The New Audi A3 Is Amess with In-Car Subscriptions | Hacker News Reader

The New Audi A3 Is Amess with In-Car Subscriptions

motor1.com

64 pointsTimothee70 comments

The Chinese carmakers will obliterate the western ones, it’s insane how these companies are trying so hard to destroy any possible goodwill people might have.

this is what happens when businesses are led by mbas and accountants, I'm sure the numbers look fantastic

It's financialization vs industrialization and those decisions are made at the nation state level; "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance" - Charles Prince.

Short term gains for long term pains. I hope customers steer clear of this behavior to discourage it. I'm personally fatigued by everything being a subscription.

Is there anything fundamentally wrong with Chinese cars as opposed to Western cars?

I mean, non-western brands such as Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, Kia, Mazda, Tata, Mahindra, Proton etc exist, so what's the big deal with Chinese cars?

And by the way, I sincerely hope this new subscription-heavy Audi A3 flops.

A few decades ago the Japanese were learning to make cars and there were some quality problems until they figured it out. I think China has gone through a similar thing.

Chinese cars apparently still lack good reputation in terms of durability, repairability or reliability. As far as I know they also are full of needles software stuff prone to fail and to spy on you because the Asians are more prone to welcome digital "progress" and surveillance in their lives. For the westerners mindless consumerism is just a norm so more of them can take it critical, for the Asians who got out of poverty way later it is heaven finally on Earth so they just cheer more and more of it. Japanese Nissan is infamous for the craziest user privacy policy ever and I doubt any Chinese carmaker is better (I would imagine they have no privacy policy at all, just take whatever data imaginable and stream it in plain-text).

> still lack good reputation in terms of durability, repairability or reliability

Are Western cars particularly better in these areas? I have a Mercedes E class (W212) bought new several years ago which I've always serviced at Mercedes authorized workshop. It's a money pit. Reliability — something or the other snaps every other month these days. Repairability — even simple things require taking apart the whole car. Durability — you mean the strength of the body? Yeah that seems good, actually.

And I know mine is not a one-off case.

Maybe the Chinese cars might actually get these things right. We don't know yet.

The European cars' redeemable aspect is that they drive well.

> As far as I know they also are full of needles software stuff prone to fail

Go sit in a new Mercedes BMW, or even Volkswagen and enjoy all those screens. Decide for yourself if they're needed or not.

> for the Asians it heaven finally on Earth so they just cheer more and more of it

Fascinating how you caricatured away billions of people with a simple flippant thoughtless remark.

> Fascinating how you caricatured away billions of people with a simple flippant thoughtless remark.

I believe caricatures are among the most precious things a human can produce, self-caricaturing even being abong the highest merits. This one is based primarimy on self-reflection, as most of them are, consciously or not.

I'm sure it's mostly FUD.

I had an Audi A1. Back to Japanese cars now. Never getting an Audi again. Instead of happily working like a car is supposed to, something always broke, it was difficult and expensive to service. The mechanic told me: "this type of engine comes rattling from the factory". While it worked, it worked great, but then an oil indicator would appear, a taillight would randomly flash. Also, the newer Q5 diesels eat oil like there's no tomorrow, you have to fill a liter every 1000 kms, along with diesel and adblue. That's three automotive fluids that you need to fill in regularly. I just hope they get banned sooner rather than later.

We won't buy Nissans though. They're just more expensive and annoying Renaults. Also if one wants a cheaper utilitarian vehicle, French cars have gotten better, to the point it makes no sense to buy a more expensive German brand. I used to dismiss Renault but after renting a Clio and seeing how well it handles and how much it costs, I've changed my mind. The soundproofing was crap though, but I couldn't care less since the rest of the car was very erogomonic, had useful sat nav, rear camera, was not underpowered even with the low capacity entry level engine and it handled very well both in the city and on the highway.

Also Alfa Romeos. What's even the point of buying a BMW as long as Alfa exists? They basically have 3 models, as opposed to 10+? A sports sedan and two SUVs. It's got the looks and the horsepower, all leather inside. It's just as reliable if not even more mostly because BMW is no longer a hallmark of reliability, quite the opposite. If that's not enough, there's always Maserati. And if one wants an EV then buy a Tesla instead. The others are playing catch up anyway, with no longer a chance in sight to actually rival Tesla or even the more upmarket Chinese manufactureres like BYD or Nio.

And I’m an Audi convert after 13 years of an A7 from new and put 120k miles on it.. Best car I’ve ever owned (40 years, 17 cars).. Yearly service, oil change each time.. Transmission and diff. Oils at 50k & 100k, and all that’s needed doing beyond that is the stupid Aluminium brake dust shields, and exhaust heat shields that just seemingly dissolve when exposed to, anything.. Oh, and the slidey outey screen failed due to the power cable, but cost £50 to fix.. Cheapest maintenance car I have ever owned..

> the Asians who got out of poverty way later it is heaven finally on Earth so they just cheer more and more of it.

There are so many things wrong with this statement Im not sure where to start.

I know. I just had no idea how to express the idea better. It would take an entire essay and a lot of research to express the same correctly which I have no time to do so I put it rough expecting the audience to get the clue and spit out the bitter aftertaste. I'm sorry if anybody got sincerely upset by reading this.

I don't think there's any problem with the cars themselves (my parents just bought a BYD Dolphin, and my partner and I are about to buy a LDV eDeliver9), but I think the critical question is - can you get qualified servicing, and spare parts when something goes wrong?

The language directed at Chinese cars now sounds a lot like that directed at Japanese import cars early on.

Those last three brands ... are they sold in the US?

Historically, Chinese cars have performed poorly on crash test. Google: chinese car safety zero star

Have they improved, and will they continue to improve? Of course.

I think in the US it is the same issue as Tata.

I might buy a Tata Altroz for $7500 if I could go to a Tata dealer and test drive one but Tata doesn't even sell to the US from my understanding.

So you can't test drive one, can't get parts for repairs, can't buy one and I am not even 100% sure if you did get one you would be able to get it legally on the road in the US.

People had the same perceptions of Kia 20 years ago in the US. The major difference though is that you could actually buy a road legal Kia from a Kia dealer.

Yep. Buy what's available.

I wasn't commenting from a US perspective.

Whenever a car company sets up shop in a new market (country) it's initially going to be difficult. Particular when it's a large country like USA, although conversely the manufacturer gets access to a large market.

Anyway, I don't have much knowledge regarding these things.

And not being in the US doesn't imply it's a bad car. Manufacturers choose to enter or not enter certain markets. Business decisions. For example I believe the new Toyota Land Cruiser isn't sold in the US. Nor is any model from Skoda. Doesn't mean they're objectively bad cars.

I'm going to reply here about another comment you made elsewhere, because you're not only deadvoted - people dislike your comments so often that you're shadowbanned here and nobody can read or reply to most of them, but also because it's an absolutely hilariously stupid comment and it deserves to be called out.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=swozey#39709282

I'll go line by line:

> You simply over value your internet presence.

You have no internet presence. You're literally shadowbanned/deadnamed on hackernews and not a single person with default HN settings can read your comments. You provide nothing whatsoever to hn. Thats your internet presence here. You're a random, rude green name with [dead] next to it posting like you're galaxy brain v2.

In what world are you remotely the person to tell someone that THEIR internet presence, when you can't even maintain civility enough to not be banned, is less important than they believe?

> Everyone is basically doing the same thing so it has almost no value.

I'm a staff level SRE who works on super performant hpc autoscaling, distributed systems, cluster federations for cdns, massive media farms (think pixar rendering farms) and POPs. Am I a nuclear assassin? No. Do I hire people who do my literal job and know exactly how rare or not rare my skillset is? Yeah, I do. Are you logged into my Indeed and seeing the applications and interviews I'm getting? You're not, right?

Sorry you suck. Or your skills suck, or whatever it is that makes you just sound like the miserable low-skill person who wrote your comment.

You understand this is HN right? This isn't facebook? We're actual engineers who post our projects and work with one another. The first 4 people who wrote Kubernetes didn't go to Facebook and post it for your cat to see. They came to HN to post it for the other engineers who would build/use the project could be made aware of it.

> I think you also highly underestimate the possible negative value of companies finding your internet presence and not liking what they find. I have never read a Linkedin profile in my life that wasn't a total waste of my time because they are all exactly the same. Everyone believes they have something unique and helping them stand out when in reality it is probably doing exactly the opposite.

I'm literally the person who is hiring the people in this topic. This is an absolutely ludicrous and just bluntly stupid statement you've made here.

Something is wrong with your personality. You are hilariously rude and completely unaware of how ridiculous you sound.

Work on integrating into other cultures better. When I moved from the USA to Germany I had to really give people a lot of leeway because they tend to come off as extremely bitter and rude.

Now, when I googled "ecoquant" I was hoping to find your github and get a good laugh, but I assume because of how poorly you portray yourself online you don't want your presence to be easily tracked. Because yeah, if I saw your presence online I'd probably not hire you.

Kind of like someone who is projecting horrible things onto other people being the actual one to perpetrate those crimes. Interesting.

I assume you're referring to the fact that many other Chinese products are just that --- products, often with some surprisingly useful features, and not subscriptions? That's been my experience with a lot of no-name/obscure-brand stuff from Ali, but unfortunately a lot of the big prominent Chinese brands have started to go down the enshittification/cloud/subscription route too. Recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39115837

And a decade from now, the CEOs of the western car companies will blame us for being disloyal as they ask for another taxpayer funded bail-out.

I strongly believe that cars should not be running internet connected software at all. This is a violation of your privacy waiting to happen, and in drive-by-wire vehicles, a homocide waiting to happen. Any of these subscriptions will require periodic phoning home, which means both the tower operators your car maker, and whoever they've done deals with will have specific, targeted information about you including your exact wherabouts, your financial information, and probably a mic and video camera feed in and around your vehicle. This is a dystopian nightmare. Maybe if the car was leased, or was a business vehicle, this could be justified, maybe. But for a personal vehicle your interaction with the manufacturer and dealer should be strictly limited. Given widespread ignorance about these capabilities and what they are used for, I'm in favor of regulation limiting these kinds of connections and transactions in personal vehicles. Some revenue streams are too dangerous and too risky to the public good to allow to exist.

> This is a violation of your privacy waiting to happen

"Waiting to happen" was 15 years ago. Today it's just privacy violation.

> This is a violation of your privacy waiting to happen...

Waiting? It is happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39666976 (Automakers Are Sharing Consumers' Driving Behavior with Insurance Companies).

I will not purchase a car with a subscription, period. If others are doing that, please stop.

Thoughts on subscription for data connection?

Not the same person, but:

I'm already paying for a mobile phone; I'm happy to use CarPlay / Android Auto (where it projects a screen like VNC). I don't want a separate connection in the car that I'll need to pay for. I don't really need a data connection in the car directly while I drive.

Anecdote: I have a newer ICE car (okay not so new anymore), and its entertainment system rebooted while I was driving at speed at one point. It was fine because that's unrelated to driving functions. I would not be happy if that included my speedometer (which was an old school dial in that vehicle).

My phone is always with me when I drive and has a data connection that a car can tether to.

Why would I want that? My phone can provide data via Bluetooth or a hotspot if needed. I don't need to pay for an extra mobile connection.

I own and iPhone. It works great. I have my "subscription" via my phone plan already. It connects to CarPlay great.

What if everyone does it?

Then it becomes a good time to start a company that doesn’t do it.

We are talking about a car manufacturer. It's a hard lift to start a car maker. Tesla is kind of a miracle.

It's far more likely that in a few decades the entire car will be a per-mile subscription.

I already pay that at the gas station.

> but now you'll have to pay an in-car subscription fee for basic features like high-beam assist, dual-zone climate control, adaptive cruise control, and smartphone integration

My 2019 fully paid-for-life ford fusion has all these features without any subscription. Thanks Audi for making me feel good about my purchase today.

Curious how this will be enforced. The stripper kia soul was sold without cruise control. But if you simply added the correct button and changed a wire harness, voila! Similarly, the hardware is obviously on the car, so will you have the right to try to use it independent of the software subscription?

There are going to be some interesting cases....

You will be sued for violation of DMCA anti-circumvention laws, of course.

Isn't there right to repair act for such cases? Aren't software patents excluded for cars in US?

Lexus ES has an optional cloud navigation subscription. I don’t think most people sign up for it, because you can use smart phone integration, but it would be frustrating if you had to have a subscription for the smart phone integration to work.

I can see having a subscription for features which require ongoing updates, but the reality is that manufacturers will collect the money and probably not ever do much to keep software which implements features updated.

Yeah it's crazy to charge for Apple CarPlay on an Audi. It comes standard on nearly all economy cars! There shouldn't be a fee at all — let alone a subscription.

Maybe that's the game: distract with outrage over subscriptions, and people will be happy to "just" pay a one-time purchase fee.

Maybe that's what a premium car actually is right now: just a more polished economy car but with subscription services that you get for free in the cheaper car, less serviceability more expensive maintenance and repairs.

Good luck, Audi. The VW brand already has problems and this is a great way of driving your other brands into the ground.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38455881

I seem to remember the first in-car nav system I used in around 1997 had a subscription from the dealer because they would mail out new CDs to install on a regular basis. (Philips CARIN)

> Lexus ES has an optional cloud navigation subscription. I don’t think most people sign up for it, because you can use smart phone integration, but it would be frustrating if you had to have a subscription for the smart phone integration to work.

That's a pretty big oversight on Lexus's part. They're leaving money on the table by giving their customers a subscription bypass like that. Let's hope, for the shareholders' sake, that a business consultant notices the error and fixes it quickly.

I think the sarcasm was lost there. You need to use /s to remind people :)

I did tech support at Lexus dealerships for 7 years. SO MANY old people buy those nav subscriptions. And Sirius XM

Hacker News is such a skewed sample.

It's difficult for us to comprehend how gullible and technologically and financially clueless the vast majority of people (esp. old people) are.

We're going to need some sort of knowledge graph for all the different vehicle models, imagine how vague dealers will be when your looking on the lot. Wonder how crazy this will be once they start adding in-car ads.

Dashboard ads swoops in, “You are now in an un-controllable drift, would you like to top-up your insurance? Say NO to stop; accepting add-on in 10, 9, 8, 7 ...”

The car industry is really hemorrhaging money if they need to resort to nickel and diming the consumers. The consumer segment of car transportation (ie, personal vehicles) is coming to an end.

I have yet to see any decent innovations in the personal vehicle segment. Designs haven’t changed in a long time. Efficiency is going backwards, at least in the US, as manufacturers begin to push larger vehicles for the insecure motorist.

I’ve been needing to take rental cars occasionally for a new job and it’s astounding there are new cars being sold that get 25-30mpg max. Some cars have what should be very efficient engines but are strapped to bloated SUVs. It’s more than embarrassing it’s depressing

Unfortunately the CAFE regulations that were put in place a decade ago to increase MPG per manufacturer left a gaping hole or exception for “light duty trucks”. Trucks were seen as “working people” vehicles so the car industry discovered they can skirt those regulations by selling consumers large trucks and SUVs under the “light duty truck” class.

Car manufacturer propaganda worked, convinced many family units to upgrade because of perceived “sAfeTy” and “cOmFoRt”. In reality, these things are more dangerous to other people on the road and pedestrians on the streets. I would say 95% of truck and SUV drivers on the road today need to get their license revoked and traded in for mental therapy.

EVs, Hybrids, Tesla, Waymo, Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are innovations in the car industry. They did not come from the incumbents, but innovations rarely do.

Hybrids came from Toyota, one of the largest incumbents.

The concept of “EVs” is nothing new. Concept was tested and deployed in the late 19th century. [1]. Early “modern” versions built by GM in the mid 1990s [2]. Sure, Tesla did bring back EVs to the mainstream in the late 2000s to early 2010s, but only after a century of human failures to bring it to market.

Waymo is just semi autonomous driving tech. It’s a bit useless in my opinion. But I’m a bit partial to public transportation over transportation via personal vehicle. The “problems” it solves wouldn’t exist if countries (namely the US) would have more diverse transportation options and more efficiently built cities.

Android Auto / Apple CarPlay - are these really considered “innovations”? It’s putting the OS of your favorite phone and loading it into a car head unit. Making sure it connects neatly with the physical components of a car. At the end of the day, it’s an over engineered radio. Incidentally, this probably is what allows car manufacturers to capture all of the private data that happens in “your” vehicle [3]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehi...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1

[3] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-...

How much do they actually earn from these? The hardware is already paid for. All the effort to create and maintain the subscription system, and the loss of good will, all for the unknown number of people who would actually buy and keep on renewing it.

I think it is a net loss for all. Except the consultants who recommended this to get a monthly assured income, that will never materialise.

The market should take care of that. An easy way to differentiate your company compared to Audi.

I actually bought a second hand base model Kia, swapped some parts to enable auto head lights and cruise control (changed the steering wheel to the one with buttons for cruise control).

Swapped the shitty mp3-stereo-radio shit unit with Aliexpress Android 4gb 2Din with specially made Kia-fitting front panel and parking HD camera. And added usb port mounted tire pressure monitoring system. Now I have almost all the features of the higher trim, except folding mirrors (this would be expensive to find and retrofit because new wire harness will be needed). Total cost ~1000 EUR (mostly for the android and some wiring work).

Parts can be found in EU at https://rrr.lt/en.

ahh yeah, and soundproof the doors and if may be the floor of the vehicle. It'll cost may be 400EUR, but it's "much" more quiet than even the higher trims.

So there is a way to "upgrade" it. Buy something 3-5 yr. old and fish for second-hand parts on rrr.lt and trim it yourself.

In my experience, the higher end of the product and more often you end up paying extra for features you take for granted. The hotel business has been this way for years with extra fees for all kinds of things that a basic, decent hotel gives you as part of the stay. Think parking, internet, breakfast. They aren't always the best quality but they are included in your rate. You don't have to pay extra.

Hell, even resort fees are a form of subscription that are typically not optional - unless you are part of some negotiated deal with the chain. It's all about hiding the real price to make it appear lower.

Too bad they don't know the subscription pricing for these features, the one-time purchase pricing, or whether it will apply in the US as well (just EU is known so far).

I don't have high hopes that the pricing will be reasonable, but IMO as long as you can still buy it outright for a fair price (and when you sell it the next owner doesn't have to pay again), then I don't mind subscriptions being an option.

But my guess is that even if prices are fair to begin with, they'll eventually become unreasonable-seeming as consumers get accustomed to having in-car subscriptions.

Unfortunately, Tesla has already set a precedent with regards to reselling a car & the new owners needing to pay for upgraded features again.

It really doesn’t make sense to lay out a lot of capital costs to outfit the cars for features, while driving the customer payments for that capital down by asking for subscriptions.

Or maybe you baseline the price higher so it doesn’t matter if only 50% of the customer base pays, but now you’re putting yourself at a price disadvantage vs competitors so don’t put partially utilized cost components on their cars.

Sounds like it's all software, so no marginal cost of installation:

> add-ons like adaptive cruise control or Apple CarPlay and Android Auto

I guess I was thinking of seat warmers that had been reported earlier. And adapative cruise usually needs at least some extra ranging sensors.

I wondered if the sensors are already there for emergency braking or other safety features.

I'm just glad you can buy adaptive cruise on its own. I remember seeing a vehicle recently that you couldn't even get adaptive cruise unless you paid $8k to upgrade to a higher trim level.

I look forward to buying a cheap “base” car that requires a ton of subscriptions… and then not buying a single one, keeping it a cheap car.

My Audi from 2018 has car play for free... this is absurd....

Does the emission cheating also require a subscription now?

It is not really a new system but the type of features to put behind a paywall is. My car (also from the VW family) has some features which need an extra subscription. But either these are included for the first 3 years, which aims the whole system at second hand buyers, or include features that are not really needed. To be fair we already payed for overpriced features in the past. It was mainly assumed that they will go together with special hardware. But most of the time that wasn‘t actually the truth. „Get the media+ package for Apple car play and sat navigation“ etc. they just try to move some of these packages from the configuration within an AppStore. I still don‘t look forward to a system with monthly/yearly subscriptions.

a mess

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