applications.
This can be expected to be more problematic when production is first initiated, whether there are bugs to be worked out, or optimizations have yet to be accomplished.
With resistors the percent deviation from the target ohm value is a simple tolerance rating.
Not everyone needs resistors within 1 percent of their labeled value, but those that do can not settle for anything less.
When initial production results in a maximum deviation of 20%, during QC/QA each component (or batch) can be measured and binned into the 1%, 5%, 10% and 20% tolerance ratings.
And most importantly priced accordingly.
Interestingly, if the binning is most comprehensive, then the consumer of the 20% parts never gets a component closer than 10% of the nominal value.
Vacuum tubes are not quite so simple as resistors, but it was well-established that the military would gladly overpay for the very top-performing tubes meeting the tightest tolerances.
In earlier decades military tubes were often physically enhanced and produced separately from the lesser consumer versions.
By the 1950's things were very mature in this respect.
And it can be a lot less costly to manufacture everything the same.
So binning it was, to select the closest conformers, which were then labeled with military part numbers destined for a supply chain where price is not as significant as it is for consumers.
The remaining tubes then were marked with everyday consumer part numbers.
This really became prominent for dual-use items like radio tubes.
Once the manufacturing process was fully optimized and every tube met the most stringent specifications, the cost to make each tube can decline dramatically.
At the same time, freshly made tubes were no longer individually labeled, they then all went into one bin.
So the most overspending customers could be supplied the same parts at higher prices than everyone else from that point without anyone knowing the difference.
Unless the customer really checked the performance independently in great detail.
Depending on the customer ordering the parts, they would be labeled accordingly right before shipping, sometimes with a little more QA and/or written guarantee but not any additional costly manufacturing QC which might have been necessary at the begining of production. They could then better meet fluctuating demand between premium payers versus consumer usage from the same manufacturing line and a single ultimate bin. And with a different part number to inhibit direct substitution even after identical performance could be recognized in some cases.
So this was well underway before solid-state semiconductors became a commodity.
As the processes improve it ended up with price-sensitive consumers who figured out when the lesser-priced CPU's had become as high-performance as the premium-labeled "alternative".
With the complexity of modern CPU's it was basically trivial to circumvent this consumer effort with the last-minute fusing & labeling approach seen today.
We've come such a long way it's not like the 1950's at all.
Lots fewer consumers expect to get their money's worth, and some vendors are only looking for these type customers any more.
Eventually all they make is i7's and if you don't want to pay the price, they further customize the component to be especially crummy, just for you.
And then there are plenty of people who will happily download and load a custom bios onto their $2k GPU that they found on some or other foreign-language forum without even the slightest clue as to how it works or what the possible consequences might be.
This will now also start being a thing with non-technical people and their cars.
What I don't understand is what is different between the headline saying that you can pay $60 for your car to go faster (true) and parent poster saying "pay an extra $60 monthly your already-expensive vehicle will not give the full outstanding performance that your particular hardware was engineered to do"?
Those two statements seem to say the same thing? What am I missing?
So it's really about who is saying what. Mercedes is trying to make customers think in their head that this is a value-added bonus that's not there by default, but it IS there by default, and it's locked behind a paywall. Rewriting the statement in OP's voice helps the customer recognize the scam that is taking place. In my opinion, at least.
Paying doesn't make the machine perform better than it already could; Not paying makes the on-board software limit the machine to perform worse than what it's actually capable of.
Perhaps you are more comfortable with this approach than others, and are part of the tartget market Mercedes may be fishing for, which is just fine.
You straightforwardly don't seem deceived at all here either way.
OTOH I would estimate the majority of the target market is expected to be much more responsive to their marketing stance than my also-realistic interpretation.
BTW, congratulations on your coronation today, glad you took the time to comment with all the festivities surrounding the event.
Companies have been doing this for awhile. Whats new is the subscription charge. Tesla has performance mode for $2k that you can buy and install over the air.
"Chipping" an EV is going to be much harder than it was with ICE cars.
This is also about ICEs having a legacy of repairability which makes modifications easier. Corporations being what they are, EVs are specifically made to be impossible to repair in independent shops.
>"Customers might see that as “a bit of a cheat,”
Because it is a cheat.
There is exactly zero chance this doesn't get bypassed and unlocked for free with the quickness. Better still though, just don't buy stuff from people willing nickel and dime you like that.
Pay real money for real things that you actually own. You will be happier this way.
That's a big claim. There are comparable third-party unlocks to get the performance upgrade for a Tesla, but nobody is doing it for free. They still want about half what Tesla charges. The difference being that Tesla will still warranty the car if you buy it from them.
The reason I think it will happen fairly quickly in cases like this is that hackers also tend to be more "challenge accepted" as culture whenever the offending restrictive software is particularly obviously stupid or egregious.
- Your car will be a package of subscriptions. Want to hear radio? You can add a subscription. They probably will even provide up-sells like a dating service. Subscribe here and we will tell hot singles available in the area where you just parked.
- Your bicycle probably will become a subscription..
"Your bicycle subscription has expired" - https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/136xaqg/your_bicycle_subscription_has_expired/So no, I will ride a bicycle or horse or walk before I pay a monthly fee for a vehicle I purchased. It is like M/S with its 365 push pushing people to Linux/BSD or Apple with the fees they are hoping to tack on for Windows use.
Guess what: My Tesla is fast enough. I don't feel any need to pay more money to make it go faster.
(I'm not going to whine about rent-seeking or how I own it and I should be able to do what I want with it. Instead, I'm going to point out that:)
Market forces will always push costs down and performance up. If a car company decides to artificially cripple their car so that you feel forced to pay extra; another car company is going to see that as a golden opportunity to undercut. Market forces will make sure that cars are "fast enough" at base price, because only timid drivers want an artificially slow car.
(And, yes, my Tesla does have an option to make the car artificially slow.)
Or to join forces in a cartel.
This was the reasoning behind the Phoebus Cartel[0], although in the business of incandescent lamps not car manufacturing. Osram, Philips, Tungsram, Associated Electrical Industries, ELIN, Compagnie des Lampes, International General Electric, and the GE Overseas Group were part of this organization to reduce the longevity of lamps to increase sales. It is a fascinating story :(
Do you have a source of this, news to me
But yes, I agree.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20211111-00/?p=10...
In my opinion such behaviour should be treated as a direct consumer rights' violation, under accusation of malicious intentional degradation of product sold to customer. When hardware (engine/cpu) is created it has its by-design limits and there is no possibility to increase those limits by software, i.e. this is not increasing, but decreasing the capabilities to extort additional premium
Not a subscription that lives on for the duration of the device.
If you don't see it this way, put your money where your mouth is, come up with a way to disconnect from the car maker. (Please, no complaints about how the communication is for my own good!)
I also spent years designing and building cars (vans) that quadriplegics could drive and lots of those were for guys who crashed, or got ran into by cars/motorcycle, at high speeds.
Personally, I think if anyone crashes a car that they were paying a fee to a car company to make their car go that fast that car company should be held accountable and libel for any and all damages and deaths that occur from that.
I'm sure others would disagree, but I don't care. Odds are they've never spent any time at all working with those who were paralyzed because some dumbass smashed into them at high speeds.
But the speed is good. Speed means people get to do more of what they like and live in places that are better for their health.
Weight and large dimensions however, are horrendously bad for safety and efficiency and additionally, useless. The overwhelming majority of cars outside of professional use don't need to be bigger than a Lancia Delta. Nobody who isn't a farmer with a specific license needs a pickup truck. And even then, people who need to move stuff around drive vans, not pickups. Literally nobody should drive an SUV in any context.
It's easy to demonize "irresponsible" drivers, but the fact is that everyday Joes hurt and kill people with their cars all the time. My good friend's son was killed by a hit-and-run and even though the driver was arrested and went to trial, a jury let him off of all major charges. We imagine that the people who kill others with their cars are always driving like asshats, but this guy was just driving like other regular people do: he was "speeding," but only 35 in a 25, and he had "been drinking" but only a beer.
We have to recognize that regular people doing regular driving are very deadly behind the wheel. Because otherwise, society embarks on this wild goose chase of trying to stop "the bad guys" rather than making data-driven decisions on how to reduce traffic fatalities.
So no, I don't agree with you. I think your line of thinking mirrors the likes of "satanic panic." It's an emotional argument used to point blame at a specific "bad" group, rather looking at the data and realizing that everyone bears responsibility. There are plenty of dads in Camrys out there running red lights, looking at their phones, and driving too damn fast.
Note, I don't have personal experience with a Civic or driving at such speed. My Prius starts losing traction at 95mph. :(
And this subject is not about someone doing 20mph and banging into someone because they were looking at their phone. It's about selling tech that will let you go 160mph and crash into someone.
The best way to reduce the road toll is to get humans off the road. Autonomous vehicles are already safer drivers, but people don’t feel comfortable because the fewer mistakes they do make aren’t mistakes humans would make. Once these issues are ironed out we need to rapidly legislate human drivers off the roads.
The vast, vast majority of EVs sold today are not forcing subscriptions of any kind on their customers. A couple minor carmakers are trying a new business model.
It's funny that you mention GM, because guess what GM wants to do with EVs starting next model year?
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a43488135/gm-apple-carplay...
(Last line of the article if you want to jump to the spoiler.)
In reality the CO2-adjusted eMPG of most EVs purchased today won’t outpace the Prius for the expected life of the car.
https://www.dacia.de/modelle/spring.html
It's actually $25k before incentives. One doctor in my clinic drives this. Fun little car for daily commutes. Range and power are uninspiring though.
Selling a book/media at a lower price in with a poorer populace?
A national park charging difference prices based on the visitor’s nationality (by the passport they have)?
Haggling in a market in a stereotypically poor country where different buyers get different prices based on their negotiations? A big company sales representative selling software licenses at difference prices to different clients?
If one company owns all the grocery outlets in a region, they can do this, so that is frowned on by governments.
I can't speak to your other examples, they don't seem to apply directly.
I drove a stock BMW 3-series, and did not need or want to pay for the added performance of an M-series for day to day driving. However, if I could upgrade to M-series performance for $60 for a track day, I would have jumped at the opportunity.
This is admittedly not a common use case, but there is definitely a niche market for this kind of thing.
I once took a first place trophy in SCCA autox because my mother's 99 Nissan Maxima sedan is handicapped compared to a Subaru WRX.
There are whole series developed around cheap, fast enough cars, s2000, Miata, RX-7 (non turbo), bmw e46. I always find it odd when people take Corvette and other super cars to these events, where they can't win.
I'm willing to bet that if the EU forces Car manufacturers to stop making ICE cars, China, South Korea, Japan will become the biggest Car makers in the world.
The removal of physical buttons now suddenly makes sense.
eat arbys.
Plastic timing chain guides, FFS.
If purposefully building engines that grenade themselves at 80k miles wasn't enough, then it's hard to imagine what would be.
Tesla spearheaded (1) removing Carplay/Android Auto and charging monthly for maps/traffic/connectivity, (2) hiding features behind paid software upgrades, (3) hiding performance improvements behind monthly subscriptions, (4) providing charging for a monthly fee. Everyone cheered them on as revolutionary, and it is too late to complain now. Of course other manufacturers are going to copy them.
1: tesla never supported carplay, although it is anti-user at this point. And the monthly sub for this is traffic data (which does cost n > 0 to Tesla) and access to cellular streaming, which also costs then per GB to AT&T.
2: FSD Beta? this costs tons of engineering hours. I made a case for heated seats in SR+ vehicles being gated behind a $300 one-time purchase here[0]
3: performance improvements were the result of continued stress and stability testing of the motors, and it resulted in a one-time acceleration boost[1], not a subscription
4: vehicle charging for a monthly fee? They have a subscription for non-EVs to charge that grants you access to discounted rates, but this isn't a thing otherwise.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35820345
1: https://www.notateslaapp.com/tesla-reference/1040/tesla-acce...
Charge subscriptions where there is a real recurring cost to provide the feature or service, like say a remote assistance service that needs a SIM card plan.
It’s not even just a bad deal for the owner, such deadweight has real environmental and safety consequences for everyone.
Apparently, the irony is totally lost on you.
Because they told us eliminating the middleman would lead to lower prices. Then they eliminated all the middlemen and started charging more. The fact you're inured to it doesn't make it good.
That just feels "icky" to me.
With Netflix, they arguably have higher costs associated with supporting super-HD feeds or more devices or whatever else.
My use of "fast mode" in a car has no such recurring cost.
I have no objection to paying for fast mode once, as I would for a V8 model over a V6 model or whatever other upgrade I might want.
For internet-based services like Netflix (or Spotify or Youtube or whomever), more stuff (streams, bitrate, resolution, etc) has higher costs for them: bandwidth, storage, licensing. They don't provide a physical good necessarily, but that doesn't mean there's zero cost to providing a higher-grade experience to their customers. (LTT has a whole video about the cost of serving 4k and 60fps video from their independent video platform that's a pretty good primer on this space, IMhO.)
In the car scenario, the cost is already sunk: the hardware is in the car, the capability to go-fast is already there and it costs nothing further to the manufacturer to allow the customer to use it. Putting a cost on it is the literal definition of rent-seeking: they're not creating anything new, which might justify the cost, they're just charging you to access a thing that already exists.
Especially since it's an ongoing cost for a thing you already own. Imagine if this extended to every other product: You buy an ipad with 1tb of storage in hardware, but you have to pay Apple $15/month to use it all. You buy a 4k monitor, but you have to pay Dell $5/month to use it at resolutions above 1080p. This doesn't make sense, and it's plain corporate greed. Mapping physical goods into the "As a service" world is absolutely nuts to me.
It's worth noting that passenger car power ratings have always been "peak" ratings ever since they stopped using the same engines in cars and trucks. 500HP is around what a semitruck engine is rated at, but the difference is that the latter can maintain that power output for more than a few seconds, even continuously, and the resulting differences in construction are massive. Look at aircraft piston engines for an even more extreme example.
A high tax on connectivity for certain classes of goods could make this less appealing. Add in the requirements for privacy and keeping records that are as stringent as HIPAA, and that could change the calculations of risk and benefit for such rent seeking.
[1]: https://www.dw.com/en/us-reaches-agreement-to-end-european-d... [2]: https://www.politico.eu/article/washington-big-tech-tax-talk...
If I own something, nobody else should have the right to disable features of it remotely unless I pay them indefinitely.
If I've bought a car with an engine in it of some specific number of HP, it shouldn't be up to anyone else to tell me I can't actually use all the HP because I'm not paying them forever. That's some real mafia-type of arrangement.
Why can cars go as fast as they do to begin with? how many people die because some foolish teenage boy with more testosterone than brains (I've been there) was hurtling down the highway at 100mph+?
Anyone know how to succinctly explain why it’s so bad?
But in those scenarios, there is extra cost incurred by the company when you choose to upgrade.
In this scenario, when you upgrade there's no cost to the car manufacturer, so it feels wrong. In the most generous view, there will be slightly more wear and tear on the car at higher speeds and that they need to charge extra to cover the warranty on faster cars. In a more realistic view, it's a cash grab not only in terms of $720/y per customer, but also making it easier to up-sell future over-the-air subscriptions or purchases with your CC already on file.
Please report to a re-education facility, or watch some news.
https://www.xda-developers.com/mercedes
I guess there won't be a need as I hope people won't touch a Mercedes while crap like this exists.
I'll keep rolling in my 69.
The phrase "software patch" implies updating the code. I'd be really surprised if this sort of change required a code push. More likely the code is already there, and the "patch" is a data file changing some constant.
I hope I'm joking....
What a funny statement. "Assuming normal driving" means not using the extra power you would be paying for.
Needless to say the PC enthusiasts told Intel to get borked.
To be clear, because every time this comes up some dickfucks come in here and start making excuses about how it's better to rent in some cases and that this is just amortizing the whole payment, and there are some people who want this: No.
This is a fucking terrible deal even just using mercedes numbers. It takes a whopping 30 months (2.5 years) for the monthly payment to exceed the upfront cost. The average length of new car ownership in the US is between 8 and 11 years (varies by source and accounting methods).
You will be charged fucking $6000 dollars for a item that is already present in your car, you just don't have the damn key.
RENT FUCKING SEEKING.
Even on cars that cost 100k, Mercedes just gets to pocket an extra 5% of the sale price here at literally no cost or effort.
Piss on these car manufacturers.
If it's not rent seeking, it's drip pricing, it's added-on sales tax, it's $0.99 instead of $1[0], it's the Ultra Digital Deluxe Collector's Edition. I would always advocate: don't give them your business.
I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here. I know it's a lot easier said than done to avoid such ploys. Still, that is the strongest personal option. Avoid them like the plague and tell your friends and family why. If a business' current practices seem better than you remember, hold on to the memory; make them work to prove any marketed change of heart. (It may be hazardous to my health to hold my breath waiting for the $0.99 shit to stop.)
[0] There was a card shop (games shop, comic book store, that sort of thing) I went to as a kid. They priced stuff like $5 and it was actually $5 when I went to pay. 12-year-old me "didn't even know that was legal".
Everyone seems to love this, or at least, they didn't stop flying. So why would any rational company not try to use this business model? Your AAA game gets to be $59.99 + $0.99 download, and your competitor's game is $60.00. Sort by price ascending makes you the top result, but you actually get $0.99 more money with each copy sold.
You are right that legislation is the only answer to curb this abuse. Consumers fall for it hook/line/sinker. Companies can't resist free money.
You can’t really fly and not take luggage with you, for example.
> Everyone seems to love this, or at least, they didn't stop flying.
Nobody "loves" it. They just have to put up with it because even for people who know what they're doing with flight searches, the only way to dig into all that dark pattern shit is to have fifty browser tabs open comparing the fine details of different flights.
If it was possible to, say, compare all those up-charges up front using flight search tools, I'm sure you'd see a lot more people choosing the slightly more expensive tickets.
Which is also why the hotel where people stay when they're visiting friends has free wifi, and the hotel next to the convention center does not.
To some extent, this is quite rational. You're in pain for like 2 hours because the seat pitch is now 4 inches. But then you get off the flight and never think about it again. The fact that flights include things that people don't need to have just made air travel more accessible, though less fun.
I hate the nickel and diming but it does make things more accessible in general.
This additionally acts as a nice A/B test; you sell the same car and get data on whether or not people would pay $6000 more for it to be faster.
I reflexively hate this, but it seems so rational to me.
Every time a company finds a way to make the product worse but increase profits, they will do it, and all other companies will eventually have to do it in order to remain competitive. It's an inevitable force that is built into the so-called free market. Nearly every product available today is worse and/or more expensive than an otherwise comparable product 10 years ago.
Mark my words, bookmark this comment and come back in 10 years. If these subscriptions turn out to be profitable, then in 2033, every car manufacturer will have functionality locked behind monthly subscriptions. And people will buy them because they have no other choice besides not buying a car. There will be no way to vote with your wallet--you'll just have to abstain with your wallet.
There is a large group of people who only want the cheapest flight possible, then there is a decent sized group who want more than basic economy, but don't want to pay for first class. This is basic customer segmenting.
Perhaps! But a big part of the problem is airlines have near monopolies on domestic routes. I want to fly non-stop to Charlotte, my only choice is American, I want to fly to Atlanta, my only choice is Delta, for the same price as a flight to Europe. Some monopoly enforcement, or laws requiring more airport diversity might fix this without micromanaging prices or services.
“Complains about air pollution, but still breathes the air”, amirite? Or perhaps there’s another explanation for the dynamic. Because I can tell you that my game-buying habits have changed as a result of your parallel example.
You rent seats on planes. Some seats are more desirable than others, so you pay more to rent those. You rent access to their storage space. You rent access to their services. The seat doesn't come with food, so if you want the food they have on the plane, you buy that from them. If you don't, someone on the next flight will.
When you buy a car, ostensibly you own the car. It's your property. A company should not be able to disable features unless you pay them not to, indefinitely, on something you own.
But there are more than 4 car companies. There's enough competition to stop this kind of horseshit, which is a fact Mary Barra seems not to recognize.
Besides, if you want to apply that axe put it against the people making those decisions to conduct business in that fashion. If your first thought is that it doesn't make sense to because then that person will be outcompeted then consider that it makes even less sense to hold people with zero agency in that decision responsible.
Indeed it is a systemic issue and I don’t claim to have a systemic solution. Even the personal solution is pretty shaky, considering the ubiquity of these practices. Oh well, it’s better than giving in.
In the Mercedes case, they ship the car with the more-powerful motor already installed in it. The cost of it has been paid already. They just artificially limit it through software unless you pay extra for it.
At least in this case Mercedes is offering a one-time flat fee, which would at least be somewhat sorta vaguely like paying extra at the time of sale for a more-powerful engine rather than whatever is stock. Still kinda slimy, but at least not absolute highway robbery, like the subscription plan is.
How so? The one-time fee is $1950. Also, this is nothing new: top end Mercedes-AMG cars always had an optional "AMG Driver's Package" [0] for years now, which did nothing but electronically unlock Vmax from 250km/h to 290km/h. No changes in hardware at all. It used to retail for around $2500.
Now you have the possibility to order a performance unlock after buying the car. You can even try it out for a few months to see whether you really need it or not.
You might not like it, but it's actually a better deal than before.
[0] https://www.mercedes-benz.co.uk/passengercars/mercedes-benz-...
So if Apple would ask you for a nice $10/m to use their famous iPhone camera features you would be okay with that, because otherwise you would be fine with 8MP photos or pay additional $10 * 12m * 3y = $360 upfront? Of course, no changes in hardware at all. And the price of iPhone is the same, not $360 cheaper.
There's ton of precedent for products that are artificially locked to a lower version. The difference between a NVidia GeForce and the much more expensive Quadro used to be just a bunch of ID resistors. Processor speeds are locked in a similar way.
Same thing with software. There's many cases where you purchase a piece of software and can later buy a feature or "Pro" unlock. You already downloaded all the bits & bytes to you device. Are you not OK with that?
I'm a bit surprised that the people on Hackernews of all places has such a reaction to this. Subscription models and SaaS have been practically invented here.
With software, the entire model is buying functionality, and then you can use it on the hardware of your choice. And it has to work that way. It's worth keeping in mind but it's not directly comparable to a hardware purchase.
Do you really think what you pay less?
If we talk about software unlocked hardware this is a moot point, the manufacturer still needs to spend money to produce and install the thing in the product, so you are paying for the hardware anyway. BMW heated seats subscription is a good example. And again you are taking the manufacturer words for it, despite they would never show how exactly they manage to drive the price down.[0]
> It's more like buying, and paying for, an iPhone 14 and then having the possibility to upgrade the camera to the iPhone 14 Pro version afterwards.
Which implies the change to the hardware. We are now discussing when there is no change in the HW, only some SW lock on that hardware.
> The difference between a NVidia GeForce and the much more expensive Quadro used to be just a bunch of ID resistors. Processor speeds are locked in a similar way.
Yes, and that forced NVidia to actually implement something useful for CAD (or degrade CAD performance on consumer products, alas). CPUs doesn't fit here, because again, nobody gives you an option to "unlock" more cores or speeds (but Intel tried and IBM did this for ages for their mainframes and POWER systems, but these are not a consumer products).
> Same thing with software. There's many cases where you purchase a piece of software and can later buy a feature or "Pro" unlock. You already downloaded all the bits & bytes to you device. Are you not OK with that?
There is no additional costs, waste and carbon footprint to produce a different software. You, as a vendor, spent money one time on R&D/development, now you support it for a tiny fraction of the cost. You don't spend money and resources on never be used part of software.
For a heated seats you spend the resources to actually manufacture and install it, even if it would be never used.
> I'm a bit surprised that the people on Hackernews of all places has such a reaction to this. Subscription models and SaaS have been practically invented here.
Sorry, but leasing and subsidizing were invented centuries before Internet and HN. And what you mix software with hardware and protecting the poor capitalistic companies are quite telling.
[0] Hint: those who pay for the feature pay not only for themselves, but for the others, who did not pay, too. Even the manufacturer never actually lowered the cost of the product.
PS automotive manufacturers are well known for charging absurd prices for things what costs peanuts. How can you believe them what 'they are reducing the base price' is beyond me.
What is similar in the both cases is what it's a 3rd-party option.
Look at my other comment in this thread, maybe it would be clearer what I mean.
There is a non-trivial amount of engineering that goes into making those features. I suspect that the software that controls the drivetrain requires making non-trivial changes to operate at higher horsepower, too.
Is it worth it? I haven't paid the price for it in my Teslas, but it's certainly worth it for someone to pay for it.
No it doesn't unfortunately (I bought it). Elon tweeted years ago the in-app/in-car purchase for the performance increase would get the drivetrain tuning screen that the Performance models have, but it has never shipped.
The feature, similar in concept to Mercedes here, $2000 (one time) "acceleration boost", adds/unlocks ~50hp and reduces 0-60 time to under 4 seconds on the dual motor non-performance model 3s etc, but you don't get any additional screens.
> https://www.notateslaapp.com/tesla-reference/1040/tesla-acce...
"Although vehicles with Acceleration Boost have better performance than their Long Range counterparts, they do not include Tesla's Track Mode feature."
"track mode" is the extra screens.
That's not rent seeking. Rent seeking is when an entity has control of something that can't be traded in a liquid/efficient way (this part is important!) and tries to leverage this uncompetetive situation into revenue that isn't subject to market forces.
Cars are pretty liquid. Subscription products are very liquid. If people don't want this they won't buy it. If they don't want cars with this subscription model they'll buy a Tesla[1] or VW. That's exactly the opposite of rent seeking.
That's not saying it's good (or bad) for consumers. But it's not rent seeking.
[1] Tesla also sells over-the-air performance upgrades, but it's a fixed price and goes with the vehicle after purchase. They do have subscription fees for data access features, and for FSD though.
The feature has already been developed, I have already downloaded the software to my device. It would cost the developer nothing, deny them the use of nothing, require none of their resources for me to use the feature and yet they charge for it.
How is that different?
I think the "it's rent-seeking" position would be weaker for toggling entire features on and off—the specific example of unlocking better acceleration was them adding a worse mode just so they could charge a subscription for the better one.
Untrue. They aren't monopoly rents but they are rents. Can you get better performance from your Mercedes EV through another provider? No? It's rent.
No, but you can sell it and buy a Tesla. Having more features is just "selling a better product". By that standard any optional feature on a market-leading product is "rent-seeking", and that's silly. Is the App Store rent seeking? Is selling junk on Fortnite rent seeking?
No, that's just "selling products". Rent seeking is a specific form of market distortion, and the concept just doesn't apply to consumer products. It's about stuff like real estate control or regulatory capture. As always Wikipedia has a great page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
The intel chip example has already been mentioned in comments. The general idea of "Damaged Goods" (and how this can benefit consumers) appears here (at Preston McAfee's site).
You are unfortunately one of the apologetic quote, "dickfucks", endquote the parent was referring too. When all players eventually do this, where will you got to buy?
There is no more free market left in the auto industry after a century of consolidations. We're at the mercy of a few giant automakers who own the entire market and make the rules in their flavor. The current greed-flation is another nail in the coffin of the "free market competition benefits the consumer" trope.
If we had left everything to the so called "free market" our food would have still contained lead, mercury and arsenic. That's why governments need to step in and regulate some things in flavor of the consumer because we can't expect the corporations to do it themselves through "free market" competition, as it's much easy and profitable for them to form rent-seeking cartels and work against us that compete for us.
It seems all lessons from the past have been forgotten.
Paying extortion to get more speed? That's just a cash cow.
2. design costs with tactile controls maybe a little higher for the first stage of a new design, but its not as if car companies did not have (a) in-house talent for this (b) decades of experience. Contrast with the (amortized) cost of implementing "car OS's" on touchscreens before even getting to "what does the infotainment screen look like".
3. where the screens do potentially save money is in allowing rollouts of new features without requiring new hardware (which in fact would generally be impossible to rely on). Of course, as Tesla found out, this doesn't always go as planned, and the company can incur extra costs because users know the change can be rolled back.
4. as the article you linked to, and dozens of others, makes clear, there is a growing body of both scientific and anecdotal evidence that screens are terrible for safety while driving.
5. whether manufacturers are responding more to consumers' demands for buttons, or the evidence that they are exposing themselves to legal liability for their interface designs is hard to get a handle on at this point, since they notoriously do not speak openly and honestly about such things. Therefore, please do feel free to believe it is an example of corporations responding to consumer demands, while I'll continue to believe that it is corporations covering their collective asses for the design mistakes they've made (preferably before they get sued over a collision on par with the navy vessel one that led to their removal from US navy ships).
Until Cash4Clunkers2.0 comes out and/or they’re regulated out of existence.
Examples: Smart (spying ad-showing) TVs, non-compete agreements, water heater rentals, not-really-unlimited "unlimited data" cell plans, surveillance economy, only-rentable-not-buyable software and films and TV shows and audiobooks, etc.
[0] https://slate.com/business/2023/04/cars-buttons-touch-screen...
In some cases people choose things that are bad for them, for all kinds of reasons. Someone will always sell you a subscription to your own car, if you tell them you want one. The market is the mechanism, the responsibility lies with the consumer. I know that it feels like there's a conspiracy, but it's almost always just people getting what they say they'll pay for.
The best solution is for people to exercise good judgment. The nuclear option is to regulate what people can and cannot buy and sell. It's not to have that nuclear option on the table, and it is necessary sometimes, but it does not feel like this particular case is one when people cannot reasonably be expected to decide for themselves what they want, or have the power to exercise that decision. Nobody HAS to buy a Mercedes.
Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.
Guess which phase we're in now.
The "market" didn't decide to exclude headphone jacks and SD cards on mobile phones. Apple went that direction and other companies followed suit. Customers had no real choice in those matters.
Yes they did, they could vote with their wallet. And they voted for ear buds.
There's still plenty of phones with jacks out there by the way.
For example, there is always going to be a huge barrier to entry for automakers. They need to invest an enormous amount of time and money in design, factories, raw materials, labor, etc before they can deliver an actual car. This barrier protects automakers from feeling the full repercussions of their anti-consumer practices because it is extremely difficult for a new pro-consumer competitor to enter the market.
When we remove that assumption of perfect competition, the whole free market theory starts to fall apart. A well functioning free market requires power to be balanced between all parties, otherwise whoever has the most power can end up corrupting it and using their power advantage to grab even more money and/or power.
But if all else fails, giant corporations are eventually going to get the good ol' pitchforks up their butt.
Drive an old car and maintain it forever, I suppose.
It's bizarre to me that in 2023 there are still so many people who think that anarcho-capitalism works.
Sure, all those terms were written into the purchase contract, but with dozens of subscriptions, what sane owner wants to stay on top of all those options, activations, and deactivations?
Will the carmaker let you upgrade your software without buying new hardware? Don't bet on it. Not if there's a chance to suck more money out of your generous wallet.
Screw all that. While I much prefer to own cars with elan, I'll buy a Honda just to avoid being jerked around. And after a couple decades of owning BMWs, that's just what I did. No more hostage-taker carmakers for me.
In fact, that's why Jay Leno doesn't own a Ferrari: jackass sales tactics.
It’s hard to tell on this site, are people really this devoted to corps or are they shills?
Even with what you said there are still so many people defending this behavior. The world is full of weak and/or deceitful people.
I think a lot of people defend this because they themselves work for tech companies who's products or services are also profitable due to some for of rent-seeking which ensure great profits and wages that wouldn't be possible otherwise because let's face it, the most profitable SW companies where the HN audience most likely works at, don't sell you a lifetime license to their product on a CD for a flat fee anymore like it's the '90s but are most likely subscription-ware.
It is indeed a bit hypocritical to criticize automakers for doing the same thing that beloved tech companies are doing which is what makes them so profitable and yet nobody bats an eye.
A one-time car purchase costs the car company some capex upfront. They actually incur more cost running whatever DRM servers lock these motors down to prop up this extortionary business model.
We take issue with big techs locking down computers too. No problem with them running whatever they want on their servers but we want to run whatever we want on our computers too without their interference.
I would pay to get software not as a service. Fuck your updates, I don't want bloody updates that end up breaking my stuff and wasting my time. Give me one version, no updates and no support, and I will give you top dollars. If I want an update I'll come back to repeat the process again, giving you top dollars again, several years down the road.
Are big purchases every several years cheaper than a subscription? I don't know and I don't care. Sell me your fucking software as a fucking static product, I am happy to pay the premium for it.
Wait till you hear how many people it took to build Roaler Coaster Tycoon .... in assembly. Spoiler alert: 1; one; uno.
Is it not OK for the automotive folks to get to the same level as their FAANG brethren?
Disclaimer: I work for an automotive OEM.
No, I want the company I work for to have similar profit margins as FAANG and thus increase my compensation. Do you also attack those employees because their companies are charging extra for pure software unlocks or subscriptions?
You can complain about any company that wants to continuously make money for nothing in return. Just look at ink printers. Rent seeking sure is attractive, yes.
Nobody owes you anything. There are MANY jobs that deserve such high salaries far more, just try anything related to caring for sick and/or old people. It's just that "deserve" has got nothing to do with anything!
Also, look at all the other countries and companies. That kind of complaint to me sounds more like a multi-millionaire looking at the even grander mansion next door and claiming they deserve at least that much too and that the world is so unfair to them. You picked the very, very few where some people make even more. It's hardly all the tens of thousands of employees of the FAANGs that all make a few hundred thousand, just a small fraction.
Cars also are not nearly as innovative. They are much farther along their product cycle. Oh sure, they did a lot of work, but the car still uses about as much fuel as it always did, and gets you barely any faster than it always did from A to B. But all the entertainment you get now! And all the electronics! Yeah okay. But the end product still doesn't deliver that much more value compared to a 1970s car. Some of them were actually more comfortable, easier to use, and easier to look out of. I do understand that there's been a lot of work on safety too since then, and that deaths went down. But I didn't claim there was zero innovation, did I? Only that you compared yourself with the latest and greatest new tech, such as AI, and in that elevated niche you again picked their highest paid people, and that seriously is your chosen comparison?
Oh and when we are looking at all the innovation in cars, may I point to the discussions - right here on HN too - about software, UIs, and cheating German car makers (I'm German too by the way), and how German car makers are big losers in China, and quality issues in German cars (https://newsingermany.com/german-car-manufacturers-fail-us-s...)?
Why would they do this? They have enough labor working for the money they give already. If their profits doubled, why on earth would their labor costs go up too instead of them just keeping the money?
As long as tech companies do it, I guess it's fine if everybody does it, because profits, and you get a cut of it?
(Tesla is profitable. Uber is not. Who pays their software engineers more?)
Also, if you think that your employer is going to increase your compensation due to anti-features like this... well, hate to break it to you, but they won't. They'll pocket that money and/or distribute it to shareholders. Your salary is, roughly, the smallest number that they can offer you to get you to do the job, and has very little to do with their profit margins.
> Do you also attack those employees because their companies are charging extra for pure software unlocks or subscriptions?
I would attack any company that charges customers extra for nothing.
Not by locking features.
And as a software developer whose income is propped up by adjacency to FAANG: we're paid an inordinate amount compared to our contribution to society. The vast majority of software development makes rich people richer at the expense of everyone else. I've managed to avoid the most egregiously harmful companies my entire career, but the idea that FAANG pay or any pay is meritocratic is just wrong. I'm paid well because my work pays my clients well, not because of anyone involved "deserves" our high salaries.
A key difference here is a car is a product that we buy and own. It doesn't cost Mercedes an ongoing cost every month to support these hardware features they change a monthly fee to unlock, and so the monthly fee doesn't provide additional value. To the extent it does, it's because the manufacturers are artifically limiting their product. Compare this to, say, and Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. With that, you're getting access to cloud services that costs Adobe to keep running, it also gets you access to new features and security updates. Whether or not you like Adobe's business model, this provides a justification for the subscription model that is simply absent in the automotive space.
Going back to the competition point, even if you just look at the monthly fee as cost shifting, it lets the manufacturers advertise a price that's lower than what the consumer is going to pay.
If you put a subscription on something where you have to continuously maintain server capacity and build and distribute new features, then that... seems fair?
Not gonna claim that there's no rent-seeking going on in the software industry, certainly. And they're scummy.
But once I'm sold a car, every bit of hardware in that car should work without artificial limits (well, modulo safety and legal concerns). Sure, it's fair for a car maker to charge for map updates for the navigation, real-time traffic information, remote functionality, etc. -- stuff that requires on-going cost to the manufacturer. But charging a subscription to send a few bits of information to the software in the car to give the motor more power? Robbery.
I ask these questions because often times people work themselves into a frenzy, and then take zero action. Hopefully you aren't one of them.
We can't all afford to devote our lives to activism. But change starts with education and we can be educators when these topics come up. That's not useless.
Nobody's asking you to do anything, except maybe stop with the ad-hominem attacks and participate in the conversation in a rational way.
Why do you think it is strange?
As long as those people have morals, what’s wrong with that?
Since it's unavoidable, the best next thing is to design a system which takes greed as an input and outputs productivity. That system is called Capitalism and that is why it always wins.
mercedes isn't selling baby formulas or epipens
plenty of other brands will take your 100 years of 3rd world salary to give you some shiny vehicle
should I cry for some pampered millionaires who just want to drive faster?
The point is that everywhere outside of the powerhouse first world economies runs on second hand cars imported from those economies. I'd know - in my country most cars are ex-german cars. And then once we're done with them, they go to Ukraine(or they used to). Then after that they go to far east or Africa. Your 100k mercedes has 15 lives before it gets scrapped.
But you know what stops that chain early? If everything in the car has subscription and strong encryption to prevent messing with payment options, which "incidentally" will mean those cars can't be worked on by anyone other than the official garage. Wouldn't want anyone to pirate some subscription-only stuff now, would we.
I'm not mourning rich people wanting to drive fast - I'm mourning regular folks who will get these cars at 15-20 years old and find out that the heating seats don't work because Mercedes won't enable them on a "legacy" vehicle. Or it's from the wrong region so they can't do anything for you, sorry.
EV cars are most likely not going to be exported to have a second life.
Well, that's absolutely inevitable given how things are going. It might not be in the next 10 years, but in 30? Almost certainly guaranteed.
What reason do you have to believe that?
Where is this sea of simps? I don't see anyone defending this type of behavior.
Power imbalances mean that some people will use contracts to exploit others. Protecting people from that is valuable.
Certainly a Mercedes purchaser is not quite in the same league there, but it's not like we haven't heard of similar subscription ploys on lower-end cars too.
But somebody designed, implemented and tested (presumably) the feature of remote enabling functionality for money, manages the subscription and payment systems, real time communications to the fleet of cars, etc.... that costs a lot of money and effort, doesn't come for free.
I would wager thats not actually true for Mercedes, they don't last that long before becoming a money pit. If you really want a Mercedes just lease then bail.
This results in a fantastic pool of 3-4 year old cars with low odometers and scrupulous maintenance records, keeping the rest of the used market in check.
Due to the slow downs and supply chain issues of the past few years, I imagine the used market is not going to be as nice the next few years, and the usual off-lease classes will be a lot smaller than usual.
I'm glad other people are willing to buy or lease them from new so there are cheap ones available secondhand.
Say the cost for a motor made of x material is $2000 more than a lower spec motor made of z. So here they could make two specs, say charge $5000 more for the better motor, and profit $3,000 when anyone with a kick for adrenaline chooses the better motor.
However, there are hidden costs to inventorying multiple different variations of the main drive train of your car. You are no longer sharing parts, so you now need two lines making that motor, you need to split the warehousing space, you need some sort of analytics / data scientists to tell you how many of each motor you need to order. In this scenario, the cost to this amount of inventorying something as critical as the main drive unit might be a thousand dollars per unit or so (of course decreasing with scale), but it means your margins aren't simply profit - BOM.
Taking these small increments in profit (at the expense of making the logistics of your plant more complex) was all the rage for Ford and GM throughout the 1990s-now with 20 different trim levels for a model, but with EVs specifically the extra trim levels make you feel like you're missing out on the most fun or useful parts of a car, and the automaker really isn't making that much extra money when it's all said and done (and it results in the car feeling cheap after the honeymoon period).
In this case, the $60/month is optional. This means that Mercedes can take the negligible hit on their bill of materials, but this will likely be offset by, and made profitable by, the people who do pay for it every month over the lifespan of the car - there is a lot of FOMO and getting to click a button that says "increase the dopamine I get by punching the throttle this month" might be what people want if they think they shouldn't splurged for a different ev x months ago.
Recurring revenue brought back for a DCF at an interest rate of 5-6% is very different from when an interest rate of 0-1% is used.
Also if the credit crunch gets worse with continued high interest rates, access to the upfront capital from the customer to fund expansion/R&D becomes a lot more interesting compared to when banks are throwing money at you.
But if I buy the car and don’t care for the acceleration, then I can NOT book this feature. And in a competitive market, which the auto market is, this will mean that the MRSP for the car is lower for me than it would otherwise have been.
Unbundling is part of what made air travel affordable. In a competitive market, unbundling lowers base prices and creates consumer choice.
If a buyer wants 500hp instead of 300hp, there should be a 1-time fee assessed at the time that feature is unlocked (traditionally at purchase because it required a whole different engine; now via app/cloud/magic because it's all software).
The only reason a subscription model should be foisted on the consumer is when the vendor has actual recurring costs to provide a service. In this case, they do not - it's a one time software update.
The warranty period is known. The rate of failure is know. Etc.
And by your argument, once the warranty is done, the go-fast software should be free (or nearly so).
Brakes and tires? That's on the consumer.
Higher warranty claim rate due to the higher motor output? That's on Mercedes. But only during the warranty period. And if they have any sense they've modeled out that additional wear and now how much it costs (they need it to correctly price a subscription too).
Chances are they've over-engineered the car so there aren't (many) additional warranty clams. So any argument that you get savings passed to the consumer are likely incorrect. The buyer pays for a chassis/brakes/etc that can handle 500hp even if they only want the 300hp version.
Does the next owner of the car also get it? No? Then it is not "bought outright", it isn't a purchase at all.
This is a case of creative business modeling. I believe that companies should invest in creating good business models. They also shouldn't over complicate them
Given that, I believe that the subscriptions to unlock seat heaters are a worse example of this and not great for customer satisfaction. Specially since all those cars are already equipped with seat heaters and essentially artificially jailed by software
Nobody ever does this. The savings is never passed onto the customer. The only time that happens is when they're trying to get just in under the competition's price, but will never go lower than that. Nobody is trying to pass the savings onto the customer, ever.
Price discrimination makes this "affordable", until the base price is just raised back to where it was originally except now you have a gazillion fees you have to pay so that companies can extract more money from people less sensitive to price changes.
A company's dream is to enact price discrimination on every single transaction so that there is no such thing as a consumer surplus. The absolute dream of a company is to make it so everybody pays exactly the largest amount they can bear for everything.
This is why we have tipping everywhere. This is why we have features locked behind paywalls for no reason. This is why we have colleges that are uber-expensive, unless you are poor, in which case they aren't expensive because you actually care about the price.
Price Discrimination and Big Data, when combined, allow for companies to give prices in such a way that no consumer on earth gets a surplus. Legislation to ensure markets with consumer surplus continue to exist is badly needed.
Maybe it's worth accepting that businesses will not behave as you expect.
Also I don't think the 10.5% profit margin of Mercedes is low - the average for the S&P 500 is 11%.
The whole idea will be perceived for the pettiness and ripoff it is. Especially when no one will even know you pay the extra a month so there is zero status symbol with this.
No way this is around in a few years. They will lose more sales than they will ever make up with the monthly fee.
Should doctors cripple children that are born unless their parents charge extra to allow them to walk?
In both cases the product is initially created with the ability, and it’s a competitive market where the parents who are okay with this can save money on their birth expenses…
Edit: This “service” is waste, and morally reprehensible like burning a perfectly good house down, or shooting a deer and letting it lie to waste. Mercedes does not gain any additional capacity by reducing individual cars ability.
at some point unbundling becomes extreme lack of transparency and customer-hostility if not a downright scam.
there are such things as externalities and transaction costs. they are manufacturing externalities and transaction costs to their benefit.
some companies put out the initial product with high-quality parts and as soon as it gets good reviews and traction they sub out cheaper parts. you could say if they didn't do that they'd have to charge more, they are giving early adopters an incentive or something, people should research which parts they are getting and let the market sort it out. if you value your time and expect reliable information from reviewers it's your problem.
today everything is a SaaS and you are permanently in a hostage situation where your car could get remotely downgraded, they could stop supporting it or discontinue a feature.
a market is a set of legal and social conventions and this is a pretty bad one. if you like markets you should want them to not be hellish, which means reasonable rules and conventions.
People then say, "customers must prefer dogshit because their spending habits tell the story"
I have much stronger feelings about general right-to-repair (which crap like this tends to obstruct, so I'm definitely against it in that sense) and speculative worlds down the slippery slope where actual safety is compromised if you don't pay an additional subscription (just $60/mo to enable your side curtain airbags!). But you won't see me crying over conspicuous wealth-signalers wasting their money on crap—they're going to do that anyway, with or without Mercedes' help. And faster cars are more deadly cars, so locking this functionality behind a paywall may actually save lives (though the real, sane solution would be to regulate excessively fast/massive/etc. personal vehicles off public roadways).
Regardless... based the info in the article, you can bypass this particular monthly cost, and pay upfront. Nothing unusual about charging for options... other than this is an option already built into the car, that you pay extra to enable.
From the article: Buyers can bypass the monthly subscription completely however, and opt for an annual subscription payment or simply pay a one-time flat fee. For instance, a buyer could take an all-wheel-drive Mercedes-Benz EQE 350 sedan from its standard 288 horsepower to 348 permanently for $1,950."
This type of option add is similar to Tesla, who charges $2k (no monthly option) for "performance boost" on their model 3 and Y, and $15k for their FSD (don't get me started on this feature), which has a $200/mo option.
If you pay to have it permanently, you can probably recoup some of the cost when you sell. (Unless Mercedes does something so that the feature is gone once you sell, which I wouldn't put past them)
All of those cars are essentially badge cars - i.e you pay more for the badge that shows that you have money and are able to pay more for the cars. Nobody buys those cars because they are better at commuting than other cars. So subscription services is natural for this type of market.
They like the attention to detail of mercedes and the quietness.
They like the attention to detail of bmw and the performance.
(not sure about audi, don't know anyone well who has one)
But this move sort of pulls back the curtain between the marketers in charge at these companies and their view of the customers. "they are price insensitive and will pay more without worrying".
But really - you don't want to piss off a first-class customer. it's easy to get under their skin if you treat them with disrespect and they remember.
But you should then also be able to opt out of the battery warranty.
Physical goods like cars 'get away with it' for things like fuel; hosting is in some sense similarly 'consumable'.
The top speed was capped and could be "unlocked" by paying extra.
Guess I can hope for a future with a hydrogen fueled V8!
If I have to pick between a world where a company makes four different models of car with actual different components, and a world where a company makes one car with DRM - the DRM world just seems better in general? I think it should be legally required to offer a fully functional un-DRM'ed car for the "full" price, but I would much rather buy the premium model and be able to unlock its features over time than have to choose up front which I want.
I expect the trend will continue, I've not yet in my life seen a user hostile corporate power grab actually stop. oh well. eat arbys.
In communism, the individual doesn't really own anything; the state just lets the individual use things as they see fit.
In our late-stage capitalism, the individual doesn't really own anything; the corporation just lets the individual use things as they see fit.
With Spotify, I get access to all the music and don't lose it when the cd gets scratched.
What the auto companies are doing is gating the existing functionality behind subscriptions. These companies are largely commodities at this point and are trying out rent seeking. I don't think many consumers will accept this long term. The proverbial camel's back will break because it is user hostile
Just make a corporation which all of your people are members of, give voting powers to all members to decide what stuff the corporation buys as well as how members get to use the things. Can even go as far as setting up an HOA or a town where the company is the landlord for everyone or has right of first refusal in every property in that area. Once you have enough people to make some stuff on your own, the company call sell that stuff and that's the only touch point you all have to have with the capitalist economy. With time the members you have, the more stuff you can make yourselves, and the less stuff you company has to sell or buy. Eventually you're totally self-sufficient, don't make transactions, and therefore don't really pay taxes either.
They usually don't go for it because they are not really bothered that they can't live the way they want to so much as they are bothered that other people might still live under capitalism.
It's somewhat similar to what Amish people do, and they do quite well at it in terms of sustainably living as they wish even though no one else around them does. They pull that off by trading the things they do want to make for the things the surrounding society has that they actually want.
It's totally possible to do a socialist version of that where everyone lives in modern houses with modern conveniences, share whatever stuff you all actually want to be building yourselves, but when you have to buy or vote on something, do so through the company and as a block. Mormons have largely gotten away with block voting over the decades, and still do, so we also have existing evidence that that works too.
The details are, of course, up to whoever is trying this out, but the overall thing I'm pointing to, that I don't think anyone has given a real go at, is that using a company as a buffer against capitalism. No one has to live without, but individuals in the community also don't have to go play the capitalist game every day just to get what they want or need.
To me, it could look like a bunch of people join a company through an app or something and receive voting shares they keep as long as they are participating.
Members would contribute various kinds of property and only members can vote on who gets to use what, for how long, and what, if anything gets sold to fund the company. At least initially, it would probably also have to be funded by members working regular jobs and contributing cash to the company but pretty shortly afterwards the idea would be to have the business making money on it's own by selling things the members make and want to sell.
The cash would then be used to buy anything the members vote to buy. Which then becomes part of the property pool people can vote on using.
As long as the members are geographically distributed, the company would also need to pay for shipping stuff around when it's time to change who is using what.
If it is profitable enough, then it might be able to provide most or all of what the members need to live their best lives. Short of that, it may at least be able to create a micro version of UBI or something.
There are a lot more details to work out than those of course. I do actually want to see if this approach can do something to help people live they way they want to. However, it's hard to imagine any communists or socialists wanting to join such a company if it is run by someone with a capitalist mindset. Even if that person's motives are pure and clear. Naturally, even if I was administrating such a system, I wouldn't allow myself voting powers in it but I suspect still that wouldn't be enough.
So just start now, incrementally, and see how far you can get before anyone stops you. You would ultimately be exiting the existing economy, but that's what you presumably wanted; to build a different kind of economy that you think will be more fair and equitable. And every single step you can take in that direction proves out whether your way is actually better.
All along the way, you have your collective company acting as a buffer against the capitalist system around you. You can't really exit totally without giving up modern life, so don't try to do that, as you point out, such a move wouldn't really be a desirable or viable way to get this job done. The next best move seems to me to be to just exit incrementally, as much as you like, one step at a time.
Why not do that?
How many do you know? As far as I can tell, in the US you could fit all of these folks in a single medium size stadium. And it probably wouldn't be full.
IRL I know two or three people who like to lean this direction from time to time, but even those people seem to be just ranting against the remaining issues present under the version of capitalism we have now rather than truly wanting a completely different system.
I don't think this is legislated anywhere (legal limit is 70mph anyway...) - some have higher limits for example.
Lead battery engineer: "for the projected lifetime cycles the maximum current drawn from the battery should be z"
Lead marketing dude: "so we market it as 2 * y, 2 * lifetime cycles and try to upsell on power" mumbling to themself: "I get my bonus on sales, the recall or warranty claims are not my problem anymore, I'll be partying with the bransons"