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Comment by chrsw | Hacker News Reader

Companies love subscription based services. I have to assume it's becauce they're much more lucrative. But many times companies forget the other part: what value are they providing? Telling me I now have to subscribe to something I'm using to owning isn't going to work, or shouldn't work.

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In theory they much better align expenses with revenue. If you need to maintain servers and pay for LTE plans in perpetuity to make this functionality work, then a subscription makes more sense than bundling it with the purchase price. People are just tired of paying for this kind of thing though, every aspect of human existence is being loaded into a subscription service.

The problem is value add:

The old remote start system worked just fine. I click a button, a remote signal is sent to my car. Boom. Was it perfect? No. But it was local.

Now we replaced a local system with a worse one. I tried using the mazda start and the delay could be 10 minutes because it depends on network coverage OR just how frequently the car wakes up to check the network.

Edit: What would I pay for?

- Remote start service that will automatically start my car 45 minutes after my alarm goes off if the external temperature in my area is below 40 degrees F.

That's additive, and many would want this in say wisconsin, but its not a feature many would need, so the market is reduced.

There is lots of value to LTE-based start.

It works even if you're too far from the car for the RF signal to reach. I park just below my office window because if I'm too far away, my RF-based remote start won't work.

Also being able to remotely adjust climate settings would be nice.

I do fully disagree with their implementation of this, especially with regards to a $10 subscription fee.

And what about if you don't have good cell service in your parking lot or garage?

The problem is the trade-off.

We don't get to decide "I like remote-start, but I want to be able to start it from inside the store while the car is in the parking lot" -- That's a $10 a month gain that I'd pay. I don't care about that? Well I can use short-range radios.

If that was the feature? It would be hailed as awesome.

This is the pushback. Mazda turns off a bunch of features unless I pay $10 and the old version was working just fine for me.

For a feature like remote start, this makes some sense, but companies are trying to charge subscription-based fees for things which have no ongoing expense.

For example, BMW offering heated seats as a monthly subscription.

Regardless, ongoing costs for an LTE data connection which can handle things like remote start costs fractions of a dollar per month at the scale of Mazda.

The stock market love companies with subscriptions…

The problem is it does work, a lot, and not enough people push back to hurt their sales, versus the number of people that just pay it, or weren't going to use the feature anyway.

Same thing with all the data collection and privacy violations of many other companies as of late. They keep doing it because it's not hurting their bottom line. I think tech people often forget that we are not their target audience.

> The problem is it does work, a lot, and not enough people push back to hurt their sales

All the evidence in the car industry to date I've seen appears to show charging subscriptions for hardware functions that were previously free or included from factory with no ongoing cost tends to back fire - BMW famously first tried a few years ago to make heated seats subscription based, and has fully backtracked etc.

> https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/bmw-will-not-cha...

"We thought that we would provide an extra service to the customer by offering the chance to activate that later, but the user acceptance isn’t that high. People feel that they paid double – which was actually not true, but perception is reality, I always say. So that was the reason we stopped that."

Remote start, widely available as a free to use feature in many Mazda models to date, falls in the same bucket really. If BMW can't make it work at the premium ends of the market, difficult to see Mazda doing it either.

> People feel that they paid double – which was actually not true, but perception is reality, I always say.

Do you have any ideas on why the double cost is not true? Maybe manufacturing efficiencies make it cheaper to install the parts despite whether the customer paid for the upgrade?

It's likely just economies of scale, similar to how almost all cars, even the cheapest ones, have electric windows. It's cheaper to include them in all model tiers than to keep a separate SKU for roll-ups that'll barely sell anyway, because they exist so they can say "Starting at [lower $]" than what dealers actually keep in stock.

This kind of stuff happens in tech all the time, like lower tier CPUs that are actually manufactured as higher tier ones, but with CPU/GPU cores disabled even if they weren't defective.

Maybe if they didn't gatekeep the feature behind an app in the first place, a lot more people would use it.

It's basically free money. You get money from people who subscribe and nothing from people who don't.

Since so many companies are simultaneously doing this app-powered subscription based value extraction there is no competitive disadvantage to doing it.

How long are memories? Annoying a subset of your customers for 20 years in exchange for orders of magnitude more profit for the rest of time?

We're seeing it in housing right now - predatory institutional investors buying up stock while younger generations are increasingly coming to terms with the idea of renting for their entire lives.

Very much indeed. Lots of auto makers are quite naive … there should be laws governing this …

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