I literally just saw a BMW advertisement yesterday that says it comes with 8 years of adaptive cruise control/driver assist, which then disables itself after the timer runs out (presumably unless you pay to license it again).
For the first 1,500 km, you get access to all of the electronic features of your new bike; then they get disabled and you have to pay to re-enable them.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/43329/toyota-made-its-key-fob-...
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/43636/toyota-reviewing-key-fob...
That said GM is dropping Android Auto and Apple Carplay from it's 2024 EVs, I assume to sell their own services. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/03/gm-confirms-its-droppin...
Klim also sells a motorcycle airbag vest that you can optionally purchase as a subscription rather then a one time purchase: https://www.vice.com/en/article/93yyyd/this-motorcycle-airba...
Ford's Commercial Division was talking about some 400,000 customers on it's subscription services though I'm not sure what those look like.
Stellantis hasn't announced anything concrete yet but said it's expecting fairly large profits from it's software division. https://www.carscoops.com/2022/03/stellantis-targets-full-ex...
Like it or not, this is the trend the majority of the car world is going.
They think they’re going to tap into a lucrative market, but really they’re just selling trash at that point.
I bet it's the worse of those two things, knowing BMW.
I guess people who don't like it see it as losing features, and talk about _owning_ their vehicle, where I see it as the ability to fine-tune the cost of a vehicle depending on what features you do or do not want to license. With any luck, competition should end up giving a market price to each of these features, and you can just pay market price for what you want/need. In addition, the car should be easier to re-sell, as any options you cheaped out on, a secondary buyer can pay for if they want them.
You are just being charged monthly.. for hardware you already bought.
"Car feature piracy" will be an interesting new world I suppose...
* Intel xeon processors have software defined feature sets that are unlocked by a license.
* Nvidia low hash rate GPUs
* Nvidia vGPU on consumer GPUs (there are hacks to enable it)
* hardware video / audio encoders in mobile processors that require licensing to use.
* Sony cameras have licenses that allow you to unlock extra features
* Cisco do this all the time with their router HW.
Even then, car manufacturers are notoriously bad at software, so probably won't be too difficult to pirate any feature.
The only time prices ever come down is when one tries to undercut the other, or they feel they can make more money by lowering them. This rarely happens in any permanent or consistent fashion, barring exceptional circumstances or a collapse in demand.
Add in inflationary pressure, and exec's pathetic desire to be cool and copy what their competitors are doing (who cares why? AcmeCo has it, we need to have it to!!!) and you don't even need a price cartel because everyone is making the same sad little moves independently.
The conspiracy aspect is absolutely a red herring. Nobody is that smart, thankfully. This is all supposedly rational actors acting in supposedly rational self-interest. AKA "Market forces"
Plus R&D, licensing and other vital expenses.
Let's walk down this slippery slope for a bit.
It's 8am, your alarm clock doesn't wake you up. You've run out of alarm credits again. They're cheap, but you have to refill them every month because the refill site wants to show you ads first.
You wake up late at 9:15, you're glad for the extra rest, but you won't make as much money today because you will get in late. On the other hand, you avoided the worst of the surge pricing for your shower.
You're finally ready to leave. You order your autonomous taxi and are given a choice of which navigation engine to use. You don't pay for UberPremium, so it's an extra $5 to unlock the Waze Ultra traffic avoidance system for the ride. Yesterday you chanced it with the free nav, and got stuck in traffic for an extra hour.
On the ride you pull out your laptop and connect to the in-car wifi. Within a couple minutes your free DNS requests are used up. You can either watch an ad to continue, or buy more dnscredits. It's only $5 for a thousand more credits, that should last you through Thursday.
- My time. - My cognitive load.
The above sounds like a nightmare to me, but you do you.
Ironically, the New Yorker website has an illegal-in-the-EU cookies modal, then a delay and a manufactured-urgency "flash sale!" pop-up that turns into a "you're on your last article" banner.
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
This is a suckers game. There are zero upsides to the consumer.
I promise the car will be harder to resell once the warranty runs out. No one wants an old car that’s super expensive to repair, especially if they’re paying to repair things related to features they can’t even use.