The best EV is an electric bus with trolley lines or a tram. I hate that I have to own a monstrous depreciating asset to have reliable transportation. If you think people are buying this to drive on a track you are naive. They are paying $60/month to make their already unsafe overweight vehicle even more unsafe. I hope they go bankrupt.
Cars should be the exception rather than the rule. We have spent so long catering to them that we have ruined our downtowns and public transit systems. We have diverted funding that should have been spent on transportation for everyone to individual transportation. This has left North American elderly, disabled, and youth trapped and unable to move around our hostile and ugly cities.
A farm truck or tractor makes a lot of sense in the middle of a farming community to do work. The same truck or tractor in an urban downtown will kill children and crowd out transit.
3. Allow mixed use in neighborhoods. Japan is really great at this. Allow families to turn garages into small bodegas. Allow small businesses to flourish by not forcing them into isolated strip malls surrounded by pedestrian hostile parking lots.
https://www.archdaily.com/search/projects/categories/mixed-u...
4. Narrow roads and eliminate on-street parking to create additional pedestrian and cycle infrastructure.
And so on... There are hundreds of plans that are extremely well thought out and just need to be implemented.
They were some of our coolest trams too, going through beautiful forests and countryside. They also didn't kill wildlife wholesale like the highways do now. Rural trains were wonderful. There are a lot of rural train stations in Minnesota that have beautiful little towns built around them. Most of the towns are dying now because all the sources of income died out with automation of large scale farming, utter isolation, and the loss of public transit.
Suburbs can support great public transit, and it would be cheaper than cars for everyone.
Suburbs cannot support the bad public transport options they get though. The lack of density makes it harder to design a great network (network is critical here!), you cannot make mistakes as there is no density to save you from mistakes.
> Suburbs can support great public transit, and it would be cheaper than cars for everyone.
While I agree... there is no way Americans will forgo cars. Americans love our rural and public and wild lands too much to not be able to simply visit at moment's notice.
Having lived in Europe, I understand how this works there. Europeans don't have the same relationship with nature that Americans often do. The ones that do usually have cars.
The point is not about eliminating cars. Cars are, and will continue to remain, an important form of transportation, especially in rural or remote areas.
Public transit and alternative forms of transportation such as bikes, are about
1. Reducing traffic, less people driving means less traffic for those that need to drive.
2. Improving safety within cities and suburbs, a car is far more dangerous than a bike or public transit
3. Reducing the cost of infrastructure maintenance, cars are heavy, especially EVs, a reduction in the number of cars on the road would lead to massive savings in the cost of maintaining our roads.
4. Removing the car burden, cars are a expensive depreciating asset, and for low-income folks they are a massive tax just to be able to travel to work. So folks who don't want to, or don't have the means to own a car, they should be able to travel without paying a huge time penalty.
5. Health benefits, less cars on the road means people who prefer to walk, bike can do so safely and gain some health benefits.
6. Cars are noisy, noise pollution is linked to bad health outcomes, less cars = less noise on public areas.
Americans do not have to forgo their cars. They just need to forgo a single car. Most families I know have a car per adult, and often a spare in case one breaks. However they could easily drop down to one truck (not car, though maybe a SUV or minivan) for those rural/wildlands trips and other things that need a truck. All we need to do is give them a good option for the 90% of trips that are not those things: getting to work, getting groceries, running to schools, going to church, the game, the bar...
Just because we can't eliminate all cars doesn't mean we can't/shouldn't have great transit. Focus on make a system that is useful for people for the 90% of trips at less cost than the one car they are getting rid of to pay for it.
Absolutely, and if you eliminated all of that... most americans would still want a car, because it lets them get out.
Look... I live in the inner city. Realistically, I walk everywhere most of the week. However, I keep a car so I can get to the mountains 50 miles away. That is the main reason I keep a car and my main usage of it (and to also visit family and friends who live more rurally).
Imagine if you could get to those same mountains without needing to worry about parking or traffic. When you get there, you don't have to dodge cars constantly or walk 10 miles into the back country to get away from road noise. It's silent aside from the sounds of birds and the wind in the trees.
When I go to the mountains in America I hear the constant drone of cars and generators...
The other problem (that Europeans often don't understand) is just how big America is. Texas alone is twice as big as the UK and Ireland combined.
My point is that covering America with train tracks would cost $trillions. Yes, there was a time when we built something on that scale: The interstate highway system. But those days are long over. American politics is now far too gridlocked to build a public bathroom, much less a trillion-dollar public transit system. Even if it ended up saving money and the planet.
Don't let big become an excuse. Sure the US is too big to go NYC->LA via train. However DC->Boston is still a great route to run a train, a high speed train on that route should decimate plane and car travel on the route. Connecting everything east of the Mississippi via train (and possibly just a little west) makes perfect sense. There is also a great north-south route along the west coast.
Yes building those trains would cost a lot. It shouldn't be trillions (that it will be is a problem we should fix!). Lets not be defeatist: lets demand better of our politicians. We have good ideas of where things are going wrong, but politicians see transit as a way to throw money at union labor and consultants (democrats); or a complete waste (the Republicans). Both sides need to do better.
>> The best EV is an electric bus with trolley lines or a tram
>Or a train. Massive numbers of passengers.
>cars seem useful in low-density, very spread out regions.
Well, while I'm here already . . .
Urban trains can be counter-productive in unintended ways.
The electric "mass-transit" Metrorail in Houston runs at street-level on many streets that were originally designed for horse & carriage.
Taking up space that was previously available for freer movement of buses, but worse with the rail crossings which almost always require more passengers in cars to idle much longer while waiting than there are passengers on the trains at the time.
Electric buses would have been much better and less wasteful of finite resources.
The light rail was originally intended for ambitious people who could not afford cars to have a quick commute to downtown jobs, reach Texas Medical Center & Astrodome area to the south, and higher education to the north.
"Massive" numbers of passengers outside of rush hours mainly only occur during Rodeo time or other special events where massive numbers of visitors come from out-of-town.
The rest of the time passengers are quite sparse, somewhat divided between workers & students versus those carless and/or on the streets whose ambitions do not include either. Some of these passengers can be quite predatory on ordinary citizens, and this gives them more efficient ways to travel or gather in places where prospective victims can more likely be found at different times, and a quick way to escape after a crime has been committed:
I still ride it weekly but never would bring my laptop or even cellphone outside of rush hours since there are always at least one or two questionable characters and that's the only time they are usually well outnumbered by ordinary riders.
But the collisions are quite common and these could have been more amenable to better engineering planning:
3 MAY 2023 "Video of the crash". Notice how the bystander throws up his hands knowingly right after the 1 minute mark:
https://abc13.com/houston-news-ambulance-turns-in-front-of-m...
>On Tuesday, METRO said the investigation is over, and no one is being cited for the crash that resulted in multiple people being hurt. ABC13 also called HFD on Tuesday to ask, specifically, if the ambulance driver is still operating ambulances. But they are still citing an open investigation, an investigation we know is closed.
For both of these parties this time liability is limited, same range as for buses:
>Why METRO bus crash victim has to pay up - despite being innocent
https://abc13.com/metro-bus-crash-houston-tort-claims-act/62...
>Even if everything goes his way, Leger will still be out hundreds of thousands of dollars because he was hit by a bus.
>That's because METRO's buses and the rail is protected by the Texas Tort Claims Act.
>It caps their expenses regardless of if the victim dies or is severely maimed at $100,000 per person or $300,000 total.
>"If a negligent METRO bus driver runs a red light and hits a van that has 14 children from a daycare and kills them, the most that METRO would ever be responsible for is $300,000," said Matt Willis, Leger's attorney.
If the full monetary damages of every incident were to have been recoverable, Metrorail might have been bankrupt long ago. But they still have money to burn going forward:
A while ago there was an article posted on HN about an old Japanese rail line that still maintained an end-of-the line terminal which was now only used by one passenger. This seemed to be a benevolent gesture. I was thinking how much more benevolent could it be in Houston where they built new rail lines for almost nobody to use very much?
>So how should Metro redeploy that $2.45 billion light rail budget instead?
Sometimes (or even with some currencies) there can be more environmental emissions earning the money to begin with compared to spending it wisely later. Depends on the scale and how wisely:
>For future planning purposes and MetroNext, it really does not matter if autonomous vehicles become available in 5 years or decades in the future. Anything built in the MetroNext plan can be expected to be in service to the year 2100 and beyond. MetroNext needs to be ready for autonomous transit, if and when it comes. The plan also needs to maximize mobility benefits of transit investments if autonomous transit is slow to develop or has a minimal impact. Practically, that means concrete guideways with rubber-tired vehicles than can evolve as the technology does.
IIRC rubber tires are a more modern & versatile technology than rail.
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/southcentral/2017/12/2...
>Some drivers said Metro should turn its efforts internally instead of policing drivers.
>“Why don’t they ticket their own drivers for blocking intersections or not blowing the horn?” said Salvadore Martin, who drives downtown daily.
>Other drivers said Houston should have anticipated safety problems with a street-level rail system from the beginning.
Engineers are usually aware of things like this more so than bureaucrats, but you can't fix stupid either way.
>“This is why you build a subway,” said Georgine McDonald, another driver in the area.
Not in downtown Houston, 20,000 leagues under the bayou floodwaters ring any bells?
Naturally Houston has the most light rail collisions under a number of terms, averaging about 90 per year in recent times:
>"Everyday people go in front of that train thinking they can beat it,"
>Those near misses happen all the time.
>If anyone should know better, it's Jim Robinson, the chairman of METRO's public safety committee.
>"I was thinking about something else and almost stepped off in front of a train," Robinson said. "It got my attention when he blew his whistle."
>"There's still work to do," Robinson said.
If you are holding up Houston of all places as to why trains are not a solution to transportation, you may want to look into other areas. Houston and Texas in general is actively hostile to public transit projects. Anything which even remotely impacts driving is opposed by huge lobbies. There is a reason that car manufacturers and distributors have moved there over the past few decades.
As for flooding and subways. The Dutch are literally 6 feet below sea level and seem to manage just fine.
If you do a lot of driving on rural 2-lane highways, I could see reasonable justification for investing significantly in being able to pass quickly, having seen more than a few situations where a prolonged pass exposed the parties to considerable risk of harm.
Passing faster is not safer, in fact the opposite is true. It FEELS safer, but the chances of being killed go up astronomically. You feel like you can make it, all the while you are accelerating to fatal speeds. If a car appears in the oncoming lane you are supposed to slow down and return to the rear of the vehicle you were passing. Your car can decelerate much faster than it can accelerate. Brakes can dissipate over 1300 horsepower. That's even more than a Model S Plaid.
In all my decades of driving I have never seen anyone do this other than myself. People are so committed to passing they literally run people off the road while going head on with tractor trailers and family cars. I've thought I was going to see people die more than once. It's insane how ignorant and self centered people get behind the wheel.
I'd blame it less on ignorance, than panic. Once committed to a process it takes effort to change. All while watching that tractor grows larger and larger in your line of vision.
There is definitely panic. Mostly because they were never taught what to do. The worst thing is, when you try to tell them they get mad or ignore you. I don't know how to describe that other than plain ignorance.
Maybe for you. I have no interest in paying for this subscription, but a trolley or tram or train would not solve my problem without an absolutely mind-boggling amount of infrastructure investment, and there are so many things I would rather pay for.
I've never enjoyed public transit, here or in Europe. It's a pain in the ass to some degree, no matter how good it is. An individual car is the epitome of freedom, so you would need to convince me (and others who like our cars) why we should swap.
Nailed it. The car is the symbol of liberty and freedom, and not without reason. People who present public transit as an alternative to cars confound me. I will choose my own car over any kind of public transit every day. I even try to avoid flights if I can drive to my destination in ~12 hours. I can take a lot of luggage, stop and relax at my leisure, have good food, not submit to security checks. Cars are literally better in every single way to train/bus/tram etc.
If you have never lived in a place with good public transit, I can understand why you feel this way. You are literally trapped without a car. Now imagine, tomorrow you are diagnosed with epilepsy, or macular degeneration. Or, your car is destroyed while it's parked on the street and you cannot afford another.
If a car is the only form of transportation, your freedom is contingent. Think of what a privilege driving is. Even better, great public transportation makes driving much more pleasurable.
One of my buddies had a dad who was a parapalegic and he was still much more mobile using his wheelchair and modified van than anyone with a bus could hope to make him.
One of these days, you should try traversing 8 blocks in a wheelchair and see how convenient a bus stop feels! lol
Been there, done that. Kinda weird how dangerous it was with all those cars. If only there had been dedicated pedestrian infrastructure and maybe some sort of micro-mobility device. If only I hadn't needed to cross huge parking lots to reach my destination where cars with huge front hoods and massive A pillars couldn't see me. Being disabled in car dependent cities is hell.
Yes, the ones that are falling apart and collapsing as we speak. The question is, would we rather continue investing in maintaining and expanding roads which have bankrupted our cities, or would we rather build something different.
We would rather spend a small amount of money maintaining an existing system which supports all dynamic transit systems than throwing them out and using a much more static system. This seems really obvious.
Cities aren't bankrupted by roads, roads are what give cities lifelines. Trains and buses are an incredibly poor substitute in all but the densest of regions.
Roads do provide an economic good. However, having every single individual drive a multi ton vehicle in order to pick up a bag of onions from a supermarket with a 15 acre parking lot doesn't make sense.
> Trains and buses are an incredibly poor substitute in all but the densest of regions.
This is patently wrong. Buses, trams and trains are the most efficient, safe and affordable forms of transportation known to man. They are superior on every metric I can think of. Combined with last mile micro-mobility and you just can't build a better transportation system.
Cars take up more space, kill more people, destroy more land, kill wildlife, and pollute the air. Worse, they are slower due to traffic.
California spends about $200,000 per mile of highway every year. That comes to about $53.6 billion dollars a year just to maintain those highways. That doesn't even count the capital costs of new projects. That doesn't count the $55 billion dollars in medical bills for people injured in accidents. The billions of dollars that people pay for health care required to treat diseases caused by pollution. The cost in lives, time, and crippling injuries is immense.
What do we get for it? Being stuck on the 91 choking on the exhaust.
It won’t be my interest in saving the planet that stops me from buying cars, it’ll be bullshit like this. I want to own my car. I don’t want it to be connected (beyond acting as a hotspot) to the internet or to some central service. Have we not learned anything?
The original phrase was coined by the World Economic Forum. What the critics leave out is that the WEF was saying that people would be happier not owning anything.
>You will own nothing and you will be happy.
Alternatively it could have a darker interpretation: you will be a slave and you will be happy, because that's all you're going to get.
I suppose it depends if you look at the WEF as a benevolent institution looking to benefit humanity or very rich people looking to solidify their own position at any cost.
It seems like it is, but read it closely. Reuters here is not debunking the phrase was said by a WEF politician, they are debunking that is is a goal of Agenda 30.
The link to the original article is now 404 from the WEF's site, but you can find it in archive.org. It's notable that the link has "agenda" in its URL.
> What the critics leave out is that the WEF was saying that people would be happier not owning anything.
Given that happiness is often a cultural construct (wildly different things make people happy dependent on the cultural context), and that many WEF members are cultural influencers the critics response is that the current people will not really be happy, but the WEF will arrange the culture so that future people are. Any outside group conspiring to change your culture is a normal cause for alarm.
A lot of people don't follow these developments, don't know how they're harmful, and don't really care. The car companies may be aware that there is growing resentment, but as long as it's legal and there are still enough people buying this for it to be worth continuing, they will do it.
Until they discover it isn't. I'm predicting a lot of this gets rolled back as used cars buyers are more sensitive.
Used car buys will look at this as the without model. Maybe this will work out as a lot of used car buyers don't care about speeds they won't go anyway (though they should ask if this was ever on as that does put more wear and tear on a car). I don't think this will work out for things like heated seats: the buyer will want a car with heated seats and one with a subscription for heated seats is worth less money to price sensitive buyers.
> I don’t want [my car] to be connected [...] to the internet
Really? No remote access, security notifications, navigation facilities? No watching TV while charging? No OTA updates that obviate the need to take it to the dealership for routine fixes? No open source location analytic API?
I mean, I'm sure there's some bad stuff that happens too. But this is very much throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I won't tell you what you, personally, want in a vehicle. But the market as a whole absolutely wants their cars on the internet.
IT. IS. A. CAR! It takes you from Point A to Point B! Nobody needs to watch TV in their car! Nobody needs subscription services for heated seats or 0.2s off your 0-60mph time! Nobody needs cameras replacing their sideview mirrors! Get rid off all this bullshit in vehicles.
6-speed manual, adjustable seats, a GPS/nav screen and radio/aux, and a damn cupholder is all anyone needs from a car. Everything else is just a bunch of accessorial crap that usually detracts from the form factor of a functional car.
I'm currently driving a car from 2007 because of how much I do not want the "connected" features that have become standard since the advent of smartphones.
I can't even find anyone who will sell me one with those features disabled. My only option is just to buy cars from before those features existed, and it gets harder every year.
Sure, even that's a luxury, but cars already have a display for audio, and it makes sense to have an in-built nav system (would be great if you could simply select the mapping/nav software from a list like a: goog, b: apple, c: OSM, and have it only do directions). This reduces the need for a 2nd, handheld or mounted device which has the potential for increased distraction. Navigation is a core function of travel, which is the primary purpose of a vehicle.
A bluetooth standard for navigation (turn left in 500 meters on adams street.) functions would be nice. The only thing I find my car nav does well is put that turn indication next to the speedometer so if I don't hear/understand the directions I can see it at a glance.
Of course my only car with nav is 11 years old, maybe there are other features of more modern systems worth having. I doubt it, but I have to allow for the possibility. The real key here is the car is 11 years old - if you only buy new cars you may fail to realize how bad features such as nav age. When my car was new 3g cell networks were the fast service (4g existed but it was in the early roll out phase), and thus what I would expect my car to have: now 3g is gone - so even if my car had a NAV subscription it couldn't get OTA updates.
Eh, my subie is almost 10 years old at this point. The nav is definitely quite old and clunky, but works fine as long as you don't expect it to be snappy like a modern smartphone. I don't think it's much in need of an update; that's just modern expectations advancing at a ridiculous pace thanks to tech.
I'm not saying that these are inherently bad. Hell, I'd enjoy having programmable 2-driver power-adjustment settings for the driver seat. That, dual zone climate control, and google maps built into the nav are basically the only luxury features I think really add value to a car. But I'm not dying without them. Meanwhile, my wife wants all that, android auto, ventilated seats, a moonroof, the side-view mirror blind spot assistance things, automatic cruise control, an auto-dimming rearview mirror, automatic lights/brights, being able to start the car remotely, etc.
If that were true then we'd all still be driving 2-cylinder air cooled put-puts.
I'm not telling you what to desire in a vehicle. I'm just saying that reactionary ludditism makes for poor market analysis. People want connected cars, period. I don't make the rules.
Really poor equivocation re: 2-cyls. Engine performance and efficiency is one of the primary and critical aspects that define the ability effectively travel between places, which, again is the entire purpose of a car.
Engine (drivetrain really) power, torque, efficiency, durability and reliabilty are core aspects of a vehicle. Being able to accelerate (and brake) when needed is important. Watching a YouTube vehicle in traffic is not. Carmakers should be focused on improving drivetrains, handling (chassis, suspension, brakes, etc.), safety in collisions (including pedestrians/cyclists). Not on introducing a bunch of superfluous luxuries that only serve to drive up the cost of a car (and make people worse, more distracted, more selfish drivers).
Edit: It's not ludditism to oppose needless 'improvements' that increase the complexity, cost, supply chain requirements, weight, and fragility of a vehicle. It's utilitarian.
The ludditism is in who decides what's "needless". To you it's needless, to other's it's utilitarian, and there are generational differences to account for as well. You probably know how to drive from your house to a number of destinations without a GPS. Other's... don't, making a screen and an entertainment system with CarPlay a utilitarian feature for them that's a deal-breaker on a new car if doesn't have that because it's a safety hazard otherwise. You could argue that people should just have the local version of The Knowledge memorized, but that's unrealistic, plus it doesn't account for traffic causing accidents along your preferred route.
Because it's another huge failure point of more software and significantly increases cost and complexity when the aerodynamic gains from no mirrors are negligible, especially considering the absolute monstrous size and brick like shape (terrible cda) of SUVs, trucks, and 'crossovers' that are extremely popular today.
Fair. That's not nothing, but again, it's a tradeoff. I'd take a plain old mirror for the sake of simplicity/cost instead of the slightly higher efficiency.
Why would I want remote access to my car? Why should my car need security notifications? And if I'm charging, I can use that as an opportunity to get out of the car, or catch up on notifications I've ignored for the last several hours. Every routine fix that I've seen on a car has been something mechanical, which either I can do myself (e.g. oil and bulb changes) or I have to take into a shop anyway.
The only semi-valid reason for connectivity here is navigation, but even then I'm already paying for a connection for my phone so I'll use that instead. I don't even want a big screen on the dashboard anyway, which means having navigation software built-in would be a worse experience than using what I already have.
> Really? No remote access, security notifications, navigation facilities? No watching TV while charging? No OTA updates that obviate the need to take it to the dealership for routine fixes? No open source location analytic API?
I've never owned a car that does any of these. I'm very happy with my car. I do not see the benefits of them outweighing the downsides.
Nope, absolutely fucking none of that. The "baby" in here is not a baby, it is a gigantic pile of dogshit that seconds as a tracking device. I'm more than happy to get rid of all of it.
I may not mind too much having essentially an Android phone embedded in the dashboard (although I'll try to jailbreak it as much as I can, and cripple it if I can't).
However, I REQUIRE an air gap between the Internet and any electronics that are involved in piloting the metal box that is currently transporting my squishy flesh at 130 km/h.
So no, no self-driving Tesla for me.
(As an aside, what kind of person gets excited over "open source location analytic API[s]"? Do you actively enjoy being tracked by your corporate overlords?)
Security notifications is probably the only thing on that list that actually requires internet (or some kind of connectivity). Even remote start doesn't need to be internet connected.
Everything else can be solved using your phone/tablet.
And yes, it undoubtedly would be a nicer experience to have navigation done entirely on the in-car display. But IMO in-car displays and interfaces are universally terrible.
> remote access, security notifications
> Or just don't put so much software in it that you need security updates for remote access in the first place, how about that?
They're talking about being able to get notifications about the security of your car (e.g you left the trunk open, someone is opening the door etc). I'm guess you don't have a modern car, but having a security system for your car is super useful, especially if you live in left-leaning crime-friendly place like SF.
> navigation facilities? No watching TV while charging?
> Why would I pay to have the same features as my phone/tablet/laptop but with the added disadvantage of not having access outside the car?
Because you can access it on a 15-30" screen rather than a 6" phone screen
Don't you want software upgrades? cars are loaded with technology, some of it is for "fun" like navigation of music services, but a lot if for safety reasons and this requires frequent updating.
Yes, but that doesn't require I give up freedom or control. The number of years a vendor provides upgrades adds value to the product (i.e. long term commitment or not). The cost of a car is so ridiculous any more that expecting a lifetime of software updates is probably a rational demand from a consumer.
> but a lot if for safety reasons
Yes, so? I wrote software for vascular ultrasound devices in the 80s. Those could do really bad things to humans. Upgrades were provided for free and accounted for in the price of the product because... SAFETY IS NOT OPTIONAL and should never be relegated to a subscription where if you stop paying YOU ARE UNSAFE.
The current price reflects the expected software support, at some point it will be not economical and not feasible on the existing hardware. The best example is the interface- cellular 2G is not supported and 3G will go away one day.
Vascular ultrasound devices are still supported because they were expensive, and support was probably paid on top of the initial price.
The Mercedes HP subscription is not safety related, but it is true that at some point stopping updates will have some affects on safety, but don't forget that "legacy" cars locked you with its initial hardware and software, many times only later models upgraded safety feature based on experience.
> Vascular ultrasound devices are still supported because they were expensive, and support was probably paid on top of the initial price.
I'm sure 80s and early 90s era vascular ultrasound devices are long obsolete, out of service and not supported. The point is cars are VERY expensive these day. It is ridiculous that a product that costs $35,000 has a $30/mo subscription for updates or features. This is majoring in the minors.
There is a difference between what we shipped is defective and that defect makes it unsafe and we could update it and bring new safety features. Defects are addressed in recalls, they are expensive, automakers plan for some amount of them, they should try to minimize that as much as possible, but recalls are screw ups, not bonus updates.
I expect a car manufacturer to do extensive real world testing in all possible conditions- heat, traffic, etc. before selling it. A spaceship needs to work perfectly the first time, the actual use is also the only real world test of the prototype. It’s also a much harder problem… cars are much simpler and well understood “mature” tech where we have over a century of real world experience on what type of failures are possible and how to mitigate them.
A mechanical engineer can lose their license if their work results in deaths.
A software engineer can't lose their license because they don't have one.
Perhaps a professional license may improve software development and thus better software in consumer products like cars where bad software design can result in deaths.
I don't think it would need to apply to all SWEs, but would make sense for safety critical things like firmware that runs vehicles, roads, bridges, etc. Certainly the sort of systems that interact with or control other systems already requiring a PE.
Simple means no advanced safety, comfort and other features, once software is involved it will never be tested enough especially at the price point cars are sold at.
Exactly. I have zero interest in "advanced features" which is why I still drive vintage high end european cars I maintain myself, and not a Tesla. Nearly all cars since the mid 70s have had plenty of very simple software on board in each of the control modules- ABS, fuel injection, ignition, etc. and it works flawlessly in widespread global use for decades with no issues because it is so simple. These things are so simple it's virtually impossible to have a flaw that can't be found in extensive on road testing.
In very rare cases where a flaw is found, it is updated at dealerships via recall.
Easy quick and frequent updates done modern silicon valley style are dangerous and absurd for something as safety critical as a vehicle. Things are practically guaranteed to intermittently break while you own the vehicle, because there is no way the extensive factory testing is repeated for each minor update.
Have you read the NASA investigation of the Toyota’s unintended acceleration accidents? It’s millions of lines of not properly tested spaghetti code. But I admit that it mostly worked pretty well. Unfortunately modern cars are significantly safer than vintage ones so we are stuck with complex software for better and for worse
I have not, but if I remember correctly, it ended up being a physical problem (floor mats) and not a software problem?
Most vehicle ECUs are traditionally made with very simple C or assembly software that simply maps inputs to outputs via a lookup table... and the same basic ECU firmware is used for decades and shared by numerous car manufacturers (e.g. almost all cars use BOSCH fuel injection ECUs). If they have a complex algorithm or model to generate these tables, that code never goes on the ECU itself, to minimize the complexity and make it reliable and predictable.
So the car manufacturer doesn't even develop any code, they only produce a table of numbers for flashing into the ECU, eliminating the possibility of algorithm errors. Once you physically test in diverse conditions that hit every possible value in the lookup table, there is very little room for an unexpected problem to pop up later on. Recalls updating the ECU tables have been mostly to reduce emissions and improve performance, but the vehicle still works fine under all conditions without it.
One thing I find really fascinating, is that old fashioned diesel engines had a mechanical injector pump, which was basically a sort of simple mechanical computer that in some sense works the same as described above. All vehicles pretty much used the same pump, but each had different "lookup tables" physically machined into a steel block as a curved ramp.
I like the philosophy explained in this article, that mentions Dieter Rams thoughts on the Porsche 911 design:
More acutely, cars have been been able to get software updates for 25+ years.
The dealer had the software and would update it for free (typically part of a recall) on my 2004 bmw, you can get this software and tune for only premium fuel (less safety)
Leaving aside that your car shouldn't need updates for the basic function of going faster when you push the accelerator, do you want to have an unskippable advert played on the car's display before you can pull away?
Maybe for the same reason, but not equivalent. We have become relatively ad blind on our digital devices, pushing ads into the car infotainment system is going to make for lots of angry customers. That being said, big-auto is pretty dumb, behind the times, and hasn't figured out how to evolve at the pace they need to. I will not be surprised if some of them try this.
Still, I don't want to have subscriptions for basic auto features like heated seats and how fast the car can go. I don't even like that Tesla makes you pay for access to the full battery, but at least that is a one-time purchase.
>You can make your Mercedes EV go faster for $60 a month
Umm, no.
Allow me to correct this misprint.
Unless you pay an extra $60 monthly your already-expensive vehicle will not give the full outstanding performance that your particular hardware was engineered to do.
You can chip most turbo engines for higher boost which means higher HP and torque. Current 911 vs the 911S is 13PSI vs 16PSI on the exact same engine. If you want Sports Plus mode which adds a little more boost, more aggressive shifting, tighter suspension, and launch control its also just software changes that porsche bundles with a dash clock.
Companies have been doing this for awhile. Whats new is the subscription charge. Tesla has performance mode for $2k that you can buy and install over the air.
People will figure out how to hack these things. But the difference here, I think, is that EVs tend to be much more software-driven than even the most sophisticated ICE car. They're likely to contain half-decent crypto that makes hacking much more difficult, and EV companies are likely to sue you under the DMCA if you succeed. In addition these cars are always connected to the mother ship which can disable the engine by remote control if they suspect tampering.
"Chipping" an EV is going to be much harder than it was with ICE cars.
EVs only incidentally happen to seem harder to hack. ICE powertrains have more complex electronics and software.
This is also about ICEs having a legacy of repairability which makes modifications easier. Corporations being what they are, EVs are specifically made to be impossible to repair in independent shops.
I understand the technical part: they are unlocking the extra power electronically.
What I don't understand is what is different between the headline saying that you can pay $60 for your car to go faster (true) and parent poster saying "pay an extra $60 monthly your already-expensive vehicle will not give the full outstanding performance that your particular hardware was engineered to do"?
Those two statements seem to say the same thing? What am I missing?
Perhaps you are more comfortable with this approach than others, and are part of the tartget market Mercedes may be fishing for, which is just fine.
You straightforwardly don't seem deceived at all here either way.
OTOH I would estimate the majority of the target market is expected to be much more responsive to their marketing stance than my also-realistic interpretation.
BTW, congratulations on your coronation today, glad you took the time to comment with all the festivities surrounding the event.
It is too vague and suggestive towards some sort of active enhancements being performed during your subscription, whilst in reality all they do is flip some "is_castrated" boolean value in a database.
Paying doesn't make the machine perform better than it already could; Not paying makes the on-board software limit the machine to perform worse than what it's actually capable of.
The perspective. It makes customers think that the software update is tuning the engine or doing something special to get non-standard performance, which is a lie. Mercedes (and I know many other companies) will intentionally nerf their cars and LIMIT their performance, and in this case Mercedes is flat out saying they will limit their customers' performance unless they pay $$.
So it's really about who is saying what. Mercedes is trying to make customers think in their head that this is a value-added bonus that's not there by default, but it IS there by default, and it's locked behind a paywall. Rewriting the statement in OP's voice helps the customer recognize the scam that is taking place. In my opinion, at least.
Binning is completely different, an i5 may be able to perform as fast an i7 if you overclock it, but it depends on your luck on how your i5 was, and it will almost certainly be unstable. Binning is the equivalent of making really fancy chocolates, and selling the slightly worse-looking chocolates for worse.
TBF - this depends how well they streamlined their manufacturing process. As yield goes up; getting a perfectly stable 3ghz chip binned as a 2ghz before a flash lock becomes increasingly common. It became common to hunt for specific chips for this reason back when I actually had time to pay attention to it.
That is true, I'm sure there have chips that have been purposely down-binned because they needed more i5s instead of i7s (probably not right now, but back when Intel was dominating and slacking).
But even that unique case is very different from literally blocking features in a chip for extra money per month (you couldn't pay Intel to up-bin an i5 to an i7, except for the 1 or 2 times they actually tried that)
Binning of electronic components goes back about a century to their initial commoditization.
So it's really matured in the same direction only further.
The most effective & consistent mass-production processes do not always produce components as identical as would be ideal, and not all equal in ultimate performance capability, especially in the most demanding applications.
This can be expected to be more problematic when production is first initiated, whether there are bugs to be worked out, or optimizations have yet to be accomplished.
With resistors the percent deviation from the target ohm value is a simple tolerance rating.
Not everyone needs resistors within 1 percent of their labeled value, but those that do can not settle for anything less.
When initial production results in a maximum deviation of 20%, during QC/QA each component (or batch) can be measured and binned into the 1%, 5%, 10% and 20% tolerance ratings.
And most importantly priced accordingly.
Interestingly, if the binning is most comprehensive, then the consumer of the 20% parts never gets a component closer than 10% of the nominal value.
Vacuum tubes are not quite so simple as resistors, but it was well-established that the military would gladly overpay for the very top-performing tubes meeting the tightest tolerances.
In earlier decades military tubes were often physically enhanced and produced separately from the lesser consumer versions.
By the 1950's things were very mature in this respect.
And it can be a lot less costly to manufacture everything the same.
So binning it was, to select the closest conformers, which were then labeled with military part numbers destined for a supply chain where price is not as significant as it is for consumers.
The remaining tubes then were marked with everyday consumer part numbers.
This really became prominent for dual-use items like radio tubes.
Once the manufacturing process was fully optimized and every tube met the most stringent specifications, the cost to make each tube can decline dramatically.
At the same time, freshly made tubes were no longer individually labeled, they then all went into one bin.
So the most overspending customers could be supplied the same parts at higher prices than everyone else from that point without anyone knowing the difference.
Unless the customer really checked the performance independently in great detail.
Depending on the customer ordering the parts, they would be labeled accordingly right before shipping, sometimes with a little more QA and/or written guarantee but not any additional costly manufacturing QC which might have been necessary at the begining of production. They could then better meet fluctuating demand between premium payers versus consumer usage from the same manufacturing line and a single ultimate bin. And with a different part number to inhibit direct substitution even after identical performance could be recognized in some cases.
So this was well underway before solid-state semiconductors became a commodity.
As the processes improve it ended up with price-sensitive consumers who figured out when the lesser-priced CPU's had become as high-performance as the premium-labeled "alternative".
With the complexity of modern CPU's it was basically trivial to circumvent this consumer effort with the last-minute fusing & labeling approach seen today.
We've come such a long way it's not like the 1950's at all.
Lots fewer consumers expect to get their money's worth, and some vendors are only looking for these type customers any more.
Eventually all they make is i7's and if you don't want to pay the price, they further customize the component to be especially crummy, just for you.
Not quite the same, but those are also being worked around by everyone and their mother. In many cases with dirty and damaging hack solutions, which only have to be that way due to the fact that no relevant technical documentation is published by the manufacturer.
And then there are plenty of people who will happily download and load a custom bios onto their $2k GPU that they found on some or other foreign-language forum without even the slightest clue as to how it works or what the possible consequences might be.
This will now also start being a thing with non-technical people and their cars.
Possibly the stupidest day-one DLC play we've ever seen.
>"Customers might see that as “a bit of a cheat,”
Because it is a cheat.
There is exactly zero chance this doesn't get bypassed and unlocked for free with the quickness. Better still though, just don't buy stuff from people willing nickel and dime you like that.
Pay real money for real things that you actually own. You will be happier this way.
> There is exactly zero chance this doesn't get bypassed and unlocked for free with the quickness
That's a big claim. There are comparable third-party unlocks to get the performance upgrade for a Tesla, but nobody is doing it for free. They still want about half what Tesla charges. The difference being that Tesla will still warranty the car if you buy it from them.
IIRC, the code for at least some of those unlocks is available open source. And usually hacks or jailbreaks have a tendency to trend in that direction even when the hackers are charging for it initially. Someone eventually decides to share their code and methods, for the fame or to do a talk, if for no other reason.
The reason I think it will happen fairly quickly in cases like this is that hackers also tend to be more "challenge accepted" as culture whenever the offending restrictive software is particularly obviously stupid or egregious.
but we mustn't agree to such practices, because if this goes legal next step will be prevent from software hacking and/or police/MOT checks for illegal software tampering
This is already the case in California. Tapering with the ECU (in a detectable way), will cause your car to flunk the smog exam, which, unrectified, makes it illegal to drive your car.
Another thing that only affects poor people. In California your first smog check is at 6 years. Most wealthy people turn over their cars more often than that. So a rich person can hack it up and not worry because they'll ditch the car before its ever checked.
As of now, no. But I wouldn't be surprised because the smog exam doubles as a road safety check, and as more EVs are on the road that are getting old, they're gonna want a way to verify road safety. Probably a state battery exam or something.
Is the smog exam really a road safety check other than if it's so obviously unsafe that they won't drive it to the smog machine? Especially since post-2000 cars are just an ODB-II check, a visual check for exhaust modifications, and a check for smoke at various engine conditions. The procedural manual does mention visual inspection for gasoline fuel leaks (diesel and gaseous fuel leaks are fine, apparently). I'd imagine techs were a little more worried about vehicle safety when they were putting the cars on dynos, too.
OK, interesting. In NY we have a mandatory yearly safety check for all vehicles but also an emissions check for specific classes of vehicles (ie: gasoline cars/trucks >=2 years old, but diesel passenger cars and EVs are exempt). Mostly the emissions test consists of connecting the state software/hardware to the OBDII port and having the car tell if it should pass or not.
Mercedes are doing it wrong. You cannot sell thunder without the flash. How will my friends know I've spent money on something that doesn't matter?? What you need to do, Mercedes, is simply follow the preestablished model. You are to tie this "go faster" fee with wheel and tire upgrades and "this model goes even faster" stickers or emblems. This subscription crap really won't sell as-is.
- You money will be digital. No currency that you can hold on your hand. We can take it all with a flip of a switch
- Your car will be a package of subscriptions. Want to hear
radio? You can add a subscription. They probably will even
provide up-sells like a dating service. Subscribe here
and we will tell hot singles available in the area where
you just parked.
- Your bicycle probably will become a subscription..
"Your bicycle subscription has expired" - https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/136xaqg/your_bicycle_subscription_has_expired/
Nice way to kill the EV industry. Usually companies would what until they get market share when compared to fossil fuel vehicles before pulling this crap.
So no, I will ride a bicycle or horse or walk before I pay a monthly fee for a vehicle I purchased. It is like M/S with its 365 push pushing people to Linux/BSD or Apple with the fees they are hoping to tack on for Windows use.
Nobody is making you buy an EV with a subscription. And there have been ICEVs for many years that sold performance upgrades which amounted to nothing more than reprogramming the ECU.
I've had this (cough) "opportunity" in my Tesla for as long as I can remember. (Dual-motor Model 3, it's well-known that it's mostly software differences to make it the performance version.)
Guess what: My Tesla is fast enough. I don't feel any need to pay more money to make it go faster.
(I'm not going to whine about rent-seeking or how I own it and I should be able to do what I want with it. Instead, I'm going to point out that:)
Market forces will always push costs down and performance up. If a car company decides to artificially cripple their car so that you feel forced to pay extra; another car company is going to see that as a golden opportunity to undercut. Market forces will make sure that cars are "fast enough" at base price, because only timid drivers want an artificially slow car.
(And, yes, my Tesla does have an option to make the car artificially slow.)
> If a car company decides to artificially cripple their car so that you feel forced to pay extra; another car company is going to see that as a golden opportunity to undercut.
Or to join forces in a cartel.
This was the reasoning behind the Phoebus Cartel[0], although in the business of incandescent lamps not car manufacturing. Osram, Philips, Tungsram, Associated Electrical Industries, ELIN, Compagnie des Lampes, International General Electric, and the GE Overseas Group were part of this organization to reduce the longevity of lamps to increase sales. It is a fascinating story :(
It's true for early AWD LR Model 3s. The motors were the same used on the P version, just software limited. It's no longer true, current LRs do not get the same motor the P does, so cannot be software unlocked to full P performance.
RAM Doubler or something like that was an actual working thing back in the days, that worked by (IIRC) transparently zipping/unzipped data on its way to/from memory.
On the other hand, SoftRam 95 took the driver kit paging driver and claimed to compress data, but actually didn't. All you got was a small buffer in memory where pages would be paged to before they actually got paged to disk.
Coming up next year - your macbook might run twice as fast if you pay additional 100$ per month.
In my opinion such behaviour should be treated as a direct consumer rights' violation, under accusation of malicious intentional degradation of product sold to customer. When hardware (engine/cpu) is created it has its by-design limits and there is no possibility to increase those limits by software, i.e. this is not increasing, but decreasing the capabilities to extort additional premium
Perhaps it makes sense to pay extra to be able to put extra strain on something (laptop, car, xyz) while it's covered under a manufacturer warranty, however after such a warranty period ends any such feature should be unlocked.
That extra cost should be a one-time fee assessed when the feature is unlocked (with any extra costs borne by the manufacturer/vendor baked into that pricing).
Not a subscription that lives on for the duration of the device.
To me it's just like my Ram Truck, they can remotely communicate with it, so I basically don't completely own it. In other words, if I'm not in total control of what I purchased, I don't really have the ability to stop them from turning the truck off at anytime.
If you don't see it this way, put your money where your mouth is, come up with a way to disconnect from the car maker. (Please, no complaints about how the communication is for my own good!)
I grew up around cars, and car builders. I've worked on quite a few very famous cars. My father built custom cars and ran "Barris Kustom" for years. I learned how to build custom cars, including race cars.
I also spent years designing and building cars (vans) that quadriplegics could drive and lots of those were for guys who crashed, or got ran into by cars/motorcycle, at high speeds.
Personally, I think if anyone crashes a car that they were paying a fee to a car company to make their car go that fast that car company should be held accountable and libel for any and all damages and deaths that occur from that.
I'm sure others would disagree, but I don't care. Odds are they've never spent any time at all working with those who were paralyzed because some dumbass smashed into them at high speeds.
Not sure if this is what you're saying, but the truth that nobody wants to hear is that cars are inherently dangerous because of their speed. The best way to save lives if have roads that encourage calm careful driving (bollards, single lanes, speed bumps, trees, ...). People want to have their cake and eat it. go as fast as possible, yet still be "safe". That's fighting against the laws of nature, weight + speed kills, it's just impossible to square that circle. We just need to internalize that in our hearts, and externalize this in our infrastructure.
Cars are dangerous because of speed, weight, dimensions and all sorts of specific things about a specific car.
But the speed is good. Speed means people get to do more of what they like and live in places that are better for their health.
Weight and large dimensions however, are horrendously bad for safety and efficiency and additionally, useless. The overwhelming majority of cars outside of professional use don't need to be bigger than a Lancia Delta. Nobody who isn't a farmer with a specific license needs a pickup truck. And even then, people who need to move stuff around drive vans, not pickups. Literally nobody should drive an SUV in any context.
This attitude ignores the elephant in the room: a Civic is plenty fast enough to paralyze a person. And it doesn't even need to be speeding to do so, t-boning a car going 45mph is going to really mess someone up, especially if the car they are driving is not very safe.
It's easy to demonize "irresponsible" drivers, but the fact is that everyday Joes hurt and kill people with their cars all the time. My good friend's son was killed by a hit-and-run and even though the driver was arrested and went to trial, a jury let him off of all major charges. We imagine that the people who kill others with their cars are always driving like asshats, but this guy was just driving like other regular people do: he was "speeding," but only 35 in a 25, and he had "been drinking" but only a beer.
We have to recognize that regular people doing regular driving are very deadly behind the wheel. Because otherwise, society embarks on this wild goose chase of trying to stop "the bad guys" rather than making data-driven decisions on how to reduce traffic fatalities.
So no, I don't agree with you. I think your line of thinking mirrors the likes of "satanic panic." It's an emotional argument used to point blame at a specific "bad" group, rather looking at the data and realizing that everyone bears responsibility. There are plenty of dads in Camrys out there running red lights, looking at their phones, and driving too damn fast.
It's trivial to limit the speed of a car. "Cruise Control" tech is pretty old.
And this subject is not about someone doing 20mph and banging into someone because they were looking at their phone. It's about selling tech that will let you go 160mph and crash into someone.
If someone is paying for a 1s quicker 0-60 how can you prove it was that 1s that caused the accident? Also, the vast majority of road trauma is not caused by performance vehicles. This does not sound like a meaningful way to make a difference.
The best way to reduce the road toll is to get humans off the road. Autonomous vehicles are already safer drivers, but people don’t feel comfortable because the fewer mistakes they do make aren’t mistakes humans would make. Once these issues are ironed out we need to rapidly legislate human drivers off the roads.
What is the distinction between paying to go faster and just going fast? (Disclaimer: I am in favor of limiting car speeds to the local speed limit via GPS-based speed governors or something similar.)
The first EV startup that emerges with a dumb EV (minimal software to actually operate) for around $30K will have a best-seller. Nobody actually wants the subscription-based car, it's gradually being forced on consumers via industry collusion.
Why does it have to be a startup? You can buy a dumb EV for under $30K today from GM. And yeah, it does sell pretty well.
The vast, vast majority of EVs sold today are not forcing subscriptions of any kind on their customers. A couple minor carmakers are trying a new business model.
It doesn't have to be a startup, no. But GM is discontinuing the Bolt, which I assume is the car you're referring to. And as far as I know, most EVs are evolving in the direction of more software complexity, not less. When I say a dumb EV, I'm talking analog knobs and buttons, no touch screen, no over-the-air updates. A disconnected vehicle.
We can worry about that next year. I fully expect GM to walk back some of it's recent announcements based on strongly negative feedback from customers.
Fair enough, let's not reverse-Osborne a company that, as you say, stands a good chance of walking back their announcements (despite having already lost a sale at our house). If GM is axing the Bolt, though, I hope they hold to their word at keeping the Equinox close to the same price point.
“Range” is a euphemism for wasted lithium, cobalt, and/or copper that could be better used elsewhere (I.e., building more PHEVs). If your grid is natural gas you may as well bring your fuel with you.
Sure, if you want to lease a car, lease a car. But the idea that I can buy a car but have to pay a subscription for heated seats is ridiculous. Not everything in our lives needs to be a subscription.
Where do grocery stores and coupons fit into this?
Selling a book/media at a lower price in with a poorer populace?
A national park charging difference prices based on the visitor’s nationality (by the passport they have)?
Haggling in a market in a stereotypically poor country where different buyers get different prices based on their negotiations? A big company sales representative selling software licenses at difference prices to different clients?
All of my examples are the same thing - selling the same thing at different prices, technically referred to as price segmentation or price discrimination.
The automaker cycle - Focus on adding value for the customer, gain dominance, milk it for all it's worth financially, drop precipitously, complain about how Toyota is beating you in the market.
Back in the day, I participated in Autocross, and occasionally joined a car club for a track day at the local raceway. Gas, club fees, entry fees and instructor fees typically came to $300-400 for a fun Sunday.
I drove a stock BMW 3-series, and did not need or want to pay for the added performance of an M-series for day to day driving. However, if I could upgrade to M-series performance for $60 for a track day, I would have jumped at the opportunity.
This is admittedly not a common use case, but there is definitely a niche market for this kind of thing.
If you're doing SCCA, will you handicap your car appropriately?
I once took a first place trophy in SCCA autox because my mother's 99 Nissan Maxima sedan is handicapped compared to a Subaru WRX.
There are whole series developed around cheap, fast enough cars, s2000, Miata, RX-7 (non turbo), bmw e46. I always find it odd when people take Corvette and other super cars to these events, where they can't win.
Ok, that kind of makes sense. Personally, I find something offensive about paying for a machine or device that's intentionally software nerfed by the manufacturer. And outside of a track setting, I think variability in one's daily driver would not be enjoyable.
This gives me nightmarish visions of DRM battles in the engine compartment.
You hacked me to go faster, but you didn't pay.
"No No. Its all good. See here is the code"
That code has now expired, I will start melting the engine. DMCA DMCA
"You are just confused. This code is ok again tomorrow"
Master computer says melt the engine. All warranty null and void
This is interesting. Mercedes is making a bold move trying to enter the subscription arena. Its customer base is affluent to say the least but I think this move won't fly with them.
I'm willing to bet that if the EU forces Car manufacturers to stop making ICE cars, China, South Korea, Japan will become the biggest Car makers in the world.
I do not consider this to be an upgrade. An upgrade would be like actually changing one part for a new improved one. This may be a physical part or new operating system. But when everything has been purchased, already paid for, and in place, then it becomes an unethical practice of extortion rather than a subscription for a service. Suppose I built you a house and you paid me in full for it. Then I told you if you ever need more storage space I would charge you a monthly subscription fee to give you access to your own basement by remotely unlocking your basement door, would you stand for that?
> Mercedes draws the line at features for which there are physical buttons inside the car, like heated seats, said Rossmann. Mercedes never wants customers to press a button and get an annoying “Subscribe for use” pop-up on the center screen.
The removal of physical buttons now suddenly makes sense.
Does Mercedes understand this is destroying the reputation of the brand? This practice needs to be made illegal and an exception made to the DMCA specifically legalizing attempts to bypass it. Bypassing such measures absolutely should not be a felony.
Mercedes, Audi and BMW destroyed their reputation for anyone paying attention a long time ago by producing expensive, unreliable cars that aren't even remotely cost effective to keep running.
Plastic timing chain guides, FFS.
If purposefully building engines that grenade themselves at 80k miles wasn't enough, then it's hard to imagine what would be.
Not that I own Mercedes (car for me is just bring me from A to B) but I would never pay rent for the things I buy. They want to sell 2 different models - sure. They want to offer car lease - be my guest. They want to graze on me - fuck you.
How can CNN and this Peter Valdes-Dapena publish something like this where the only criticism is a short line buried at the end calling subscribe-a-speed "a bit of a cheat"? That's not journalism, it's a fluff piece.
Apple spearheads user-hostile decisions and everyone willingly accepts it (even cheers for it) because hey, it's Apple. Google, Samsung etc. copy them down the line, and by then it is too late to complain and reverse the trend.
Tesla spearheaded (1) removing Carplay/Android Auto and charging monthly for maps/traffic/connectivity, (2) hiding features behind paid software upgrades, (3) hiding performance improvements behind monthly subscriptions, (4) providing charging for a monthly fee. Everyone cheered them on as revolutionary, and it is too late to complain now. Of course other manufacturers are going to copy them.
> (1) removing Carplay/Android Auto and charging monthly for maps/traffic/connectivity, (2) hiding features behind paid software upgrades, (3) hiding performance improvements behind monthly subscriptions, (4) providing charging for a monthly fee.
1: tesla never supported carplay, although it is anti-user at this point. And the monthly sub for this is traffic data (which does cost n > 0 to Tesla) and access to cellular streaming, which also costs then per GB to AT&T.
2: FSD Beta? this costs tons of engineering hours. I made a case for heated seats in SR+ vehicles being gated behind a $300 one-time purchase here[0]
3: performance improvements were the result of continued stress and stability testing of the motors, and it resulted in a one-time acceleration boost[1], not a subscription
4: vehicle charging for a monthly fee? They have a subscription for non-EVs to charge that grants you access to discounted rates, but this isn't a thing otherwise.
You can say all of the same for the article being discussed. It takes time and effort to engineer a fast car. If you aren't okay with Mercedes charging monthly for it, you should not be okay with Tesla's business model as well.
I think this produces more outrage than a one-time charge would. The reason is that there is no apparent ongoing cost to Mercedes to enable the full-spec performance of the car, yet they are charging a subscription fee. It would be much more palatable to me (probably most others) if you could pay some extra money at the start to let your car perform to it's rated capacity. I would be able to justify it in my mind as cost of the car.
Charge subscriptions where there is a real recurring cost to provide the feature or service, like say a remote assistance service that needs a SIM card plan.
Literally everything I buy on the internet has features unlocked by higher payment plans (Netflix, hosting, ahrefs etc). I don't get the big deal about it. For one, I am happy I can upgrade my car without any mechanical interventions. You get what you pay for when you buy your car. It's their business if it's limited down to meet your package or not. Did they deliver anything else from what you paid for? If the answer is yes then we have a problem. If the answer is No then I don't see the issue. A more powerful car is usually more expensive, always has been.
Typically higher prices are associated with higher Cost-Of-Goods-Sold, plus some margin.
For internet-based services like Netflix (or Spotify or Youtube or whomever), more stuff (streams, bitrate, resolution, etc) has higher costs for them: bandwidth, storage, licensing. They don't provide a physical good necessarily, but that doesn't mean there's zero cost to providing a higher-grade experience to their customers. (LTT has a whole video about the cost of serving 4k and 60fps video from their independent video platform that's a pretty good primer on this space, IMhO.)
In the car scenario, the cost is already sunk: the hardware is in the car, the capability to go-fast is already there and it costs nothing further to the manufacturer to allow the customer to use it. Putting a cost on it is the literal definition of rent-seeking: they're not creating anything new, which might justify the cost, they're just charging you to access a thing that already exists.
Especially since it's an ongoing cost for a thing you already own. Imagine if this extended to every other product: You buy an ipad with 1tb of storage in hardware, but you have to pay Apple $15/month to use it all. You buy a 4k monitor, but you have to pay Dell $5/month to use it at resolutions above 1080p. This doesn't make sense, and it's plain corporate greed. Mapping physical goods into the "As a service" world is absolutely nuts to me.
>Literally everything I buy on the internet has features unlocked by higher payment plans
Because they told us eliminating the middleman would lead to lower prices. Then they eliminated all the middlemen and started charging more. The fact you're inured to it doesn't make it good.
The owner of a 516-horsepower Mercedes EQS 580 needn’t worry that a neighbor’s EQS 450 might go faster
It's worth noting that passenger car power ratings have always been "peak" ratings ever since they stopped using the same engines in cars and trucks. 500HP is around what a semitruck engine is rated at, but the difference is that the latter can maintain that power output for more than a few seconds, even continuously, and the resulting differences in construction are massive. Look at aircraft piston engines for an even more extreme example.
I can understand to some degree only manufacturing one physical product and limiting it to create multiple retail products. And once you do that it only makes sense to allow people to "upgrade" after delivery. But I am really not sure why they'd want to do a subscription rather than a one-time purchase? Is it just to get better conversions? Is it because they want a recurring revenue stream (it can't be _that_ big for their business)?
Generally I hate the idea of making everything into subscription, but maybe I like this. There's NO people really need such overkill performance, but BEVs might have such performance because of other reasons. Bigger battery for long range and powerful motors for AWD will make vehicle can go fast, but it's not practical and dangerous. Make it subscription and only speed badass people pay for this is looks good idea.
I think that the solution to that has to be in taxation. Legislation that bans something profitable is going to encounter a lot opposition. Taxation is easier to introduce than a ban.
A high tax on connectivity for certain classes of goods could make this less appealing. Add in the requirements for privacy and keeping records that are as stringent as HIPAA, and that could change the calculations of risk and benefit for such rent seeking.
The tax was planned by some EU countries but it has been cancelled on pressure of US government, defending the interests of large companies like Google ([1] & [2]). The legislation for this tax may have not addressed exactly the Mercedes case, but in general the idea was to tax more digital services, which I believe the Mercedes subscription would be qualifying for.
The relevant question is what you own when you purchase a car.
If I own something, nobody else should have the right to disable features of it remotely unless I pay them indefinitely.
If I've bought a car with an engine in it of some specific number of HP, it shouldn't be up to anyone else to tell me I can't actually use all the HP because I'm not paying them forever. That's some real mafia-type of arrangement.
Honestly don't hate this when applied to speed specifically. Consider it a tax on dangerous behavior. Before you get your knickers in a twist, we already get charged more for premium safety features.
Why can cars go as fast as they do to begin with? how many people die because some foolish teenage boy with more testosterone than brains (I've been there) was hurtling down the highway at 100mph+?
Well, we do it in software where we charge higher monthly fees for uptime guarantees, more features, better performance, etc. And Xfinity does it with hardware where you pay extra per month for faster speeds over the same cable.
But in those scenarios, there is extra cost incurred by the company when you choose to upgrade.
In this scenario, when you upgrade there's no cost to the car manufacturer, so it feels wrong. In the most generous view, there will be slightly more wear and tear on the car at higher speeds and that they need to charge extra to cover the warranty on faster cars. In a more realistic view, it's a cash grab not only in terms of $720/y per customer, but also making it easier to up-sell future over-the-air subscriptions or purchases with your CC already on file.
> available through an over-the-air software patch
The phrase "software patch" implies updating the code. I'd be really surprised if this sort of change required a code push. More likely the code is already there, and the "patch" is a data file changing some constant.
The industry is changing to actual code changes. If it is a flag someone might figure out where that flag is and how to change it, and with right to repair that becomes a legal thing. If it is more code they send, that code is protected by copyright and isn't a right to repair issue at all.
This is just all about recurring revenue from clueless people.
In the USA SEMA needs to be supported before we lose even more control.
https://www.sema.org/
The next logical step is for CPU, in hardware you physically own, to have subscription that will unlock more cores. Imagine owning an Apple M2 device that requires an extra 30$ a month subscription to unlock 2 more cores.
Remember those Intel Core locked range of CPU's - you could unlock certain features afaik higher clocks and bigger caches by running a unlock tool and buying a code from Intel.
Needless to say the PC enthusiasts told Intel to get borked.
To be clear, because every time this comes up some dickfucks come in here and start making excuses about how it's better to rent in some cases and that this is just amortizing the whole payment, and there are some people who want this: No.
This is a fucking terrible deal even just using mercedes numbers. It takes a whopping 30 months (2.5 years) for the monthly payment to exceed the upfront cost. The average length of new car ownership in the US is between 8 and 11 years (varies by source and accounting methods).
You will be charged fucking $6000 dollars for a item that is already present in your car, you just don't have the damn key.
RENT FUCKING SEEKING.
Even on cars that cost 100k, Mercedes just gets to pocket an extra 5% of the sale price here at literally no cost or effort.
These complaints remind me of complaints I've heard about "day one" DLC (DownLoadable Content) in video games. For those unfamiliar, it's content which is available in the game upon its release but you have to pay extra for it. Sometimes, players are given the option to buy the Ultra Digital Deluxe Collector's Edition which comes with the DLC and "exclusive" shit (and also costs extra).
If it's not rent seeking, it's drip pricing, it's added-on sales tax, it's $0.99 instead of $1[0], it's the Ultra Digital Deluxe Collector's Edition. I would always advocate: don't give them your business.
I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here. I know it's a lot easier said than done to avoid such ploys. Still, that is the strongest personal option. Avoid them like the plague and tell your friends and family why. If a business' current practices seem better than you remember, hold on to the memory; make them work to prove any marketed change of heart. (It may be hazardous to my health to hold my breath waiting for the $0.99 shit to stop.)
[0] There was a card shop (games shop, comic book store, that sort of thing) I went to as a kid. They priced stuff like $5 and it was actually $5 when I went to pay. 12-year-old me "didn't even know that was legal".
Isn't this all the same thing as what airlines did after 9/11? You pay the fare and get a seat. Want it to not be a middle seat? That's $50. Want to carry on a bag? That's $50. Want to check a bag? That's $50. Want to check out the lounge before you depart? That's $50. Want some WiFi? That's $50. Want a snack? That's $50. Now your flight is $200 more than the quoted fare. (OK OK you can probably get WiFi and a snack for less than $50.)
Everyone seems to love this, or at least, they didn't stop flying. So why would any rational company not try to use this business model? Your AAA game gets to be $59.99 + $0.99 download, and your competitor's game is $60.00. Sort by price ascending makes you the top result, but you actually get $0.99 more money with each copy sold.
You are right that legislation is the only answer to curb this abuse. Consumers fall for it hook/line/sinker. Companies can't resist free money.
> Now your flight is $200 more than the quoted fare.
> Everyone seems to love this, or at least, they didn't stop flying.
Nobody "loves" it. They just have to put up with it because even for people who know what they're doing with flight searches, the only way to dig into all that dark pattern shit is to have fifty browser tabs open comparing the fine details of different flights.
If it was possible to, say, compare all those up-charges up front using flight search tools, I'm sure you'd see a lot more people choosing the slightly more expensive tickets.
I mean, you do get to know airlines by reputation - generally speaking I expect Ryanair to do all the bullshit dark pattern nickel and diming and not expect it from national airlines like Lufthansa.
I think overall you overestimate the amount most people fly. Generally, many people fly very little or almost never. Sure, there's world travelers that know who are bad airlines, but knowing the 'secrets' to not having a bad flight is assuming a lot of the average occasional flight consumer.
...Are you of the impression that people like this? People hate it. It's like, the one thing everyone complains about all the time when flying. How did you get to the conclusion that people like this about flights
Actions speak louder than words. People say they hate it. But they aren't upgrading to all-inclusive first class or full-fare economy tickets. They happily buy the cheapest flight, whine, and then do it all against the next time they take a vacation.
To some extent, this is quite rational. You're in pain for like 2 hours because the seat pitch is now 4 inches. But then you get off the flight and never think about it again. The fact that flights include things that people don't need to have just made air travel more accessible, though less fun.
Of course. It being cheaper is why people like it. Same reason that games are free and offer DLC, or Mercedes offers a car that could go faster if you have extra money laying around this month.
I hate the nickel and diming but it does make things more accessible in general.
Just because somebody buys something, that doesn't mean they like it. I don't like my ISP. It's shit service at a ridiculous price. I pay for it because the glorious free market has failed to provide acceptable options. No ISPs provide good service for a reasonable price. Therefore, my choice is to pay for something I don't like, or not have Internet.
Every time a company finds a way to make the product worse but increase profits, they will do it, and all other companies will eventually have to do it in order to remain competitive. It's an inevitable force that is built into the so-called free market. Nearly every product available today is worse and/or more expensive than an otherwise comparable product 10 years ago.
Mark my words, bookmark this comment and come back in 10 years. If these subscriptions turn out to be profitable, then in 2033, every car manufacturer will have functionality locked behind monthly subscriptions. And people will buy them because they have no other choice besides not buying a car. There will be no way to vote with your wallet--you'll just have to abstain with your wallet.
Yeah, it's especially toxic to capitalism when tight oligopolies (like the car industry, telecoms, mobile phone OSs) develop. Barriers to entry are super high, so when one company does a customer-hostile move like this and makes money, the others know everyone else will follow suit too, so rather than advertise how they won't exploit you like the bad guys do, everyone just adopts or "improves on" the d*ck move. Think about it. Some car company was the first to do a Destination Fee. Some ISP invented the bandwidth cap. And somehow these became universal, because who would/could challenge the oligopoly?
A $60/month difference is not what's going to make or break someone buying a Mercedes. Flying economy is cheap enough that many people can do it, there is no right Mercedes subscription model that will get people into one of their cars.
That's exactly right. If they want $6000 dollars more for the car over the lifetime of the car, the $6000 being right there in the sticker price might dissuade some buyers. But if they say it's $60/month, now you're only looking at the sticker price, and the Mercedes is cheaper than the everything-included BMW, so you buy that instead. (Sorry, I don't know enough about cars to know if Mercedes vs. BMW is a comparison that people make. I never even got a driver's license.)
This additionally acts as a nice A/B test; you sell the same car and get data on whether or not people would pay $6000 more for it to be faster.
I reflexively hate this, but it seems so rational to me.
It would maybe make things more accessible if there were caps on corporate profits. As it stands, corporations have 0 obligation to pass those savings on to consumers.
Don't really love or hate, but am ok with it. If I'm flying something short, I'll buy the cheapest ticket possible, which are really cheap now. Longer flights I like being able to get more leg room w/o having to spring for first class.
There is a large group of people who only want the cheapest flight possible, then there is a decent sized group who want more than basic economy, but don't want to pay for first class. This is basic customer segmenting.
There's a big difference between something you rent and something you own.
You rent seats on planes. Some seats are more desirable than others, so you pay more to rent those. You rent access to their storage space. You rent access to their services. The seat doesn't come with food, so if you want the food they have on the plane, you buy that from them. If you don't, someone on the next flight will.
When you buy a car, ostensibly you own the car. It's your property. A company should not be able to disable features unless you pay them not to, indefinitely, on something you own.
I don’t think that people -_love it_ or _fall for it_ per se. rather, people don’t have much of a choice but to accept it unless they can afford to fly private.
You can’t really fly and not take luggage with you, for example.
The key here is that because the US government's antitrust division has been sitting on its hands for 40 years, there are now only 4 airlines in the US. This lack of competition means that all 4 can play this game (except Southwest, which has other problems) because there's not enough competition to stop it.
But there are more than 4 car companies. There's enough competition to stop this kind of horseshit, which is a fact Mary Barra seems not to recognize.
Everyone seems to love this, or at least, they didn't stop flying.
“Complains about air pollution, but still breathes the air”, amirite? Or perhaps there’s another explanation for the dynamic. Because I can tell you that my game-buying habits have changed as a result of your parallel example.
You are right that legislation is the only answer to curb this abuse.
Perhaps! But a big part of the problem is airlines have near monopolies on domestic routes. I want to fly non-stop to Charlotte, my only choice is American, I want to fly to Atlanta, my only choice is Delta, for the same price as a flight to Europe. Some monopoly enforcement, or laws requiring more airport diversity might fix this without micromanaging prices or services.
Seeing this as a problem with personal responsibility misses that the problem is structural. Culture as expressed through individual choices works great for many situations, but it does not fix broken dynamics.
Besides, if you want to apply that axe put it against the people making those decisions to conduct business in that fashion. If your first thought is that it doesn't make sense to because then that person will be outcompeted then consider that it makes even less sense to hold people with zero agency in that decision responsible.
I don’t feel personally responsible but recognize that I can take actions to avoid these things, at least in some cases. If I ever found a store (literally any kind) today that didn’t price almost everything at $X.99 they would have all of my business which they could support. However, I recognize that I’m just one person and ultimately these decisions primarily benefit me. That’s also why I advocate for it; the behavior can benefit those close to me if they happen to agree.
Indeed it is a systemic issue and I don’t claim to have a systemic solution. Even the personal solution is pretty shaky, considering the ubiquity of these practices. Oh well, it’s better than giving in.
I think I read more into your post than intended, specifically your suggestion to vote with your wallet. It is frequently stated in such a way as to be the end of the conversation - shut up and change your purchasing habits, essentially. You didnt put it that way, my bad.
No, it's absolutely rent-seeking in the Mercedes case. Your DLC analogy doesn't hold water: when you buy the game, you are paying for the core game. The DLC costs time, money, and resources for the game studio to produce, and you're buying that separately.
In the Mercedes case, they ship the car with the more-powerful motor already installed in it. The cost of it has been paid already. They just artificially limit it through software unless you pay extra for it.
At least in this case Mercedes is offering a one-time flat fee, which would at least be somewhat sorta vaguely like paying extra at the time of sale for a more-powerful engine rather than whatever is stock. Still kinda slimy, but at least not absolute highway robbery, like the subscription plan is.
The problem is that capital intensive industries like car manufacturing (or airlines as was mentioned elsewhere in this thread) tend to have low margins, high volume and high barrier to new entrants. This means unless you can convince a lot of the volume to boycott with you, minority purchasing decisions of people doing the math and taking a principled stance can’t really affect the behavior of the incumbents or attract new players. Then your choices quickly turn into not using the good or service _at all_ or engaging with the pricing scheme you find abhorrent.
A lot of people here think building a successful subscription based product is the absolute goal in life. To them Mercedes (and BMW and others) doing this isn't dumb - it's super smart and worth applauding. Otherwise you're just leaving money on the table /s.
You put the /s, but I don't think this comment is inaccurate in any way. Some people really have enthusiasm for nothing but making money. No hobbies, no interests, no friends, no other goals.
It has also been understood to be fundamentally inherent to humanity as a consequence of our "need to survive", so trying to regulate it away is just inviting people to skirt said regulation
Since it's unavoidable, the best next thing is to design a system which takes greed as an input and outputs productivity. That system is called Capitalism and that is why it always wins.
honestly yes it's smart(doesn't mean it's kind), if I was selling 6 figures cars
I'd do my best to milk customers in every possible way as long as it's still
profitable in the long run
mercedes isn't selling baby formulas or epipens
plenty of other brands will take your 100 years of 3rd world salary to give you some shiny vehicle
should I cry for some pampered millionaires who just want to drive faster?
I find it really amusing that you think you need to be a millionaire to own one of these, but whatever - that's not a core of this argument.
The point is that everywhere outside of the powerhouse first world economies runs on second hand cars imported from those economies. I'd know - in my country most cars are ex-german cars. And then once we're done with them, they go to Ukraine(or they used to). Then after that they go to far east or Africa. Your 100k mercedes has 15 lives before it gets scrapped.
But you know what stops that chain early? If everything in the car has subscription and strong encryption to prevent messing with payment options, which "incidentally" will mean those cars can't be worked on by anyone other than the official garage. Wouldn't want anyone to pirate some subscription-only stuff now, would we.
I'm not mourning rich people wanting to drive fast - I'm mourning regular folks who will get these cars at 15-20 years old and find out that the heating seats don't work because Mercedes won't enable them on a "legacy" vehicle. Or it's from the wrong region so they can't do anything for you, sorry.
I don't believe that, I've met people living on minimum wage with brand new mercedes, and I call those people brain dead. Buying a six figures car only makes sense if you're a millionaire.
EV cars are most likely not going to be exported to have a second life.
What is already happening? Quick look at otomoto.pl shows plenty of ex-German EVs being brought over here already, I don't understand what you're insinuating.
I think bootlicker is a stronger but more appropriate word. I genuinely cannot believe people support being sold a fully standalone physical product and being charged just for the ability to use it, while thinking it is in their best interest.
I thought simp stood for "someone idolizing mediocre pu__y", a slur for guys commiting and caring too much about lower tier women. Doesn't really seem to fit a discussion about people agreeing with a corporation.
It might be, but that doesnt explain why it's #1 usage is towards guys being lame in hopes of getting women. If it was just simpleton, it makes no sense.
>are people really this devoted to corps or are they shills?
I think a lot of people defend this because they themselves work for tech companies who's products or services are also profitable due to some for of rent-seeking which ensure great profits and wages that wouldn't be possible otherwise because let's face it, the most profitable SW companies where the HN audience most likely works at, don't sell you a lifetime license to their product on a CD for a flat fee anymore like it's the '90s but are most likely subscription-ware.
It is indeed a bit hypocritical to criticize automakers for doing the same thing that beloved tech companies are doing which is what makes them so profitable and yet nobody bats an eye.
Continually running a service with its own recurring costs with additional improvements (SaaS) justifies a subscription, because your product is constantly improving, and constantly incurring costs.
A one-time car purchase costs the car company some capex upfront. They actually incur more cost running whatever DRM servers lock these motors down to prop up this extortionary business model.
There certainly are, I'm just pointing out that much of the software that is charging a subscription is doing so to more closely structure their revenue to their expenditures.
Software as a service is a continuous operation. Cars aren't. Not hypocritical at all. No one cares that they want to be as profitable as big techs. We want to own our damn cars. We want to accelerate as much as we want. It's that simple and requires no further justification.
We take issue with big techs locking down computers too. No problem with them running whatever they want on their servers but we want to run whatever we want on our computers too without their interference.
I would pay to get software not as a service. Fuck your updates, I don't want bloody updates that end up breaking my stuff and wasting my time. Give me one version, no updates and no support, and I will give you top dollars. If I want an update I'll come back to repeat the process again, giving you top dollars again, several years down the road.
Are big purchases every several years cheaper than a subscription? I don't know and I don't care. Sell me your fucking software as a fucking static product, I am happy to pay the premium for it.
That's okay, I was just pointing out that it's not hypocritical at all. Personally I'd rather have free as in freedom software running locally on unlocked computers. This should be the norm and use of technology like remote attestation to penalize us for exercising our freedoms should be illegal.
I guess I sort of grew up in the SaaS era - to this day it blows my mind that one of the most perfect pieces of software I have ever enjoyed - N64's Goldeneye - was created by ~10 devs, who had one single release. I often fantasize about joining team like that while daydreaming in the poker-card scrum sessions at the agile sweatshop I currently take my paycheck from :/
Personally i’m not in favor or against this particularly, but in favor of free market, after all mercedes or BMW are not selling lifesaving drugs or food if someone is able and willing to pay for a stupid “addon” why not?
I am against the government deciding that contracts between two people are illegal. No one is forced to buy a mercedes. There is nothing even close to a monopoly when it comes to cars. If Mercedes wants to charge customers every time they push a button in their car, why should the government decide to stop them.
Then you must be against child labor laws, and laws that prohibit people selling themselves into slavery because they have few choices in the world.
Power imbalances mean that some people will use contracts to exploit others. Protecting people from that is valuable.
Certainly a Mercedes purchaser is not quite in the same league there, but it's not like we haven't heard of similar subscription ploys on lower-end cars too.
We can't all afford to devote our lives to activism. But change starts with education and we can be educators when these topics come up. That's not useless.
Take a look at the profit margin (and market valuation) of automotive companies and compare them to tech companies. Now also make a comparison of average developer/engineer salaries at both.
Is it not OK for the automotive folks to get to the same level as their FAANG brethren?
I have zero fucks to give for the profits of corporations, and the idea that any of this money will make it into the hands of engineers is ludicrous. If you want higher salaries start a union, otherwise the people at the top (executives + shareholders) will just use any extra profits to pay themselves more. There's no incentive for them to do anything else.
And as a software developer whose income is propped up by adjacency to FAANG: we're paid an inordinate amount compared to our contribution to society. The vast majority of software development makes rich people richer at the expense of everyone else. I've managed to avoid the most egregiously harmful companies my entire career, but the idea that FAANG pay or any pay is meritocratic is just wrong. I'm paid well because my work pays my clients well, not because of anyone involved "deserves" our high salaries.
It's fine for automotive companies to maximize their profit margin. If they have smaller margins than google, that's probably because google is nearly a monopoly, and there's fierce competition in the automotive space.
A key difference here is a car is a product that we buy and own. It doesn't cost Mercedes an ongoing cost every month to support these hardware features they change a monthly fee to unlock, and so the monthly fee doesn't provide additional value. To the extent it does, it's because the manufacturers are artifically limiting their product. Compare this to, say, and Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. With that, you're getting access to cloud services that costs Adobe to keep running, it also gets you access to new features and security updates. Whether or not you like Adobe's business model, this provides a justification for the subscription model that is simply absent in the automotive space.
Going back to the competition point, even if you just look at the monthly fee as cost shifting, it lets the manufacturers advertise a price that's lower than what the consumer is going to pay.
> You’re completely ignoring the customer (people like you) in favor of the (already mega rich) corporations. What a mindset.
No, I want the company I work for to have similar profit margins as FAANG and thus increase my compensation. Do you also attack those employees because their companies are charging extra for pure software unlocks or subscriptions?
>to have similar profit margins as FAANG and thus increase my compensation
Why would they do this? They have enough labor working for the money they give already. If their profits doubled, why on earth would their labor costs go up too instead of them just keeping the money?
High prices require both a buyer to be able to pay and the buyer to have to pay (due to lack of sufficient sellers). High profit margins provide the first condition.
Car companies already and always have made money from continued support of their products. Car maintenance and repairs and spare parts and the work already cost money. So, not even remotely the same.
You can complain about any company that wants to continuously make money for nothing in return. Just look at ink printers. Rent seeking sure is attractive, yes.
Nobody owes you anything. There are MANY jobs that deserve such high salaries far more, just try anything related to caring for sick and/or old people. It's just that "deserve" has got nothing to do with anything!
Also, look at all the other countries and companies. That kind of complaint to me sounds more like a multi-millionaire looking at the even grander mansion next door and claiming they deserve at least that much too and that the world is so unfair to them. You picked the very, very few where some people make even more. It's hardly all the tens of thousands of employees of the FAANGs that all make a few hundred thousand, just a small fraction.
Cars also are not nearly as innovative. They are much farther along their product cycle. Oh sure, they did a lot of work, but the car still uses about as much fuel as it always did, and gets you barely any faster than it always did from A to B. But all the entertainment you get now! And all the electronics! Yeah okay. But the end product still doesn't deliver that much more value compared to a 1970s car. Some of them were actually more comfortable, easier to use, and easier to look out of. I do understand that there's been a lot of work on safety too since then, and that deaths went down. But I didn't claim there was zero innovation, did I? Only that you compared yourself with the latest and greatest new tech, such as AI, and in that elevated niche you again picked their highest paid people, and that seriously is your chosen comparison?
Oh and when we are looking at all the innovation in cars, may I point to the discussions - right here on HN too - about software, UIs, and cheating German car makers (I'm German too by the way), and how German car makers are big losers in China, and quality issues in German cars (https://newsingermany.com/german-car-manufacturers-fail-us-s...)?
If you want a higher salary, find a job and a company that will give you one. Don't advocate for your company to charge their customers for something that costs them $0 to provide. I guarantee that things like that will turn the world into a place none of us want to live in over the long run.
Also, if you think that your employer is going to increase your compensation due to anti-features like this... well, hate to break it to you, but they won't. They'll pocket that money and/or distribute it to shareholders. Your salary is, roughly, the smallest number that they can offer you to get you to do the job, and has very little to do with their profit margins.
> Do you also attack those employees because their companies are charging extra for pure software unlocks or subscriptions?
I would attack any company that charges customers extra for nothing.
What does that have to do with anything? If you sell a product and then try to put a subscription on hardware that is already in the customer's hands, that's scummy.
If you put a subscription on something where you have to continuously maintain server capacity and build and distribute new features, then that... seems fair?
Not gonna claim that there's no rent-seeking going on in the software industry, certainly. And they're scummy.
But once I'm sold a car, every bit of hardware in that car should work without artificial limits (well, modulo safety and legal concerns). Sure, it's fair for a car maker to charge for map updates for the navigation, real-time traffic information, remote functionality, etc. -- stuff that requires on-going cost to the manufacturer. But charging a subscription to send a few bits of information to the software in the car to give the motor more power? Robbery.
I think it might be if automobiles weren’t such a necessary item in many parts of the world. Or, for many people in North America you require a car to engage in society.
This depends on if they actually charge you for it upfront in the MSRP.
Say the cost for a motor made of x material is $2000 more than a lower spec motor made of z. So here they could make two specs, say charge $5000 more for the better motor, and profit $3,000 when anyone with a kick for adrenaline chooses the better motor.
However, there are hidden costs to inventorying multiple different variations of the main drive train of your car. You are no longer sharing parts, so you now need two lines making that motor, you need to split the warehousing space, you need some sort of analytics / data scientists to tell you how many of each motor you need to order. In this scenario, the cost to this amount of inventorying something as critical as the main drive unit might be a thousand dollars per unit or so (of course decreasing with scale), but it means your margins aren't simply profit - BOM.
Taking these small increments in profit (at the expense of making the logistics of your plant more complex) was all the rage for Ford and GM throughout the 1990s-now with 20 different trim levels for a model, but with EVs specifically the extra trim levels make you feel like you're missing out on the most fun or useful parts of a car, and the automaker really isn't making that much extra money when it's all said and done (and it results in the car feeling cheap after the honeymoon period).
In this case, the $60/month is optional. This means that Mercedes can take the negligible hit on their bill of materials, but this will likely be offset by, and made profitable by, the people who do pay for it every month over the lifespan of the car - there is a lot of FOMO and getting to click a button that says "increase the dopamine I get by punching the throttle this month" might be what people want if they think they shouldn't splurged for a different ev x months ago.
Of course they're charging up front. The goal is to make as much money as possible. What's much more likely to happen, especially with a brand like Mercedes, is instead of charging $A for trim x and $1.1A for trim z, they'll just charge $1.1A for both and tack the subscription fee on.
or, crazy thought, pass the cost savings of not having to manage multiple trimlines onto the consumer instead of trying to make a quick buck by artificially borking the motor.
It's interesting how it takes reading someone else's writing to realize how little profanity adds to the substance of a comment. You never realize it when it's your own comment.
It adds the substance of communicating to me that the poster's about as fed up as I am with treating the "dickfucks" with respect. On this and several other market-regulation topics.
I disagree, the information it communicates is visceral in nature rather than 'rational', but it provides a much broader cross-section of a person to relate to (or feel alienated from).
I’ve found profanity can add impact when I’m a regular reader of someone who normally doesn’t use profanity and I’m familiar with their normal lack of profanity.
"Manufacturers may intentionally damage a portion of their goods ... "[0]
The intel chip example has already been mentioned in comments. The general idea of "Damaged Goods" (and how this can benefit consumers) appears here (at Preston McAfee's site).
Even worse - if you pay for the subscription and then later sell the car, you don't get anything back and the next owner doesn't get the feature unless they pay as well.
If you pay to have it permanently, you can probably recoup some of the cost when you sell. (Unless Mercedes does something so that the feature is gone once you sell, which I wouldn't put past them)
This is the same thing people found out trying to sell their used game consoles with a bunch of downloaded games. No extra value to the buyer, because as soon as the seller disconnects their account, all those games disappear. And in the case of the WiiU and 3DS, are now unavailable for purchase.
But somebody designed, implemented and tested (presumably) the feature of remote enabling functionality for money, manages the subscription and payment systems, real time communications to the fleet of cars, etc.... that costs a lot of money and effort, doesn't come for free.
"It's okay that they lock things behind subscriptions because how else would they pay for the mechanisms necessary to lock things behind subscriptions"
> You will be charged fucking $6000 dollars for a item that is already present in your car.
How so? The one-time fee is $1950. Also, this is nothing new: top end Mercedes-AMG cars always had an optional "AMG Driver's Package" [0] for years now, which did nothing but electronically unlock Vmax from 250km/h to 290km/h. No changes in hardware at all. It used to retail for around $2500.
Now you have the possibility to order a performance unlock after buying the car. You can even try it out for a few months to see whether you really need it or not.
You might not like it, but it's actually a better deal than before.
> You might not like it, but it's actually a better deal than before.
So if Apple would ask you for a nice $10/m to use their famous iPhone camera features you would be okay with that, because otherwise you would be fine with 8MP photos or pay additional $10 * 12m * 3y = $360 upfront? Of course, no changes in hardware at all. And the price of iPhone is the same, not $360 cheaper.
Try looking at it from the other side: you're getting a product at a lower base price and can upgrade to a higher model at a later point in time. It's more like buying, and paying for, an iPhone 14 and then having the possibility to upgrade the camera to the iPhone 14 Pro version afterwards.
There's ton of precedent for products that are artificially locked to a lower version. The difference between a NVidia GeForce and the much more expensive Quadro used to be just a bunch of ID resistors. Processor speeds are locked in a similar way.
Same thing with software. There's many cases where you purchase a piece of software and can later buy a feature or "Pro" unlock. You already downloaded all the bits & bytes to you device. Are you not OK with that?
I'm a bit surprised that the people on Hackernews of all places has such a reaction to this. Subscription models and SaaS have been practically invented here.
Those precedents in hardware are not exactly good. And the more expensive a product is, the less acceptable artificial locks are.
With software, the entire model is buying functionality, and then you can use it on the hardware of your choice. And it has to work that way. It's worth keeping in mind but it's not directly comparable to a hardware purchase.
> Try looking at it from the other side: you're getting a product at a lower base price
Do you really think what you pay less?
If we talk about software unlocked hardware this is a moot point, the manufacturer still needs to spend money to produce and install the thing in the product, so you are paying for the hardware anyway. BMW heated seats subscription is a good example. And again you are taking the manufacturer words for it, despite they would never show how exactly they manage to drive the price down.[0]
> It's more like buying, and paying for, an iPhone 14 and then having the possibility to upgrade the camera to the iPhone 14 Pro version afterwards.
Which implies the change to the hardware. We are now discussing when there is no change in the HW, only some SW lock on that hardware.
> The difference between a NVidia GeForce and the much more expensive Quadro used to be just a bunch of ID resistors. Processor speeds are locked in a similar way.
Yes, and that forced NVidia to actually implement something useful for CAD (or degrade CAD performance on consumer products, alas). CPUs doesn't fit here, because again, nobody gives you an option to "unlock" more cores or speeds (but Intel tried and IBM did this for ages for their mainframes and POWER systems, but these are not a consumer products).
> Same thing with software. There's many cases where you purchase a piece of software and can later buy a feature or "Pro" unlock. You already downloaded all the bits & bytes to you device. Are you not OK with that?
There is no additional costs, waste and carbon footprint to produce a different software. You, as a vendor, spent money one time on R&D/development, now you support it for a tiny fraction of the cost. You don't spend money and resources on never be used part of software.
For a heated seats you spend the resources to actually manufacture and install it, even if it would be never used.
> I'm a bit surprised that the people on Hackernews of all places has such a reaction to this. Subscription models and SaaS have been practically invented here.
Sorry, but leasing and subsidizing were invented centuries before Internet and HN. And what you mix software with hardware and protecting the poor capitalistic companies are quite telling.
[0] Hint: those who pay for the feature pay not only for themselves, but for the others, who did not pay, too. Even the manufacturer never actually lowered the cost of the product.
PS automotive manufacturers are well known for charging absurd prices for things what costs peanuts. How can you believe them what 'they are reducing the base price' is beyond me.
Peak humanity in this thread:) The trade-offs are driving a Mercedes at 250 km/h vs 295 km/h; or some Apple camera with three lenses vs one lens. I am so glad I live in a country where I have to make these choices.
How is this relevant to the manufacturers extorting a subscription for the existing hardware? It's totaly up to you take to pay or not for Halide. Halide doesn't gut your iPhone cameras performance if you didn't pay them.
Who said anything about gutting the performance? This is about adding a performance package that is software based. In the, albeit poor, iPhone analogy the performance camera package happens to come from a different company.
Well, if we are here for poor analogies, it's more like you gone to some 3rd-party shop and they flashed your ECU with a new firmware which gives you options your car hadn't before. And this is a thing already, for at least two decades, people are reprogramming the ECU to have more power. It's extremely popular.
What is similar in the both cases is what it's a 3rd-party option.
Look at my other comment in this thread, maybe it would be clearer what I mean.
> The average length of new car ownership in the US is between 8 and 11 years
I would wager thats not actually true for Mercedes, they don't last that long before becoming a money pit. If you really want a Mercedes just lease then bail.
At least in Germany, a very large portion of new BMWs, Mercedes, Audis and even boring things like Toyotas and Fords are corporate leases, often driven by individual employees who get them at their employer's negotiated rates and sometimes as part of their compensation.
This results in a fantastic pool of 3-4 year old cars with low odometers and scrupulous maintenance records, keeping the rest of the used market in check.
Due to the slow downs and supply chain issues of the past few years, I imagine the used market is not going to be as nice the next few years, and the usual off-lease classes will be a lot smaller than usual.
No matter how many times I read this, it just blows my mind. I can't believe how many people buy new cars--and then dump them right after the steepest part of the depreciation curve. I mean: Thank you, people, for making horrible financial decisions and eating all the depreciation, and then providing a nearly-new car to the market at a steep discount!
It's just that unfortunately the financial system is geared toward making this the "best" option. I don't know about Germany specifically but here for instance if you run a company you can't buy a car and expense it(or get a loan and expense payments for the loan), but a lease is technically a rental so you can expense it, which means that "renting" a brand new car for 3 years is actually cheaper for your company than buying it and keeping it for longer. So yes, you have loads of companies essentially paying for that worst depreciation period in a vehicle's lifetime and then immediately these cars hit the market again.
I've had excellent service from several Mercedes after buying them at 4-7 years because people believe they turn into money pits. Dealer service is expensive; the solution is to use an indy mechanic or DIY. (They're quite DIY friendly for consumables.)
I'm glad other people are willing to buy or lease them from new so there are cheap ones available secondhand.
It's curious that the market (almost?) always decides what is bad for the consumer and profitable for the companies. As a person who is a person not a company, I would rather we don't let the market decide so much about our lives.
Examples: Smart (spying ad-showing) TVs, non-compete agreements, water heater rentals, not-really-unlimited "unlimited data" cell plans, surveillance economy, only-rentable-not-buyable software and films and TV shows and audiobooks, etc.
Because most of the free market theory that most normal people believe is based on the assumption of perfect competition[1]. However, that almost never actually occurs in the real world and even ends up being impossible in most cases.
For example, there is always going to be a huge barrier to entry for automakers. They need to invest an enormous amount of time and money in design, factories, raw materials, labor, etc before they can deliver an actual car. This barrier protects automakers from feeling the full repercussions of their anti-consumer practices because it is extremely difficult for a new pro-consumer competitor to enter the market.
When we remove that assumption of perfect competition, the whole free market theory starts to fall apart. A well functioning free market requires power to be balanced between all parties, otherwise whoever has the most power can end up corrupting it and using their power advantage to grab even more money and/or power.
What are our alternatives? I’ve said in posts before that legislating against each anti-consumer product or feature is a fool’s errand. The legislature cannot keep up the rate at which corporate entities produce consumer-unfriendly products. I also don’t trust it to represent citizens rather than corporate donors, at least here in the US.
Pitchforks? Seriously though, your comment is way too defeatist. Legislature has worked for centuries for this problem. Imperfectly, but don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
But if all else fails, giant corporations are eventually going to get the good ol' pitchforks up their butt.
This isn’t a case where you have to wait until after the damage is done though. Making a blanket regulation of “you can’t sell a physical good that has its capabilities artificially limited to create price brackets”, or something similar, would work in advance of people trying to sell such products in the US market.
I already decided I will not buy cars with touch screens or cars that limit my usage (for ex. Tesla limiting how you can use its battery). I am guessing I will keep driving my 12 years old ICE car for another 5-6 years. It seems to work: car makers are starting to go back to buttons instead of touch screens [0]. Maybe the same will happen with these features (charging $/month for extra engine power / remote car startup / heated seats)?
> It's curious that the market (almost?) always decides what is bad for the consumer and profitable for the companies.
In some cases people choose things that are bad for them, for all kinds of reasons. Someone will always sell you a subscription to your own car, if you tell them you want one. The market is the mechanism, the responsibility lies with the consumer. I know that it feels like there's a conspiracy, but it's almost always just people getting what they say they'll pay for.
The best solution is for people to exercise good judgment. The nuclear option is to regulate what people can and cannot buy and sell. It's not to have that nuclear option on the table, and it is necessary sometimes, but it does not feel like this particular case is one when people cannot reasonably be expected to decide for themselves what they want, or have the power to exercise that decision. Nobody HAS to buy a Mercedes.
I agree with this comment. I have a smart TV that does not show me ads. I could have bought maybe a better one that shoots Ads every now and then, but finally, luckily there is still choice. Same either cars. There are so many nice brands out there that it's now difficult to choose from - no offense to Mercedes, but there is so much good competition for that price...!
Yeah, the market doesn't decide when there are only a few major players.
The "market" didn't decide to exclude headphone jacks and SD cards on mobile phones. Apple went that direction and other companies followed suit. Customers had no real choice in those matters.
No, they didn't vote for headphone jacks to be removed, they were forced to decide whether it was a dealbreaker for them. This kind of incremental erosion of the user experience is a very different thing than consumers making a binary choice about what they would prefer. They 'get away' with it, then it becomes the new normal, and the previous experience becomes niche and expensive or comes with other compromises.
Are there any recent examples when a boycott worked? That did not work for dumb TV's and privacy-oriented business phones like Blackberry. Sometimes when market converges to the cheaper and more predatory choices, and that kills the market segment that was normal in the past.
>If you don't like it, just don't buy cars whose performance is artificially limited. Let the market decide the issue.
You are unfortunately one of the apologetic quote, "dickfucks", endquote the parent was referring too. When all players eventually do this, where will you got to buy?
There is no more free market left in the auto industry after a century of consolidations. We're at the mercy of a few giant automakers who own the entire market and make the rules in their flavor. The current greed-flation is another nail in the coffin of the "free market competition benefits the consumer" trope.
If we had left everything to the so called "free market" our food would have still contained lead, mercury and arsenic. That's why governments need to step in and regulate some things in flavor of the consumer because we can't expect the corporations to do it themselves through "free market" competition, as it's much easy and profitable for them to form rent-seeking cartels and work against us that compete for us.
It seems all lessons from the past have been forgotten.
I don't like a lot of the features in modern cars. That doesn't mean the world should be legislatively changed to suit my personal tastes. Because maybe I'm in the minority. But neither will I buy stuff I don't like; plenty of second-hand cars to go round.
Corporations do not make (significant) sums of money on a button vs screen choice, and there's important evidence about the safety and ergonomics that favors buttons.
Paying extortion to get more speed? That's just a cash cow.
I will spell it out for you, since you were so kind to spell it out for me: consumers' power is limited by the interests of corporations. When a corporation can fix what is viewed by the consumer as a mistake without significant financial downsides, they frequently will (if the consensus is strong enough that it really was a mistake). However, they will not fix anything that causes them financial hardship unless forced to by the legal system.
Arguing for the sake of arguing? If you read the article I linked you would have seen that touch screens were used by car manufacturers to lower their cost. Switching from touch screens to buttons causes them some financial hardship (their costs are going up). The article I linked directly refutes your argument.
1. evidence for the cost savings in a single vehicle build is hard to find. The article you linked to cites a cost of $50 for the screen, claiming this is significantly less than tactile controls, but this is contradicted by the actual cost of the typical tactile controls used in mass-market vehicles.
2. design costs with tactile controls maybe a little higher for the first stage of a new design, but its not as if car companies did not have (a) in-house talent for this (b) decades of experience. Contrast with the (amortized) cost of implementing "car OS's" on touchscreens before even getting to "what does the infotainment screen look like".
3. where the screens do potentially save money is in allowing rollouts of new features without requiring new hardware (which in fact would generally be impossible to rely on). Of course, as Tesla found out, this doesn't always go as planned, and the company can incur extra costs because users know the change can be rolled back.
4. as the article you linked to, and dozens of others, makes clear, there is a growing body of both scientific and anecdotal evidence that screens are terrible for safety while driving.
5. whether manufacturers are responding more to consumers' demands for buttons, or the evidence that they are exposing themselves to legal liability for their interface designs is hard to get a handle on at this point, since they notoriously do not speak openly and honestly about such things. Therefore, please do feel free to believe it is an example of corporations responding to consumer demands, while I'll continue to believe that it is corporations covering their collective asses for the design mistakes they've made (preferably before they get sued over a collision on par with the navy vessel one that led to their removal from US navy ships).
Then you can expect the carmaker to jerk you around indefinitely. This month, 300 HP costs $5. Next month it's $10. One month, your wipers won't go intermittent unless you pay an extra $3. Want ABS to function? Uh oh, your subscription lapsed. No brakes for you.
Sure, all those terms were written into the purchase contract, but with dozens of subscriptions, what sane owner wants to stay on top of all those options, activations, and deactivations?
Will the carmaker let you upgrade your software without buying new hardware? Don't bet on it. Not if there's a chance to suck more money out of your generous wallet.
Screw all that. While I much prefer to own cars with elan, I'll buy a Honda just to avoid being jerked around. And after a couple decades of owning BMWs, that's just what I did. No more hostage-taker carmakers for me.
In fact, that's why Jay Leno doesn't own a Ferrari: jackass sales tactics.
The problem is when the entire market becomes nothing but dog turds. Or, realistically, 98% dog turds and 4% premium-priced diamonds (note the overlap)
Seriously. It isn't like anyone needs a Mercedes. There whole brand is around flashing wealth around and crap like this is inline with that. Buy something else.
You are correct that nobody needs a luxury vehicle but those are the brands that the Fords and Chevys of the world will emulate in their mid to lower priced tiers.
I'd just like to point out that Tesla's performance upgrade, (which is software only) unlocks screens to tune how the drivetrain works.
There is a non-trivial amount of engineering that goes into making those features. I suspect that the software that controls the drivetrain requires making non-trivial changes to operate at higher horsepower, too.
Is it worth it? I haven't paid the price for it in my Teslas, but it's certainly worth it for someone to pay for it.
> I'd just like to point out that Tesla's performance upgrade, (which is software only) unlocks screens to tune how the drivetrain works.
No it doesn't unfortunately (I bought it). Elon tweeted years ago the in-app/in-car purchase for the performance increase would get the drivetrain tuning screen that the Performance models have, but it has never shipped.
The feature, similar in concept to Mercedes here, $2000 (one time) "acceleration boost", adds/unlocks ~50hp and reduces 0-60 time to under 4 seconds on the dual motor non-performance model 3s etc, but you don't get any additional screens.
"Although vehicles with Acceleration Boost have better performance than their Long Range counterparts, they do not include Tesla's Track Mode feature."
What would be interesting is if we have continued high interest rates whether the push for monthly subscriptions will subside.
Recurring revenue brought back for a DCF at an interest rate of 5-6% is very different from when an interest rate of 0-1% is used.
Also if the credit crunch gets worse with continued high interest rates, access to the upfront capital from the customer to fund expansion/R&D becomes a lot more interesting compared to when banks are throwing money at you.
I will get downvoted to oblivion for this and apparently this makes me a simp.
But if I buy the car and don’t care for the acceleration, then I can NOT book this feature. And in a competitive market, which the auto market is, this will mean that the MRSP for the car is lower for me than it would otherwise have been.
Unbundling is part of what made air travel affordable. In a competitive market, unbundling lowers base prices and creates consumer choice.
Sure, but that doesn't mean a subscription is the consumer-friendly way to manage those costs.
If a buyer wants 500hp instead of 300hp, there should be a 1-time fee assessed at the time that feature is unlocked (traditionally at purchase because it required a whole different engine; now via app/cloud/magic because it's all software).
The only reason a subscription model should be foisted on the consumer is when the vendor has actual recurring costs to provide a service. In this case, they do not - it's a one time software update.
If you bothered to click on the article before commenting, you would know that Mercedes gives customers the option to buy it outright or pay a subscription.
In some ways, they do have costs - the on-going extra wear / load on everything in the vehicle, which presumably is covered by the warranty if you pay for this. That's not free, nor zero.
Wouldn’t the additional wear and tear accumulate over time? The effect of added acceleration doesn’t apply all at once. Mercedes probably does know the rate, and the fee may well cover that.
Higher warranty claim rate due to the higher motor output? That's on Mercedes. But only during the warranty period. And if they have any sense they've modeled out that additional wear and now how much it costs (they need it to correctly price a subscription too).
Chances are they've over-engineered the car so there aren't (many) additional warranty clams. So any argument that you get savings passed to the consumer are likely incorrect. The buyer pays for a chassis/brakes/etc that can handle 500hp even if they only want the 300hp version.
That's absolutely false. You are painting the picture as if the car maker will sell you a high performance model (with all the necessary parts for performance) at a lower cost. No they will sell you that model with all their profit margin and then charge you extra monthly for the performance.
This isn't even going to work in the long run anyway. Imagine being the car sales person. It makes you sound like a cheap used car salesman trying to nickle and dime the customer while selling "luxury".
The whole idea will be perceived for the pettiness and ripoff it is. Especially when no one will even know you pay the extra a month so there is zero status symbol with this.
No way this is around in a few years. They will lose more sales than they will ever make up with the monthly fee.
Markets which require billions of dollars to compete in are not truly competitive. They may be competitive in a regulatory sense, but not in a practical one. And these markets have huge amounts of regulation as well that limits competition on top of the financial limitations on competition.
Slim margins say nothing about competitiveness. You can lose money in uncompetitive or competitive markets. You can have huge margins in competitive ones.
Also I don't think the 10.5% profit margin of Mercedes is low - the average for the S&P 500 is 11%.
If you don't care about the acceleration, then you can simply not accelerate. Don't press down on the pedal so much. Why the hell do you need to "unbundle" the car's acceleration? It's not even "unbundled", the engine is perfectly capable of doing it but it's refusing to obey your command. How is it even possible that people are justifying this insanity? What's next, paying extra to unlock geofenced destinations? Car shuts down in the middle of the road unless you pay for the premium destination package? Car is in perfect condition and can absolutely go there, it's just refusing to?
Should doctors cripple children that are born unless their parents charge extra to allow them to walk?
In both cases the product is initially created with the ability, and it’s a competitive market where the parents who are okay with this can save money on their birth expenses…
Edit: This “service” is waste, and morally reprehensible like burning a perfectly good house down, or shooting a deer and letting it lie to waste. Mercedes does not gain any additional capacity by reducing individual cars ability.
I believe that the statement "the car will be cheaper because there is a subscription add-on enhancing the amount of horsepower available" is false
This is a case of creative business modeling. I believe that companies should invest in creating good business models. They also shouldn't over complicate them
Given that, I believe that the subscriptions to unlock seat heaters are a worse example of this and not great for customer satisfaction. Specially since all those cars are already equipped with seat heaters and essentially artificially jailed by software
LOL. There's that saying... "We pass the savings on to the customer."
Nobody ever does this. The savings is never passed onto the customer. The only time that happens is when they're trying to get just in under the competition's price, but will never go lower than that. Nobody is trying to pass the savings onto the customer, ever.
The problem with this line of thinking is that the price reduction for the "affordable" option compared with the old all-in pricing is $5. The price premium for the new deluxe (with additional features compared to the old all-in price) is $20. [Note that the $5 and $20 are meant to be relative to each other, not to the base price]
People then say, "customers must prefer dogshit because their spending habits tell the story"
not sure if the current airline industry is a great model for all other industries.
at some point unbundling becomes extreme lack of transparency and customer-hostility if not a downright scam.
there are such things as externalities and transaction costs. they are manufacturing externalities and transaction costs to their benefit.
some companies put out the initial product with high-quality parts and as soon as it gets good reviews and traction they sub out cheaper parts. you could say if they didn't do that they'd have to charge more, they are giving early adopters an incentive or something, people should research which parts they are getting and let the market sort it out. if you value your time and expect reliable information from reviewers it's your problem.
today everything is a SaaS and you are permanently in a hostage situation where your car could get remotely downgraded, they could stop supporting it or discontinue a feature.
a market is a set of legal and social conventions and this is a pretty bad one. if you like markets you should want them to not be hellish, which means reasonable rules and conventions.
Frictionless competition in an economic vacuum does not exist. It especially doesn't exist in the US, where foreign car manufacturers are banned from selling their superior, smaller, efficient, lower tech cars that have everything I actually want. Car makers now have a gigantic grapple on an industry that takes billions of dollars to get into. There is nothing approaching a free market for cars in the US.
Price discrimination makes this "affordable", until the base price is just raised back to where it was originally except now you have a gazillion fees you have to pay so that companies can extract more money from people less sensitive to price changes.
A company's dream is to enact price discrimination on every single transaction so that there is no such thing as a consumer surplus. The absolute dream of a company is to make it so everybody pays exactly the largest amount they can bear for everything.
This is why we have tipping everywhere. This is why we have features locked behind paywalls for no reason. This is why we have colleges that are uber-expensive, unless you are poor, in which case they aren't expensive because you actually care about the price.
Price Discrimination and Big Data, when combined, allow for companies to give prices in such a way that no consumer on earth gets a surplus. Legislation to ensure markets with consumer surplus continue to exist is badly needed.
I'm not defending this, nor promoting. TBH, this is similar to what BMW is doing with heated seats...the hardware is in the car, but you have to pay to option it in. /smh.
Regardless... based the info in the article, you can bypass this particular monthly cost, and pay upfront. Nothing unusual about charging for options... other than this is an option already built into the car, that you pay extra to enable.
From the article:
Buyers can bypass the monthly subscription completely however, and opt for an annual subscription payment or simply pay a one-time flat fee. For instance, a buyer could take an all-wheel-drive Mercedes-Benz EQE 350 sedan from its standard 288 horsepower to 348 permanently for $1,950."
This type of option add is similar to Tesla, who charges $2k (no monthly option) for "performance boost" on their model 3 and Y, and $15k for their FSD (don't get me started on this feature), which has a $200/mo option.
ok well there probably is somewhere here but I just scrolled through 20 comments and everybody was talking about how Mercedes sucks and this was a dick move, and also that the people who thought that it was a cool move were losers and I'm starting to wonder if these people with opinions that to me seem super unlikely actually exist in any sizable numbers.
That's not rent seeking. Rent seeking is when an entity has control of something that can't be traded in a liquid/efficient way (this part is important!) and tries to leverage this uncompetetive situation into revenue that isn't subject to market forces.
Cars are pretty liquid. Subscription products are very liquid. If people don't want this they won't buy it. If they don't want cars with this subscription model they'll buy a Tesla[1] or VW. That's exactly the opposite of rent seeking.
That's not saying it's good (or bad) for consumers. But it's not rent seeking.
[1] Tesla also sells over-the-air performance upgrades, but it's a fixed price and goes with the vehicle after purchase. They do have subscription fees for data access features, and for FSD though.
> Can you get better performance from your Mercedes EV through another provider? No?
No, but you can sell it and buy a Tesla. Having more features is just "selling a better product". By that standard any optional feature on a market-leading product is "rent-seeking", and that's silly. Is the App Store rent seeking? Is selling junk on Fortnite rent seeking?
No, that's just "selling products". Rent seeking is a specific form of market distortion, and the concept just doesn't apply to consumer products. It's about stuff like real estate control or regulatory capture. As always Wikipedia has a great page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
Don't know why the parent comment is downvoted--it's totally right. "Rent seeking" is a term of art with that doesn't at all mean "trying to get people to rent something they could buy".
They're charging extra for something that would cost them nothing, deny them the use of nothing, require none of their resources, if you could use it without paying them. I can see an angle for calling that rent-seeking.
Is charging for a feature unlock in a piece of software also rent-seeking?
The feature has already been developed, I have already downloaded the software to my device. It would cost the developer nothing, deny them the use of nothing, require none of their resources for me to use the feature and yet they charge for it.
This would make more sense as a comparison if adding two or more modes of operation hadn't taken more work than just having one.
I think the "it's rent-seeking" position would be weaker for toggling entire features on and off—the specific example of unlocking better acceleration was them adding a worse mode just so they could charge a subscription for the better one.
It's stupid, but so is anybody buying a luxury car in the first place unless they have millions and millions of dollars to burn on stupid shit to satisfy their own vanity and other frivolous tendencies.
I have much stronger feelings about general right-to-repair (which crap like this tends to obstruct, so I'm definitely against it in that sense) and speculative worlds down the slippery slope where actual safety is compromised if you don't pay an additional subscription (just $60/mo to enable your side curtain airbags!). But you won't see me crying over conspicuous wealth-signalers wasting their money on crap—they're going to do that anyway, with or without Mercedes' help. And faster cars are more deadly cars, so locking this functionality behind a paywall may actually save lives (though the real, sane solution would be to regulate excessively fast/massive/etc. personal vehicles off public roadways).
I feel like people miss the point of cars like Mercedes/BMW/Audis
All of those cars are essentially badge cars - i.e you pay more for the badge that shows that you have money and are able to pay more for the cars. Nobody buys those cars because they are better at commuting than other cars. So subscription services is natural for this type of market.
I think that's how it looks from the outside, but people I know who have bought these cars look at it different.
They like the attention to detail of mercedes and the quietness.
They like the attention to detail of bmw and the performance.
(not sure about audi, don't know anyone well who has one)
But this move sort of pulls back the curtain between the marketers in charge at these companies and their view of the customers. "they are price insensitive and will pay more without worrying".
But really - you don't want to piss off a first-class customer. it's easy to get under their skin if you treat them with disrespect and they remember.
This is NOT a service. It is EXTORTION! I I have a XM radio in my car and I pay a monthly fee that is a service as I am buying content. But to pay monthly fees to continue the operation or enhance the operation an OWNED product is extortion. It is unethical and should be illegal.
oh no they have car DLC now? This is a nightmare. With what Ive learned recently about cobalt mining and the dependencies EVs have on them, it sounds to me like were better off with combustion engines.
Guess I can hope for a future with a hydrogen fueled V8!
If I have to pick between a world where a company makes four different models of car with actual different components, and a world where a company makes one car with DRM - the DRM world just seems better in general? I think it should be legally required to offer a fully functional un-DRM'ed car for the "full" price, but I would much rather buy the premium model and be able to unlock its features over time than have to choose up front which I want.
There is a sense in which this can make sense, in that unlocking the power increases the chance of failure during warranty. So you pay to hedge against that. But we can be certain car makers will not be giving you the option to unlock this for free post warranty. The fact that you aren't given control of your car when you own it is pretty awful and a terrible trend.
I expect the trend will continue, I've not yet in my life seen a user hostile corporate power grab actually stop. oh well. eat arbys.
Lead power electronics engineer: "for the projected lifetime failure rate of x as targeted the maximum power should be y"
Lead battery engineer: "for the projected lifetime cycles the maximum current drawn from the battery should be z"
Lead marketing dude: "so we market it as 2 * y, 2 * lifetime cycles and try to upsell on power" mumbling to themself: "I get my bonus on sales, the recall or warranty claims are not my problem anymore, I'll be partying with the bransons"
At one point, the BMW M3 had a "launch" mode, which enabled a couple of bits to get the bragged about 0-60 time. The car computer also kept track of how many times it was used, and your warranty expired after 10 launches.
I've seen references to 30, 50 and 100 launches (now 10), and what seems like a lot of FUD in the BMW forums. Does anyone have a current/verified resource of this policy? It's gotta be buried in the fine print somewhere...
Twenty years on, I've yet to see a shred of evidence. A lot of punters playing BMW employees, though, who never seem to be able to find that document they're saying would prove it.
Aren't max speeds limited all the time on vehicles, with state mandated governors? I know some countries require them on all automobiles. Even the US requires them on ebikes.
Modern cars usually have their engine max speed limited so they don't exceed your average all-season tire's speed rating, but arguably that's more equivalent to a redline limiter preventing your pistons from self-destructing than an type of anti-freedom measure
With Spotify, I get access to all the music and don't lose it when the cd gets scratched.
What the auto companies are doing is gating the existing functionality behind subscriptions. These companies are largely commodities at this point and are trying out rent seeking. I don't think many consumers will accept this long term. The proverbial camel's back will break because it is user hostile
I keep trying to tell the socialists and communists out there that they can totally implement the way they want to live within any democratic capitalist system.
Just make a corporation which all of your people are members of, give voting powers to all members to decide what stuff the corporation buys as well as how members get to use the things. Can even go as far as setting up an HOA or a town where the company is the landlord for everyone or has right of first refusal in every property in that area. Once you have enough people to make some stuff on your own, the company call sell that stuff and that's the only touch point you all have to have with the capitalist economy. With time the members you have, the more stuff you can make yourselves, and the less stuff you company has to sell or buy. Eventually you're totally self-sufficient, don't make transactions, and therefore don't really pay taxes either.
They usually don't go for it because they are not really bothered that they can't live the way they want to so much as they are bothered that other people might still live under capitalism.
Not totally opt out. That's a stupidly dismissive take on this idea. The point is that you would never get a wholesale light-switch style shift in any civilization anyway.
So just start now, incrementally, and see how far you can get before anyone stops you. You would ultimately be exiting the existing economy, but that's what you presumably wanted; to build a different kind of economy that you think will be more fair and equitable. And every single step you can take in that direction proves out whether your way is actually better.
All along the way, you have your collective company acting as a buffer against the capitalist system around you. You can't really exit totally without giving up modern life, so don't try to do that, as you point out, such a move wouldn't really be a desirable or viable way to get this job done. The next best move seems to me to be to just exit incrementally, as much as you like, one step at a time.
I've seen and read up on how some of the communes have gone, but I haven't seen any that made a serious attempt to run a company that way. By using the existing structures as a buffer, as I am proposing, a group could actually make the commune thing work without giving up any modern conveniences.
It's somewhat similar to what Amish people do, and they do quite well at it in terms of sustainably living as they wish even though no one else around them does. They pull that off by trading the things they do want to make for the things the surrounding society has that they actually want.
It's totally possible to do a socialist version of that where everyone lives in modern houses with modern conveniences, share whatever stuff you all actually want to be building yourselves, but when you have to buy or vote on something, do so through the company and as a block. Mormons have largely gotten away with block voting over the decades, and still do, so we also have existing evidence that that works too.
The details are, of course, up to whoever is trying this out, but the overall thing I'm pointing to, that I don't think anyone has given a real go at, is that using a company as a buffer against capitalism. No one has to live without, but individuals in the community also don't have to go play the capitalist game every day just to get what they want or need.
More like a different kind of sharing app/company as the potential starting point to people figuring out how to live the way they want to. I am indeed wondering out loud about whether anyone would participate in such a system.
To me, it could look like a bunch of people join a company through an app or something and receive voting shares they keep as long as they are participating.
Members would contribute various kinds of property and only members can vote on who gets to use what, for how long, and what, if anything gets sold to fund the company. At least initially, it would probably also have to be funded by members working regular jobs and contributing cash to the company but pretty shortly afterwards the idea would be to have the business making money on it's own by selling things the members make and want to sell.
The cash would then be used to buy anything the members vote to buy. Which then becomes part of the property pool people can vote on using.
As long as the members are geographically distributed, the company would also need to pay for shipping stuff around when it's time to change who is using what.
If it is profitable enough, then it might be able to provide most or all of what the members need to live their best lives. Short of that, it may at least be able to create a micro version of UBI or something.
There are a lot more details to work out than those of course. I do actually want to see if this approach can do something to help people live they way they want to. However, it's hard to imagine any communists or socialists wanting to join such a company if it is run by someone with a capitalist mindset. Even if that person's motives are pure and clear. Naturally, even if I was administrating such a system, I wouldn't allow myself voting powers in it but I suspect still that wouldn't be enough.
How many do you know? As far as I can tell, in the US you could fit all of these folks in a single medium size stadium. And it probably wouldn't be full.
That sounds about right, I try to engage with people on this topic as much as I can without annoying any of them too much. That basically looks like asking them why they don't group up and prove their point instead of individually raging against the machine all the time.
IRL I know two or three people who like to lean this direction from time to time, but even those people seem to be just ranting against the remaining issues present under the version of capitalism we have now rather than truly wanting a completely different system.
