Carmakers Plan to Make Basic Features Subscription, Despite Widespread Backlash
techdirt.com
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You are still allowed to opt out.
For now.
(I say this as someone who is emphatically of the opinion that we should be less reliant on cars!)
If everyone goes that way then consumers are screwed.
Then inevitably after 10-20 years there will be enough anger that congress will do something about it, but in the mean time the original execs all lived like fat cats and danced into the sunset. Yippee!
For now, there are a lot of used cars and my plan is to get good ones and drive them.
I can't wait! The auto makers will deserve everything they get for going down this road.
More broadly, business models should only rely on recurring revenue streams for products that are receiving nontrivial updates or for which there are demand-based costs.
Presumably where this gets murky is with AI features, where inference costs are high and one-time fees aren't sufficient or appropriate.
Many places "going to the corner store" is a 20 minute drive. I still remember going up to long island to visit a friend, and we wanted to eat. The absolutely closest place to get food was a 45 minute walk each direction.
Around 92% of US households have a car. Comparing to Europe Italy is around 89%, Germany 85%, France 83$, Spain 79%, and UK 74%.
Unless those countries are also restricting mixed living/business areas they suggest that there is some other more general factor that drives (no pun intended) people to car ownership. US zoning might explain why US car ownership is higher than in Europe but seems unlikely to explain more than maybe 20% of US car ownership.
At least for the remainder of my life, I recon. (I'm in my 40s.)
>You are still allowed to opt out.
>For now.
Opting out of consumerism is probably the most subversive thing most people can do.
When you need service from the same company that made your car, dealerships can be a life saver. (Not all of them, of course. YMMV.)
When the stock price starts going down / not growing as it “should”, everyone is unhappy. Execs can leave, key employees can leave, and investors can launch an activist campaign.
If the story is spun right even “weak” financial performance can lead to strong stock - look at Amazon. There was very little profit for years but that was because they were reinvesting in growth (and seeing results). So people believed and stock price went brrr.
I wish we would stop making our lives worse for each other.
Perhaps heated car seats would normally cost an extra $1,200. If they predict a 50% adoption rate, they could charge $40/month (raised annually by inflation) and they'd get $2,400 from each subscriber over a 5-year ownership. This way the people who don't use the hardware don't pay for it, their unused hardware is paid for by those who do use it.
If it functioned this way, I imagine some people would figure out how to hack the car to unlock these features without paying for them. I'd even be curious how illegal that would even be -- distributing software hacks might be prohibited by DMCA, but installing a switch that bypasses the infotainment OS entirely and directly connects the heated seats' resistive heating elements to 12V/48V rails or whatever surely wouldn't be in violation of any current laws.
OP was saying they pay to cart it around the country.
how do you derive $1,200 from a ~$20 BOM change?
The way things are going BYD will be able to come in next year and make a killing.
As an interesting anecdote, Ford was founded with the 2023 equivalent of less than a million dollars.
European carmakers are looking into subscriptions, knowing it will anger their most loyal customers, because their main business is struggling. They look at sofware companies with envy. To put it in perspective, Volkswagen, Europe's largest carmaker with 675,000 employees has the same market cap as Crowdstrike and Snowflake.
Making a ICE drive chain is very very difficult, there is a long supply chain required. This moat is drying out very very fast.
ICE drive trains aren't impossibly complicated. It's 200 year old technology that has been near perfected. Modern engines last 200k miles no sweat and require little more than an oil change. BEV is simpler in some ways but more complex in other ways. BEVs are much heavier and that means you need more structural components, heavier suspension, more complex crumple zone, etc. Electric cars also can't be repaired as easily. BEV aren't simpler than ICE cars, it's just a different set of costs/benefits.
Here are my questions:
1. Would this work for much more than small conveniences? Heated seats, steering wheel, wifi, etc? Where it's literally cheaper to build 1 part instead of 2.
2. If it's cheaper to always build in the feature, why wouldn't a competitor just include the feature as standard? The auto market is pretty competitive, and Brother did pretty well just by not screwing up their printers.
3. Will people get turned off at the fear of higher replacement part costs?
4. Has this grown past the small-experiment stage? Is it any more than BMW heated seats?
Ford's electric crate motor is out now: https://performanceparts.ford.com/part/M-9000-MACHE
Are we talking about better fuel efficiency, acceleration or both? To lock down better fuel efficiency would be downright evil. I am okay with locking down better acceleration.
I think more technically-gifted people need to look into these “subscription” systems, in order to find workarounds. Because if it comes with my car, _it’s mine to do whatever the f**k I want with it._
Nobody is claiming that.
After 25 years, it is assumed to be so safe they don't even need to comply with vehicle safety laws. If the import ban was about safety, it wouldn't ever allow cars previously legally considered 'unsafe' onto the roads, but the 25 year law pretty much gives away it was about people importing Lexuses and BMWs for less than it cost to buy one in the US, which made the manufacturers unhappy.
1: https://www.nhtsa.gov/importing-vehicle/importation-and-cert...
I suspect the 25-year cutoff is mostly about allowing enthusiasts to drive classic cars. There's a small number of them. Allowing millions of new unsafe cars to be sold to random consumers would be a terrible idea. I think the rules make sense.
I’ll find an old 72 travelall and swap the motor/trans for something modern and efficient and say screw the automakers.
One exception: a new c8 z06. I might get one, if my dealer gets an allocation and I have all my ducks lined up AND I can get it with no markup.
Which… isn’t happening
The first was a Mercedes A200 that had been imported from the Netherlands to Denmark. It did not have heated seats, something I overlooked when I bought it, supposedly not a deal breaker in NL, but a big issue during cold Danish winters. I would have gladly payed a subscription fee to activate seat heating had it been possible, but the car was originally made for another market, so there was nothing I could do except sell it and buy another one.
The second is my current car, a Volvo, which came with a wifi hotspot. For some reason, the hotspot stopped working after a the car was out of warranty, and I found that I am able to live without it, by using my phone as a hotspot instead. In this case I could have stopped paying for a feature that I no longer need. As cars get more laden with tech, I think it is quite feasible that some initially "fashionable" features will get irrelevant over time, and users might like to have to option to stop paying for features that have lost their relevance. If Volvo would upgrade my current sat-nav to Apple Carplay I would gladly pay for that too.
Having users pay recurring would also incentivize car makers to keep investing in updating their software, and perhaps even install hardware upgrades "free" of charge, in the hope that the user would keep paying a recurring fee to have them.
Please no. I don't want fancy software that hides essential features 4 layers deep and stops working when the internet is bad and the billing service can't be reached. I want buttons for the features and a display that works with android auto. Nothing more, nothing less.
You would've just had heated seats, no fee required.
You could also have bought a heated seat warmer seat cover*, or taken it to an independent service shop to have them install heated seats. Buying a different car was just the solution you choose. Having the hardware but having to pay for it in software wrankles those with a Marxist understanding of value and pricing things, but most of us don't live in such a world.