Features cost money, so I should pay for them. Wether that's via an option package (traditional) at order time OR via a software update (Tesla) after purchase doesn't matter.
BUT! As long as that feature doesn't have recurring costs to the manufacturer (heated seats), it should be a one-time fee, and transfer with ownership.
Something like self-driving, where there might be an active internet connection and server costs - I'm ok with a recurring subscription.
Examples... BMW tried to charge a subscription to use Apple CarPlay. This should be a one-time fee (baked into model price, or a one-time software switch). Same for Toyota (I think) who tried to make remote-unlock a subscription (this was basic key fob unlock - no internet hosting/app maintenance involved). Also crappy move from them.
Hacking otherwise reasonable software-locked features feels like theft to me. If you want the feature, pay for it. At minimum, I'd expect Tesla (or whoever) to void warranties on cars with these hacks applied (within the bounds of Magnuson-Moss Act in the US).
Telsa chose to do this presumably to only have to buy a single seat configuration and streamline installs so they could hit production quotas.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/10/16283330/tesla-hurricane-...
It's either so close that you're overpaying for the 100kWH, or it's not very close in which case you're overpaying for the 50kWH.
Either way: the 50kWH is hit: carrying dead weight on a smaller capacity. A not insignificant weight.
The compromise that minimizes production costs and still allows that upsell is to put them in every car and disable them via software.
Whether it ends up being wasteful is complicated, there are would be operating effeciencies in putting the same hardware into every car.
Why? The component is already in every vehicle. This is not like binning for chips: every vehicle must (and does) have the capability because it’s unknown whether a consumer will pay for the upgrade. If anything, the price should go down because software costs have decreased by removing the software locks.
Base price: $10,000. Cost to produce (including profit): $11,000. Cost of option: $2000. 51% of buyers opt for the option at purchase. Some % of resales result in additional sales of the option.
Instead if, for example, the component adds $30 to the BOM and they know from market research that 10% of buyers will pay $500 for the software unlock within 3 months of purchase, they don't have to include the cost in the base price and still make very good margin on it.
Otherwise, I can totally assure you they were not "standard features", and they didn't even exist for most car models, regardless of the trim.
Or maybe your definition of "older" vehicles means those that were produced in the past 5-10 years, but that's a fairly controversial definition of "older".
Power windows were originally an expensive option, but they got cheaper, and the fraction of cars ordered with manual crank windows dwindled, to that point that power windows are simply standard on most cars now.
If somebody said, okay every car has power windows but yours don't work unless you pay a monthly fee, I'd break out the wire cutters right in the dealer lot and fix the problem myself. Screw that. It's a standard feature and someone broke it, I'm fixing it.
I understand your point. I just don’t care. They sold me a thing, and now it’s mine.
If you sell me a bunch of hardware, that hardware is now mine, and I should be able to do whatever I want with it. If you sell that hardware with a bunch of software on it, I should again be able to do anything I want with that software.
That doesn't entitle me to updates of that software, or ongoing use of the company's cloud infrastructure. It's fine to require payment for that.
IP laws just aren't particularly relevant to the discussion at hand. I don't think anyone is suggesting we should be able to legally "pirate" the software running on our devices.
If I own a shoe, I can paint it to look different or change its shoelaces. If I own a book, I can tear out the pages and rearrange them. If I own a TV, I can hook anything I want up to it. And if I own a car, I can modify it as I see fit. Those things are mine. If I no longer want them, I can sell them (barring a specific contract with the manufacturer, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine). And if a company wants me to pay them money while still retaining some kind of legal right to restrict how I use it, they can negotiate a discounted price for me to pay them.
When I walk onto a car lot, I'm not saying "whoa, check out this IP!" The salesperson doesn't hype me up by saying "you could own significant portions of this beauty today!" We don't sign a "purchase (most of it) contract". I don't pay "sales-but-all-rights-reserved" tax on it. The DMV lists me as the owner, not the IP licensee.
If I had to choose whether to support laws protecting IP versus laws protecting ownership, I'll pick ownership 100% of the time.
Having said that, I don't entirely understand why Tesla don't keep the software unloaded from the vehicles until the user chooses to purchase the add-on features: compared to everything else the software does, that's not exactly a particularly difficult engineering challenge.
I run a news website. I charge $2 to view the news website. You paid to view to my news website, thanks!!
Let’s say you really prefer dark mode, but my news website is bright white. You install something like DarkReader, to make it inverted colors, so problem solved!
But now I realize that this is a market that I could charge for. So I start charging $5 for “news site with dark mode”.
Should it be illegal for you to use dark reader to view my news website with your light-mode-only license?
Technically I’ve shipped you the text and style for my website, which you are completely allowed to access and have paid for.. Then you’ve modified it for your own use after receiving the product. Is that wrong?
I'm fine paying for software. And I'm fine with a subscription model if I actually get new things periodically during my subscription.
Put another way, if you sell me a static, unchanging piece of software (like a software update to enable heated seats), then that should be a one-time charge. If you sell me a self-driving package that gets regular updates over time, then I'm fine with a subscription.
(Self-driving software is a bit of a grey area, though. I should probably have to pay for new features, like "now it can drive on some more roads where it would previously disengage and require a human to handle it". But I should not have to pay for an update that fixes safety issues with existing functionality.)
“I want free updates”
Self-Driving is much more complex and abides much more as an argument to your view.
(personally I'm very much on the side of giving people control of their own software and hardware)
If the hardware requires non-trivial software to enable the feature, and that software is not provided with the device, then it's fair to require additional payment to buy that software. But also no one should be able to prevent a third party from reverse engineering the hardware and writing their own software for it.
I think "who gets to decide?" is a somewhat silly question. It's the same answer we'd accept for just about any situation: someone reasonably well-versed in the technology.
It's of course hard to prove as cause, but if there is a liability case it might become "interesting"
Edit: Also relevant: even without incident, the disabled heated chairs may be broken. By not being enabled Tesla doesn't have to repair them under warranty as the aren't a feature. Thus they maybe can reduce quality in the production
I imagine the situation at court "you implemented combustive seat-heating for this model?¿"
I disagree, pretty strongly. There is a line. They sold you something in its entirety, including the seats with wires.
I would agree with you if you had to download the control software from their servers.
I would agree with you if you if the upgrade provided you physical wires to install, even if you had to install them.
Related I think it would be fine to purchase the control software and/or heating wires from a third party that was not tesla and install it in your tesla car.
When it comes to hardware, if they've already installed the feature, they've already factored the cost of it into the purchase price. Your out the door cost includes that heated seat hardware, even if it's not a line item. And you don't have the option to have it removed for a discount (or get a lower car package). You only have the option to pay to use the thing that's already in your car or not to pay to use it.
Trying to think about it in terms of "normal" cars - unlocking Plaid is similar to reprogramming the ECU on an ICE to deliver more power.
There is also law in place to refute what you said. Manufacturers can not deny warranty coverage if you jailbreak your phone or hot rod your car, and this is similar. (I believe they have the burden of proof if it seems you did the damage)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...
If the manufacturer can show the change contributed to the failure, they can deny coverage. Vastly increasing the power output of the drivetrain would likely cause a voided warranty on the drivetrain.
Unlocking heated seats wouldn’t void the warranty on the drivetrain, but could void it on the seats and related electronics.
> They sold you something in its entirety, including the seats with wires.
This is the part I have to agree with. There should be nothing to legally prevent me from doing whatever I want with my hardware. It may be unethical to use this hardware without paying for it, but I shouldn't be legally prevented from doing it. They did sell me this hardware even if the cost was paid for by those buying the heated seat package and I should be able to do whatever I want with it.
I think this works quite well with things like CPUs where they blow hardware fuses to disable features and it is infeasible to restore this functionality at any practical scale. However for things like seat warmers where the controller is likely easy to bypass (and in this case the lock is actually implemented very far away in the infotainment system) it will likely turn into a arms race between tamper-resistant hardware and those who what to unlock the feature without paying for it.
What if it's a sort of payment plan?
E.g. if we assume heated seats costs $1000 and the consumer wants to pay for this monthly over ten years then it'll be 1000/12/10=$8.33 plus interest per month.
Of course, this should mean that once repaid, it's the property of the owner and therefore transferred at resale.
IBM and I'm sure others have shipped enterprise hardware for years that was partially locked. You might get a machine with 16 cpus but you only paid for 8, for example, but you could license the rest as you grew. It seems a little similar and it was in no way underhanded, everyone knew what the deal was.
However I'll echo what another poster said. I say Tesla should be free to sell whatever they want, but if the end user finds a way around it too bad.
I think thats the stance I'm leaning towards as well. To quote another commenter[1]:
> If a manufacturer wants to lock features behind a paywall, that is fine. However, they shouldn't be allowed to complain when consumers modify the thing they bought to get around that paywall. If Tesla really wants to make sure absolutely no one gets FSD or heated seats without paying, then they should make a point of only including the relevant hardware or software in the vehicle at the time of purchase.
To take that business practice, and then try to foist it on consumers who don't have $500/hour lawyers on retainer looking out for them is more than just morally questionable, it crosses a line into some sort of fraud/extortion-adjacent realm.
If Tesla was really upset about this, it's a problem completely within their capacity to solve. Only send bugfixes OTA, require a service visit for new features. I'm betting that their software's such a trainwreck they wouldn't be able to compartmentalize it properly like that to save their own lives.
Their cars from 2013 can still get modern features OTA. Please explain how you classify that as a train wreck compared to software cobbled together from 100 vendors (none of whom specialize in software)
Tesla gets plenty of software from other vendors. And doesn't always test it particularly well - there was a story here of a firmware vendor who had a test harness that took ~36h to verify. They shipped a bug fix to Tesla, told them it was available...
... four hours later, "Great, this is awesome, looks like we fixed the issue."
???
"We just flashed one of the cars here and took it for a drive."
The same should go for DVDs, BluRays and streaming media and yet here we are looking at jail time for bypassing the DRM.
Even in the US, which has quite draconian anti-circumvention law under the DMCA, the criminal penalties associated with this behavior only apply to those that violate the statute “willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain”. A person who bought a DVD or blu ray and decrypted it for their own use would not be criminally liable.
https://law.justia.com/codes/us/2021/title-17/chapter-12/sec...
I’m not defending the law, which I disagree with, merely pointing out that “looking at jail time” for non commercial bypassing of purchased BluRay DRM is a stretch.
What I’m vehemently opposed to is ongoing fees for things that don’t have ongoing costs. BMW wants to charge monthly for seat heaters or carplay, but those things are not a service and don’t have ongoing costs for BMW to provide. If anything creating an ongoing software lock creates an availability risk. If BMW’s authorization service is unavailable do you lose heated seats?
Several manufacturers are offering either monthly or one time costs for certain features. I’m less clear how I feel about that. Maybe quite valuable for someone who lives somewhere warm and only needs seat heat one month a year. It would take many years of paying for a single month to justify paying for the fully unlocked feature. I think I can live with optional monthly fees for things as long as you can always pay once and just have something that stays for her life of the car.
And auto-renew should require explicit opt-in. For most subscriptions I have, automatic renewal is desirable, but invariably I forget to cancel trials or one month subs of things I just wanted to test.
IMO, the real issue is the price. There is pretty broad and well established equivalency between OPex and CAPex. The problem is that car companies are trying to charge OPex as if there was a 1 year depreciation schedule, when cars typically last for decades.
I think that if BMW charged 1/240th[1] the cost to buy the option in order to rent it per month, very few people would complain. Especially if that price were locked in for the life of the car.
---
1. 20 * 12 = 240
One of the worst problems with this subscription-based everything is that it creates an ongoing reliance on the company instead of allowing things to be pure local.
For example Netflix downloads are a huge pain because of refreshing and re-verifying. In theory these wouldn't exist if they didn't need to worry about your license expiring. You would never run into a scenario where you couldn't play the video that was stored locally because they can't prove that you are still subscribed (even though I'm only half way through my month so it is literally impossible for my subscription to have ended yet).
So yes, if I could guarantee that I could pay a fairly reasonable price for as long as I wanted to and it would work flawlessly for that entire time it wouldn't be too bad. But in practice I can't rely on that and have to dread the day I am offline and can't get heated seats or they take the licensing server down since it wasn't worth maintaining for the 8 people who are still subscribed to this service.
The manufacturing price delta between an 8 core CPU and a 16 core, nowadays is functionally meaningless.
The manufacturing cost between a car with heated seats and without headset seats is functioningaflly meaningful.
The way I see it, for things like heated seats or CarPlay, I'm already paying for the base hardware cost (plus some margin) as part of the base price of the car, charging me for the upgrade is charging me a markup on what I already paid for. Making it a service is insult to injury.
Citation needed. The way assembly lines and product mix work, it could be meaningfully less expensive to have all the hardware be identical with software unlocks.
Semi yields?
I don't believe that is the case. BMW determined it was more expensive to have the supply chain, inventory, and manufacturing management to build both heated and non-heated versions of their seats. Rather than just make heated seats a standard feature they saw an opportunity to maintain and even expand their highest margin revenue stream: options.
You could probably buy something that would heat your seat at home for under $4 on Temu. And that includes multiple middle companies and shipping across the ocean. It probably costs them pennies, where the upside is, this owner doesn't want heated seats, but a car can easily have 2-3 owners in its first 10 years. maybe the 2nd and 3rd owners will want the heated seats, worth the money it would take to install it
They were entire cpus in sockets.
That's because you don't understand.
The customer didn't pay for a car with heated seats. The manufacturer included them anyway, but disabled them in software.
Presumably, a consumer could go to the dealership and pay for heated seats as an aftermarket add-on. Or they could pay to enable heated seats (software unlock) on a month-to-month basis.
Well, when you buy a car your payment gives you ownership of the entire car.
There may not be a written contract or specification explicitly saying that the valves in the tyres are included in the deal, but they're your property nonetheless (in the absence of obvious errors like the dealer letting you drive the wrong car off the lot)
The customer paid for a car with heated seats present but inoperable. If the customer wants to modify their property, that's their business.
Sure.
> If the customer wants to modify their property, that's their business.
If you were talking about a vacuum cleaner or something, I'd agree. But modern cars are "fly by wire". It is not, in fact, only the customer's business if they modify their car's software.
A book is copyrighted too, but when I buy one, I can legally write in it, paste in pages of my own, cut out pages, etc.... I can even sell it after I've done that.
I'm 95% certain the law should be changed to restore the first sale concept to software, and even more certain when it comes to embedded software that's necessary to use hardware owned by end-users.
Not saying that BMW is in the right. Hell yeah they are extracting every penny they can, but you can simply protest by not buying from them. People support their decisions by buying their products and complain afterwards. There are many alternatives.
Sure they did. Maybe they didn't pay the full price for those heated seats, but they definitely paid more for the car with them (but disabled) than for a car without them entirely.
The carmaker is hoping that people will pay for the unlock in order to recoup their costs. But they're certainly not going to ship those heated seats in every car without inflating the cost of the base vehicle by some amount.
Put another way, it might look like this:
1. Car without heated seats at all: $10,000
2. Car with heated seats, but locked: $10,100
3. Car with heated seats, unlocked: $10,500
If the carmaker offered options 1 & 3, then customers would pay for what they want and get, and nothing more. If carmakers only offer option 2, then even customers who don't ever want heated seats will still pay some premium.
The carmaker might estimate that only 50% of their customers will pay an unlock fee for a car sold to them. They want to still cover their costs and make a tidy profit, so they might charge more than the $400 difference to unlock the feature. And that's if they're doing it in the non-shady way, and are charging a one-time fee. If they decide to charge a subscription, they might do something like charge $100/year for it, and then eventually they're just making pure profit for no added value.
Also consider that the carmaker's own costs could be, on average, greater per car if they have to offer two different options 1 & 3. Offering only option 2 (regardless of whether or not people are able to defeat the software lock) might be cheaper for them. I don't see why we need to subsidize their business decisions.
But all of this is still kinda irrelevant: bottom line is that if you sell piece of hardware to a customer, that hardware now belongs to the customer, and you don't get to tell the customer what they can and can't do with it.
You can also picture this as a marketing cost. Maybe Tesla things that a $100/car marketing cost is worth paying because they expect that 1/2 of the cars will pay $500 so they have $150 expected return.
the upside is that by not having much difference between SKUs, and "locking" one SKU from becoming the other, the costs are lower, and manufacturers might turn those savings into lower prices
in both cases, as in cell phones, I believe like you still own the hardware, including everything in it, including software [1], so if you want to "unlock it", that's your right, as is smashing it, reflashing it, and having sex with it. If that makes for an unsustainable business model, nobody is entitled to their preferred business model being sustainable. Analogous examples here might be unofficial Keurig pods, or printer ink cartridges, which bypass manufacturer DRM intending to lock customers into an otherwise arguably unsustainable business model.
sometimes, though, you have to fight for your rights, e.g. build/buy/download and use unofficial tools
[0]: http://computer-communication.blogspot.com/2007/06/unlocking...
[1]: this inclusion stems from my belief that, where possible, you have an absolute right to view every bit of data that happens across hardware you own, whether gadgetry or eyeballs, in any format you desire, as well as the right to remember what you've viewed, as well as the right to modify or prevent modification of any arbitrary bit on said hardware
Especially if that rent-seeking doesn't come with any kind of support for the "offering".
If the heated-seats break for a "subscriber", will BMW repair them for no additional cost?
That said I am trying to play devil's advocate here. Other people have mentioned the analogy of locking out some CPUs on a die for a cheaper version of hardware, and I think that kind of applies here, at least for a one time payment.
If I'm willing to accept that, is it so unreasonable that they could rent this feature to me, even if it's only a software switch? After all, the idea of renting physical property isn't very controversial.
Again, I don't like the idea and would never want to rent the heated seats software switch, but I'm having a hard time justifying why it shouldn't be allowed.
People should not be constrained in doing whatever they want with the hardware they have bought.
While I intuitively agree with you, I'm having a hard time arguing against the economic argument in favor it. Producing a single version of a product is generally cheaper than producing two different versions. Also offering a lower-margin, software-locked variant can (in certain conditions) make things cheaper for everyone, and it gives the consumer more choice: if you don't need or want the features of the premium model, you don't have to pay for it.
For example, imagine a manufacturer that sells two versions of its product, a basic model that makes up 20% of sales which costs $1000 to manufacture, and a premium model that makes up 80% of sales and costs $1250 to manufacture; this gives an average cost of $1200/unit. If they can save $100 per unit by only manufacturing the premium version and software-locking it, that reduces the average cost of goods sold to $1150/unit. They can pass on half of the savings to the customer, and still come out $50/unit ahead.
Now lets talk about CO2 output of driving around extra dead weight. Makes it worse.
Let's say instead that BMW decided all their car models would be physically 4 seaters, but in order to be allowed to use the back two seats, you had to pay a large monthly "sedan fee". And if they caught you using the back seats without paying, they'd sue you. Would anyone accept this? Likely no. And the reason you shouldn't accept this is the same reason you shouldn't accept the "seat heat" fee.
Either way if I truly think I am right, then BMW, etc should just go ahead with this plan. It should be a money loser for them in the long run. But on second thought why burn all this CO2 just to prove a point. We should probably collectively put a stop to it sooner rather than later.
I wouldn't be so sure, it's all about the price. There's plenty of people that don't have a need for the backseats, and at a certain discount on the purchase price it becomes worth it to have two unusable seats in the back of the car. Think about the extreme case, in which the car is free: there are certainly people that would take that deal.
But you're supposed to get a ticket. Or is it fair game to use public transport for free because you can?
We're talking about a few grams of extra weight on an ICE vehicle over 1.5 tons, if not even an SUV over two tons. If you put a spare bottle of water in your car you'll most likely have similar dead weight.
Now, I get where you're coming from, but the amount of dead weight this adds is so miniscule compared to the general overhead any modern vehicle carries that making this argument is borderline disingenuous.
But a few grams is definitely not correct. It's probably more on the order of 3-5lbs per seat.
If we don't like the heated seat example, let's use power seats. Those are much heavier than the equivalent seat with manual controls to adjust its position and angle. Granted, I don't know of any car manufacturer gating power seats behind a software lock...
Then we can add in the CO2 emission of manufacturing dead material to place in the car.
To top it all off, no one wants this.
Or to put it in another perspective: carmakers have never optimized for weight at the cost of everything else (as otherwise we'd all be driving around in cars made from titanium or carbon fiber). What's the difference between putting in a heavier seat with a non-functional heater to reduce production costs, and using steel instead of aluminium to reduce production costs?
Option A: Buy our car for $50,000
Option B: Buy our car for $40,000, but we'll software lock the "full self driving" feature
It sounds bad if you frame it as the company withholding functionality. It sounds better if you frame it as the company offering a discount, given some software stipulations.
This is really about paying for software. When you spend $400 for Ableton Live you are "unlocking" new capabilities for your PC. When you buy the latest PC game you are "unlocking" new capabilities for your GPU.
If you wanted to do all this yourself you are technically able to do so, at great difficulty and expense. You could develop your own software to operate your vehicle. (Not advisable.)
I prefer to look at it as a value proposition, rather than a battle of ideals. If a car with x, y, and z features disabled at a price of a is attractive to you, then buy it. If not, don't.
First, they absolutely will not pass the savings on to the customer. Prices are governed by what people will pay, not by what it costs to make the car. If they can make the cars for $100 cheaper, they will pocket the $100, unless market forces (like cheaper cars from other manufacturers) signal that they should lower their prices.
Second, heated seats are heavier than non-heated seats. Customers who get software-locked heated seats and don't want the feature will get slightly worse gas mileage or EV range. So not only is the manufacturer potentially saving money building the car (savings they likely are not passing on to the customer), but they're pushing added operational costs onto the customer.
I think it's fine (though somewhat shady[0]) for a company to use these sorts of software interlocks. But the product sold to the customer belongs to the customer. If they want to hack or mod it to disable that software interlock, the company should just have to live with that, and shouldn't be allowed to punish the customer in other ways (like refusing to provide software updates, refusing to do maintenance, making that maintenance more expensive, etc.).
[0] Ultimately they can do whatever is legal. But customers don't like being nickel-and-dimed for things, and doing too much of this might cause customers to find alternatives. For example, I refuse to fly on super-low-cost airlines like Frontier and Spirit because I don't want a super-bare-bones experience where I have to pay extra for every little quality of life improvement. Flying is already not a particularly great experience, and I don't care to make it worse. It's Frontier & Spirit's prerogative to operate like that (and clearly enough customers are fine with it for these companies to be successful), but it's also my choice to spend my money elsewhere. But if the only option was airlines like these (or car manufacturers who software-lock everything), that would really suck.
On the other hand, such regulation would serve to prevent users from enjoying the property they purchased and to facilitate exploitative practices by manufacturers and retailers. It is all the more absurd given that existing law already provides mechanisms for deterrence and punishment, namely: the notion of negligence.
I cannot stress how terrible this idea is. This would severely degrade consumer rights and do virtually nothing to protect people.
If you are messing with safety critical software then it is no help to me that you are prosecuted for negligence if I am killed.
Even if your safety critical software works it still is negligent, there should be some barrier to entry for such software. It shouldn't be out there in the wild made by whoever with no oversight.
Writing your own self driving software, go ahead, as long as your driving on private land I have no issue.
(Tesla's software killing people is also not their responsibility, because you're 'supposed' to use it in a way that nobody actually uses it.)
No such thing as impossible to bypass, which is exactly why companies turn to the courts and police for enforcement instead.
Instead, we have bullshit like the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions that companies pushed so they could get the government to legally enforce their crappy business models.
Some people don't want to pay for heated seats. Turns out the manufacturer found it cheaper to just include the hardware anyway rather than differentiate on the production line. What's the big deal? The ability to change your mind and pay for the feature after purchase without getting an aftermarket seat heater seems like a nice bonus. Everyone wins.
Sure, maybe they have a lower markup if you don't buy the license up front, but you still paid for it. These types of gimmicks are free money for the company pulling them.
Edit: Hell, to make it sound even more stupid, you're being asked to fork over $1k or whatever the additional charge is in order to change a bit from 0 to 1.
Obviously, I don't like up-paying for features I don't get to use. The price of the product must be the same, having benefited from mass production. With that being the case, I'm actually glad I have the option to save money now and upgrade later.
The concept isn't a problem, it's companies taking advantage of it (and us).
To borrow a phrase you used earlier, I truly don't believe that we need to come to terms with companies blurring this line and taking advantage of us.
Which is a real thing that has actually happened.
The functionality exists, the code already has been written, but it's disabled so as to extract more money.
The arguments about cheaper manufacturing is pretty well pointless. If the cost of adding seat heaters is negligible, what justification is there for charging extra? You pay for the hardware either way. This is rent seeking and nothing more.
This is a topic that's been beaten to death in the electronics industry for years. Oscilloscope manufacturers design and sell a 500MHz scope, but cripple it to 200MHz unless you pay 50% more. Or they put 16MSample of memory in and restrict you to 8 unless you pay $400 for an "upgrade". The cost of buying the lower model and upgrading it later is usually much higher than just buying the high end model.
In any case, it's not like manufacturers are selling the lower tier model at a loss. They're taking lower margins on the crippled hardware, yes, but then they charge you ridiculous prices that are orders of magnitude above the real cost of the additional hardware.
Not true. The price you have decided you are willing to pay assumes it is not there. Your payment allocates no portion to the hardware. If you have decided a car is worth $30,000, that is what you are willing to pay, regardless of whether or not they include the hardware.
And, in actuality, you might even consider a car with said hardware to be worth less as it adds weight which will require more fuel and wear and tear expenses over the operating lifetime of the vehicle. The car worth $30,000 without heated seats is, perhaps, only worth $29,000 if the hardware is included.
The cost to manufacturer is their problem. Your value determination is entirely independent of that. Should it cost them $1 or $100,000 to build that $30,000 car – it doesn't matter. You are paying for the value you think you will derive from owing the car, not what it cost them to make it.
Indeed, in the long run the value has to exceed the cost of manufacture, else the business will soon find itself filing for bankruptcy. But in the short term, it is not uncommon to see input costs exceed the value of the product, resulting in a net loss for the business. The buyer doesn't care. Input costs mean absolutely nothing to them.
If it's that cheap then it should just always be included, period. Otherwise it's just transparent greed. Why charge your customers extra for something that costs you literally nothing extra? Why not do the same for everything? The radio volume knob is software-locked and it's either at 100% or off, unless you pay extra to unlock it. The entertainment system will play ads continuously while the car is running unless you pay extra for the no-ads version. When you unlock the doors they will stay locked for five more minutes unless you pay extra for the Instant Unlock feature.
So they make a cheaper version, with lower margins, but they deliberately cheapen the experience so that those who can afford the "luxury" version don't buy the "cheap" version instead.
In any case, it shouldn't change anything for the end user, hardware or software, you pay a premium for premium features. And even if it involves actual hardware, it will cost you a lot more than what the part is worth. That's how manufacturers target both the premium and budget market with the same product. I think it benefits most people in the end, especially on the "cheap" side since people can get something they wouldn't be able to afford at all otherwise, at the cost of a bit of luxury.
Now, you can get smart, buy the cheap version and hack the software, or install much cheaper third party hardware. Same idea as ink refills for printers, or ad-blocking ad-supported websites. Often, that's you right, but don't expect the manufacturer to play along, you are on your own.
Because that's not how business works, whether cars, computers, or any other widget. The cost of manufacturing is only tangentially related to the retail value.
Your examples, while contrived, could easily work the same way. As long as the customer knows what they're buying, and there are other choices on the market, then we will find out pretty quickly how valuable a non-binary volume knob is.
You may not want to know the answer to that one, if you pay much attention to airline ticket pricing and consumer behavior.
Welcome to capitalism, it seems you are new here.
> Why charge your customers extra for something that costs you literally nothing extra?
Because (1) you can, and (2) it maximizes profit.
> Why not do the same for everything?
Because of estimates about what people will accept not having in the base model and what some will be willing yo pay extra for. Why do you think there would be some other principal at work here?
In the former case, I didn't pay you money, so you didn't give me a good / service / whatever. That feels fair, because you need money to provide those things.
In the latter case, I didn't pay you money, so you didn't flip a switch. That seems like a dick move.
So I guess the difference is that in only one of these cases does it feel like the manufacturer is an asshole.
This is the case for all software. There is no physical exchange of goods, and nearly zero effort to distribute the bits.
a car is hardware, not software, even if it interacts with software
the fact that the switch is implemented via software is irrelevant to the fact that hardware is more analagous, e.g. a printer you want to use off-brand cartridges in, or a cell phone you want to root
I bought a kindle fire at a discount because it was ad-supported, then rooted it and removed all the adware+bloatware, and don't feel even a little bit bad, because all I was doing was using my hardware as I saw fit
sorry not sorry that this breaks amazon's business model (in reality it's so rare it doesn't), but my hardware, my property, my rules
Some people don't want to pay for a 4th bedroom. Turns out the builder found it cheaper to just include the extra bedroom rather than differentiate on blueprints. What's the big deal? The ability to change your mind and increase your mortgage without having to deal with construction in the future seems like a nice bonus. Everyone wins.
If the customer only paid for 1 bedroom, they're going to save a lot of money. It's the extra maintenance costs of that roof and the associated space taken up by the structure that would make it a harder sell, otherwise dynamically growing living space would be very interesting.
Also, how will you keep me out of the room in my house that I didn't buy? You can't effectively.
A creative tenant could certainly break through a wall that's been put up in place of a door, but that seems pretty extreme. I've seen some creative construction projects to make use of crawl spaces that weren't originally designed for people to live in though, but that's far from the norm.
Basically everyone with this car is paying for 95% the actual hard work of what you need for the fog lights already. Very few owners end up going for the fog lights but everyone subsidizes their installation.
Hardware features that are actually present in the product when purchased should be available for use. If manufacturers want to put those features behind a software lockout, I guess that's their prerogative, but they shouldn't be allowed to complain or punish the customer if they find a way to circumvent it.
Charging for ongoing services that require the manufacturer to spend money to maintain infrastructure (like a remote engine start or remote lock/unlock) seems entirely fair, though.
But as a big fat asterisk to that last statement, it pisses me off that I can't run my own server infra for that myself. I bought a Mercedes E-class a little over a year ago, and it included a free year of their online services. Fortunately continuing the subscription is pretty cheap (something like $150/year). But it's an all-or-nothing deal. I want to be able to do remote lock/unlock and engine start, but I don't want Mercedes tracking my location wherever I go, and I don't care about map updates (since I use Google Maps via Android Auto for navigation).
I would much rather be able to spin up my own server to handle some of the remote capabilities, and not have the car talk to Mercedes' infra at all (except perhaps for software updates, which I would manually approve/accept).
I get why car makers won't do this. Even if they didn't want a stranglehold over providing services, I'm sure they still wouldn't do it: it would require extra "advanced" settings in the car and in the app to allow the customer to set an alternate server backend. And customers will inevitably make security mistakes with their own server backend, which could create liability for the carmaker, or at least cause bad press, even if it shouldn't.
For FSD, part of the payment is for ongoing maintenance. It is likely that the countermeasure would be subscriptions, and they already seem to be progressing in that direction.
It might be possible to subscribe to FSD, wait for it to download, then unsubscribe, and hack it to re-enable the firmware. But FSD is still beta and you'd be risking being exposed to get future updates.
Till this day it wasn't a problem since this was not really locked down, and despite the fact that is illegal, people did modify the car software to unlock more power quite easily.
But... that "locking" of feature kind of made sense, since a car with less kW pays less taxes (at least in my country you pay more if the car is more powerful) so selling a locked down model was also an advantage for the user that wasn't interested in having more.
Locking down heated seats... it's just a move against the user. Buying a car you payed for that seats, since they are there, why the manufacturer should ask you another fee to use for something you already payed? To me this shouldn't be possible.
I mean, it's easy to get 20% more power out of an engine if you don't care if it idles like a washing machine. And for some applications, that's just fine.
Can you explain this? How does remapping an ecu make the idle different?
This makes it easy for me to make up my mind about. FSD is about far more than just the hardware - there's many teams of devs working on it.
> heated seats
There's little (no?) justification for software locking heated seats. Press the button, make the seats hot. This is just capitalist bullshit and we shouldn't put up with it.
If you enabled a seat heater, enabling hardware that the car already has installed, or hot-rodding the engine, I don't think it is that big a deal.
But if you downloaded and installed software from tesla that didn't come with the car, or did something like enabling free supercharging, that would be more like theft of services.
I expect if this becomes a thing, features will have to be downloaded after purchase.
1) If tesla took possession of the used car and then sold it to you, I think they can disable features.
2) If you sold your car to someone, and THEN tesla disabled features I am not ok with that.
With case #1, I think it is like any used car. People flip cars. They can take a car, remove expensive rims or other options and sell the car without them. People also buy cars and part them out, selling each piece individually. This is ok because the flipper owns the car before selling it and they can do what they want.
If the seller didn't tell the buyer, or the seller themselves didn't know - who's fault is that?
Even on game consoles, the “DLC” is often a couple meg download because the actual content is already built into the game.
You could turn Windows NT 3.51 Workstation into Server by just changing a registry key!
https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/differences_nt.htm...
Expecting capitalism to be fair is probably where we're all going wrong here.
It would be the same if the volume rockers on the iPhone would only work if you have a paid subscription, or if you needed to pay extra to unlock 120fps while the device is capable but locked to 60fps because you’re not giving Tim Cook more money.