“We do believe there are subscription revenue opportunities for us," Kummer said. GM Chief Executive Mary Barra is aiming for $20 billion to $25 billion in annual revenue from subscriptions by 2030.”
Ah yes pissing off your customers because you think they’ll not just accept a worse experience, they’ll actually pay more for it. It’s a bold strategy.
GM is chasing the United airlines and Ryan air business model.
United expects customers to be grateful if they get involuntarily rescheduled to arrive a day and a half after the original arrival time, with not so much as a free snack ticket to compensate e even when the flight delay is of their causing, not weather, that made the original connection impossible.
Well CarPlay (and Android Auto) do cut off revenue.
I’ll never buy the satellite radio plan for my car to stream music. Why would I? My phone already provides a cell connection.
I’ll never buy the car cell plan to stream Spotify. Why would I? My phone does that already.
I never bought the $200+ per year map updates for my last car. Why would I? I had Apple Maps on CarPlay and it updates for free.
In many ways this seems like trying to go back to 2006 when cars had some subscription stuff (maps, satellite radio) but consumers had no other choice besides going without.
Today we have another choice. Use our cell phones. And they’re often superior experiences.
This will be reversed after much shareholder pain.
Well CarPlay (and Android Auto) do cut off revenue.
Sure, but that revenue stream only exists in a situation where the auto manufacturer has monopoly power (over that particular service).
Prior to cell phones, they had that power over navigation and could charge a fee for updated maps (annually via DVD initially).
Attempting to subvert the market and create a monopoly here is anti-consumer, anti-competitive, and very likely a short-sighted decision that GM will regret in 5 years.
The other future path is that all the other OEMs follow suit because they don't want to just make money once in selling hardware - but have a recurring revenue stream.
At the moment GM (and Tesla...) is capacity constrained so no reason to appease customers any more than they need to. Not till you have excess supply. I think GM can take the hit for a year or two and see if other OEMs follow. If not they can always say "whoops, here's an OTA upgrade".
If other OEMs follow what will consumers do - besides mounting their cellphone on their dash.
It'd be like if United split Economy into say Basic Economy and Economy with the difference being Basic Economy doesn't let you pick a seat. And then in Economy, they charged to pick anything but a middle seat.
They sell 2.2M cars a year, so if 5 model years of cars are involved, that's >$2200 ARPU. This makes no sense at all. It's orders of magnitude too high.
