Technology

When you need fitgirl to help you with your car.

The level of subscriptions has become insane

“We’re pivoting from serving peasants to fleecing rich dumbasses that subscribe and pay monthly fees for features built into the car.”

And they’ll make money doing it. Because there will never be a shortage of people with more money than sense.

If once you do not succeed, just try again next year. They tried and backtracked putting heated seats behind a paywall not even a year ago see here.

Unless laws are made to make this fundamentally illegal, they'll just keep pushing until it sticks. And once one manufacturer succeeds, they'll all follow.

Oh look, another reason not to buy BMW, I'll just add it to the other 456788656752 reasons.

You know it's just a matter of time before this shit starts being applied to budget cars.

...I really hope the tech crowd is working on jailbreaking this garbage.

Haha.. connection to server cannot be established. Suspension resetting to default.

So you purchase ordinary suspension but get active suspension that works exactly like ordinary suspension and cost like active suspension to service....

It's time we get legislation that gives the consumer access to all key pairs used in the product they purchased.

So, you buy a car with all these features, but you don't pay for them. They are disabled by default. You jailbreak your car, everything works without paying extra, but then you realize, you broke your warranty.

Thanks, I gladly stick with my old non-BMW car!

In what way does the suspension require regular servicing or an online connection to a server to function? That would be the only reason to offer it as an ongoing service cost.

Otherwise, you're just paying extra for something already in your car, not for an actual service, which would make no sense?

What next, paint ongoing service fees for having wheels? Not even for ensuring they're regularly replaced, serviced, or repaired, just for the ability to use them at all....

There are basic rules for coming up with these types of product subscriptions:

1. Is it something a large number of customers can't live without?
2. Is it something that costs money to support and continue developing? Subscriptions help defray that cost and loyal users are happy to keep it going.
3. Will the feature be actively used on a regular basis, going forward?

Now apply these to seat warmers, suspension adjustments, self-driving, or whatever else shows up in the future. If you don't hit all three, head back to the drawing board.

P.S.: This isn't limited to cars. It's equally true for any hardware product.

Now, I can "kinda" see the rationale behind optional features on a car being either enabled via software or subscription. I believe the permanent enable price should be the same as if you added the hardware to the car as an option.

As to why this might make sense for a carmaker. In my work I've visited car manufacturers before, and from what I could see it's quite expensive and adds time to support the various options when building a car. You see they have the main production line, and units are pulled off the main line to fit the options at various points and then reinserted and this causes problems for efficiency and price per unit I think.

So, there's probably a cost saving to making the base car have all the options fitted and having a completely standardized production line. However, the expense is likely going to mean if they sold the base car at the usual base car price they would either lose money, or at the very least, the profit margin wouldn't be worthwhile.

However, if you know a certain percentage of people will want the options, and you can enable it with software later, it's possible building the hardware into every car as standard would work out overall cheaper. They might also be able to upsell to more people by making a subscription option, perhaps with maybe a free trial for the first say 3 months of ownership. That is, they turn everything on for 6 months for free, then revert you to the package you paid for. Hoping that you liked some of the features and will pay or subscribe to keep them.

What I don't like is when this stuff might become ONLY available as a subscription, the overall move toward subscription models for everything irks me a lot. I'd much prefer we still get to choose a package, and have the ability to upgrade later.

So I think my point is, the argument "the hardware is there anyway" doesn't really work, because they are likely going to install the hardware at a loss, on the assumption (backed up by their own numbers) they will sell enough to make a bigger profit overall.

They also likely bake into the numbers that a very small number of people will hack the car and enable the features anyway. The vast majority will not do this, though.

Well done BMW. Anything that leads to more people cycling instead of driving is a good thing in my book.

These cars already cost more than my life, how can they ask for more money.

Hardware As A Service (HAAS).

I wish that someone sues when something breaks in the car that you didn't opt in for.

And... yet better, they get sued when something breaks that is in connection with a paid service and someone suspects that it's because they paid part caused it.

In theory most subscription services provide additional content as time goes on. This only provides a capability that already exists on the car.

We are pirating car suspension now holy shit

People act like subscriptions are a new thing for cars, and somehow mentally gloss over the fact that they have to physically go in to renew their energy subscription weekly, not to mention the quarterly, and bi-annual subscriptions for oil and various maintenance respectively.

Everything has always been a subscription, you're just a frog that's well done.

Don't get me started on your road subscription.

Next up, Anti-lock brakes as a Subscription Service. ASS.