If you don't like it, just don't buy cars whose performance is artificially limited. Let the market decide the issue.
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.
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.
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.
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.