The really offensive part of this kind of thing is that you already paid for it. Like if you wanted to buy a regular car and you could get the engine with turbo then those are two different cars. The latter costing more because it has more/better stuff in it. This is all fine and good.
In this case, all the cars have turbo and you pay to have it turned on or not. The cost of the turbo is in the cost of the normal car because the company would not sell it at a loss. You already paid for it, but aren't allow to use it. So you are driving around with this perfectly good and usable turbo that you paid for and can't use unless you paid some extra extortion money. This is abusive, wasteful, and should be illegal in my opinion. You should only be charged extra if it is in fact extra. Not something that is already there and withheld.
The turbo example would be especially egregious because it adds complexity to the engine. You're paying for the hardware and paying more for all engine related repairs in the future. The same goes for BMW's infamous heated seat subscription.
I wish the smartcar didn’t suck so bad. We need alternatives to this “turn them upside down and shake the coins from them” approach to cars. We kind of screwed ourselves here in US because you have to drive places, you can’t walk. Even big cities aren’t that walkable (with the exception of a dozen neighborhoods sprinkled about a half dozen cities).
No, digital payments didn’t do it, lack of laws did. Courts can’t keep up with the pace of innovation to protect us from greed.
I’m ok with an app charging an install fee if it’s worth it. I’m ok with games selling micro transaction cosmetics. I’m not ok with features being behind yet another paywall or subscription.
It’s plain old false advertising. If I buy a car and it has a turbo, I expect it to go turbo. If I buy an app and it’s supposed to make things pretty, it better make things pretty. If I buy a cheeseburger, I don’t want to be charged extra for the condiments put on it or the onions, pickles, lettuce. I expected that comes included as part of Cogs.
We would need to have laws against enshitification and limit patents to no more than a decade. Then we would be forced to innovate or lose competitive advantage. Greed Innovation will just bring more piñatas to hit.
> Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare – but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it's a dream they can't give up on. [...]
> But even amid all the complaining about cars getting stuck in the Internet of Shit, there's still not much discussion of why the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips. Are car execs just the latest generation of rubes who've been suckered by Silicon Valley bullshit and convinced that apps are a magic path to profitability? [...]
Sorry, but a large percentage of people have never left their home state. The US is effectively a collection of 50 countries that formed an American Union, so it sounds like you are suggesting that EU people would have no problem walking end-to-end across all of Europe, but that we are the ones who need cars.
Blaming dirt for political failures in providing better accessibility to transit seems like a pretty weird starting point for a discussion.
As I said in other comments, this is already happening since years (and I mentioned Ford, but literally everyone else does it).
Car manufacturers already give you the same powerful engine that you can't afford/don't want to buy and "shrink" it with SW. If you jailbreak it, you lose the warranty and bye bye insurance.
You should not think that you're paying more for getting less. You should think that finally you can now enable more in your engine if you want to. Until today, you couldn't.
You just had to know that your car is more powerful than the papers say and live with that.
Insurance does not necessarily stop insuring modified cars. They do, however, require you to detail in depth your modifications and request a revised estimate of them. If your modification is “downloaded an Internet program and ran it to break the ECU lock”, they may be uncomfortable and either raise your premium or ask you to find another insurer. If instead it is “applied the attached two-byte change to the manufacturer-issued software after tracing all associated uses and determining that it exclusively activates a manufacturer-offered feature for the vehicle that is legal in my insured region(s)”, they’re probably not going to change your premium at all. Their job is to charge you a fee for the risk you pose to them, and the more effort you show in documenting and mitigating the risks of your mods, the more likely they are to be cool about it.
It varies per region, whether you’re increasing body dimensions or power and by how much, and if you’re prepared to install a roll cage (look up Lithuania’s rules!).
More accurately, in the US they might or might not care. When you make a claim they might choose to investigate and they could deny your claim if they think it's ultimately your fault.
You can also choose to ask them for permission in advance but that's (usually, AFAIU) entirely optional.
How can companies get away with doing extra work to make their products worse in a market with healthy competition? What does it mean when things that happen in a competitive market aren't happening?
They are doing less work. Designing a lower performance engine is harder and more expensive than producing more of the higher performance engine and limiting it.
It works in the market because sellers sellers want to charge as much as buyers are ready to pay. People who want a powerful engine are ready to pay more, so make them pay more. The limited power option is sold at a lower but still profitable margin to those who don't want to pay for the extra.
Market segmentation like this is seen everywhere. It is just that the subscription thing makes it particularly obvious.
Artificially limiting the engine is the extra work. In a competitive market artificial limitations would mean that you lose to a competitor.
I should tell my personal background here: Half of what I'm arguing against is my own personal experience of having people tell me that free market competition rewards those who offer the best product at the lowest price. I'm saying this is a counter-example; and, yeah, I agree with you that similar counter-examples are seen everywhere.
If you’re talking about limiting the power through ECU it can be interesting for engine longevity. If I’m buying used I’d avoid the typical downsized turbo engine pushed to its limit and prefer the artificially limited one as it’ll have prevented the previous owners to have wear it out too much.
It's true of all 'sub-models' of a given make and model.
Consider the BMW G20 3-series petrol cars. Essentially all trims except the M340i have twin-turbo 2-litre inline-4 B48 engines. The engine output is tuned by the engine control unit (ECU, which is a bit of software running on an embedded computer) depending on the trim: 318i gets 115 kW, 320i is 125 kW, 330i is 190 kW. There are occasional hardware differences—typically the intake manifolds, radiators, and maybe belts, but the engine block is exactly the same across these trims—they're all B48. This is public knowledge; there is a detailed table on Wikipedia[1].
Engine 'tuning' is exactly tweaking numbers in the ECU. A stage 1 tune could involve mapping a 318i to a 320i or better without even popping the bonnet; just a laptop plugged into the OBD2 port above the driver's foot rest.
Naturally, as mentioned by others, some of these tunes are less than legal, because the price, road tax, and other legalese surrounding motor vehicles are determined by the performance and fuel economy of the vehicle from the factory. A car is so computerised that nowadays there are plug-in 'chip tuners' that remap the ECU signals on-the-fly and just-in-time, and can be removed before inspections. It's not dissimilar to overclocking computer chips.
This applies across all car makes, not just BMW and not even just European ones.
Intake and exhaust manifold shapes affect the power and torque characteristics of the engine. Also, these are not cheap parts. Also a quick glance at the parts catalogue suggests that the example engine, BMW B48, has different pistons and connecting rods for different tune levels, suggesting that the cast engine block is one of the few components which are actually interchangeable between the versions. Didn't check, but I'd guess the turbocharger compressor and turbine wheels might be different, too.
Manufacturers have been shipping cars with detuned engines forever, and tuners have been tweaking them to unlock the hidden power for just as long. Back in the beginning of the century I owned a 2000 Audi S4 twin-turbo. The torque curve on it looked like a perfect plateau between 2,500 and 5,300 rpm. I replaced the entire ECU with a chipped duplicate (a five minute swap) and instantly gained 50 horsepower. Of course, Audi limited the torque for a variety of reasons, including reliability and the fact that otherwise the car would have encroached on their higher-end RS4 line.
Similarly, the car I have as a track toy, a 1986 Porsche 944 Turbo, was famously limited by Porsche to avoid competing with their flagship 911 Turbo. Tuners figured this out and came up with all sorts of modifications, from mild to wild, to extract more performance.
Back in the 2000s I didn't have a problem with insurance. Probably not the same today.
I hesitate to call turbo cars detuned just because you can turn up the boost or add timing. A lot of the "hidden power" in turbo cars is for emissions and reliability. Just because you can run 30psi doesn't mean the car is gonna last 200k miles like that.
This is an honest question, because I have no knowledge about cars at all. Could the "detuning" rather be interpreted as akin to the "binning" that CPU manufacturers do? So, if you buy a higher model car, you get qualified and tested parts for that performance rating. And if you buy a lower model, and "overclock" it, you're on your own?
I don't know if I exactly follow the analogy, but engines are not binned like CPU's. If you have questions about if you're "on your own" with mods, check with whoever has your warranty and insurance. It might be different car to car or even state to state. Likely, you can get some work done at a dealership that won't void your warranty and tune to a level that doesn't affect your insurance.
I don't think the analogy works because you're not getting different hardware, just different mixtures of fuel/air/timing that trade reliability and mpg for more performance.
I was into sports cars more in the 90s, so my knowledge of this stuff today isn't great, but I mean it was at least true of most sports cars. Most famously the Nissan Skyline R34. The RB26DETT engine is known to have been under-tuned from the factory. You can get so much more horsepower out of it.
That's different. Look up the gentleman's agreement for why, but every Japanese car from that era had 276hp on paper. The supra had close to 320 as sold. The skyline had a marked boost controller hose that you could remove part of and turn up boost for more power. None of this was to sell a higher power variant using the same parts but software locked. It was all to secretly continue the horsepower war while publicly sticking to the agreed limits.
This was the whole point of the grease monkey scene starting back in the 50s. You take the car from the dealer, and then start adding, tweaking to get every last bit of power from it. Take a set of twin single barrel carbs off to be replaced with a single four barrel. Add a better set of manifolds. Add better __________. Once computers were introduced for air/fuel mixing, fuel injection, and any of the other things it can do, there have been shops that specialize in tuning them to max out performance. Just watch any show on your favorite streaming platform about building/enhancing cars.
That is not true, and even TFA points at why that can't be true: to your insurance, to vehicle taxes, etc. you declare the power _of the installed engine_, not of whatever software interlocks you, your tax advisor, or the manufacturer have decided to install on it.
TFA already says the car is registered at the maximum power level regardless of the actual software cap. So you are _quite literally_ paying for it, at least in terms of increased insurance and taxes.
That article says the opposite you're trying to say (it clearly says Ford uses physically different engines for different variations, just that the volume is no longer the comparable or even advertised metric). That engine volume, size (and other like metrics) no longer correlates with power has been a thing since the 1950s ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_horsepower ). Which is why since then the tax is not computed by size alone.
It doesn't say about manufacturers using the same physical engine, and/or having software interlocks for engine power, which would imply that on paper (and on registration) you have an engine paid for X power that can only do Y (with Y < X). People would riot if they noticed such things, as like on what is claimed on TFA.
I got downsizing mixed up, you're right. We're talking about something I didn't look up for a while now, so in mind the downsizing was connected to the ability to resize the engine with software. While the downsizing was done for different reasons, the engine configuration can and is often provided through software.
> One of the best-selling examples of ‘downsizing’ is Ford’s 1.0-litre EcoBoost petrol engine, which is available with outputs of 99bhp, 123bhp and 138bhp, meaning it effectively replaces 1.4, 1.6 and even some 1.8-litre engines from the past.
> Other advances include the way the fuel is introduced into the engine, with powerful computers and software controlling fuel injection to the millisecond and allowing the engine to shut down in traffic where stop and start is fitted.
They understood that with SW you can provide multiple configurations for the same engine. This I know for sure it's the case of Ford Ecoboost 1.0.
Is this the same with EV though? The power of the installed engine is more nuanced, for example the full power is limited by software already to prevent wheel spin and improve range. Also, in the UK EVs are listed as a 0cc engine on the vehicle ownership records so effectively have no engine.
It is true, the performance of the engine depends on the version of the software - manufacturer declares that this engine with this software can achieve this maximum performance and the software can't be legally nad officially tuned or changed. Btw in my country tax depends on engine displacement so it doesn't really change anything.
In most countries I know of (almost all of western EU), for electrical vehicles, you have to register the real maximum power output by the engine. If a software update allows you to increase that over the registered power, then you are in violation of motor vehicle codes and would need to a) pay a fine b) then update the registration, which is usually a $$$ process.
If, like TFA, they register the power output as larger than the actual one in order to give room to these "unlocks", then you basically have a vehicle which can do less than what its registration says, which people tend to notice and riot about (you pay more taxes and insurance).
In which country does the tax rate depend still only on volume?
You know that you can tune your engine right? And this is done with software that does ECU tuning. So in theory all cars are illegal?
The issue is not that you can do it, the issue (as stated in the VW article) is how to update your car papers to reflect the changes. You do it illegally with your friends? You can't. VW does it through the subscription? (I guess) allowed.
Don't ask me how, but when you buy such cars (with an engine that can support multiple configuration), you won't register your engine for something it is not. It's what's enabled to do. Simple example: you buy the ford ecoboost 1.0 100HPs. It won't be registered as the 150HPs model, although it's 100% the same hardware.
> You know that you can tune your engine right? And this is done with software that does ECU tuning. So in theory all cars are illegal?
You know that you CANNOT tune your engine, without going through your state's motor vehicle department, right ??
If the manufacturer tunes the ECU via whatever method and as consequence lowers/raises the power, good for him, but the final maximum power number is what will appear on the registration, and only in case of huge negligence can he change it afterwards on sold cars.
> The issue is not that you can do it, the issue (as stated in the VW article) is how to update your car papers to reflect the changes. You do it illegally with your friends? You can't. VW does it through the subscription? (I guess) allowed.
As I have repeated in literally each one of the 3 messages I have written in this thread: TFA clearly says the register the car for the maximum unlocked power level. Which means you _are literally paying for the maximum power even if you don't unlock it_, in terms of insurance and tax.
> you buy the ford ecoboost 1.0 100HPs. It won't be registered as the 150HPs model, although it's 100% the same hardware.
That's unsourced bullshit. I'm not familiar with Ford US cars, but Wikipedia clearly lists that the different models _are differently sized_.
But, even if it was true, and software was used as in the interlock mechanism, Ford would have to register these engines as with their maximum, unlocked power, and that's something people tend to notice.
> You should not think that you're paying more for getting less. You should think that finally you can now enable more in your engine if you want to. Until today, you couldn't.
I can think the way I want to think. I'm not going to pretend that I'm not paying more and getting less when that is what's happening!
> You just had to know that your car is more powerful than the papers say and live with that.
Or I voice my opposition to this sort of bullshit in the hopes that enough like-minded people can gather enough force to make it change for the better.
> I'm not going to pretend that I'm not paying more and getting less when that is what's happening!
I'm confused by this statement.
You're only paying more if you want the extra capability. If you don't pay more you get the capability appropriate for the price you paid (based on the market and competition).
In this example aren’t the two engines equally capable, with one being held back artificially?
I think what the other commenter is getting at, is that if the manufacturer puts a 300hp engine in a car but limits it to 250hp, they still need to charge enough to make a profit. If the manufacturer produced a cheaper 250hp engine for the 250hp car, they could probably charge less for the same profit.
So it’s a double loss for the consumer of the 250hp car. They pay a higher cost and are artificially kept from the full performance of what they bought
Understood your thinking and we don't know if that is the case or not, I can see a few different ways they could have handled it:
1-As you stated, full extra cost is paid by the buyer regardless of opting for extra capability, and that cost is non-trivial
2-Same as #1 but the cost is trivial due to some internal mfg conditions we are unaware of
3-Extra cost is non-trivial and is prorated across all units based on the expected rate of purchasing the extra capability and the overall revenue vs costs. So in this case it's a partial increase.
3-Extra cost is non-trivial but the buyer does not pay more than if they had used the less powerful engine, the buyers of extra capability are expected to fully fund the cost increase to the entire group of vehicles in the program. This could still be competitive with the market for the extra capability because people can pick and choose when they want to spend the money, that flexibility has value.
We don't really know how they handled the situation but I would be surprised if it was #1 because it would make the car less competitive for buyers that don't want the extra capability.
From a manufacturer perspective it costs less to produce and test 1 engine type than 5.
So it's questionable to me that you believe you're paying more.
You're just getting better hardware, but it doesn't mean it would be cheaper it it was specifically crafted for your needs. (= I buy 100HP and my engine supports only 100HPs).
If the manufacturer doesn't want to go through the trouble of creating a less powerful engine because it's not economically advantageous then the consumer should just get the better engine by default.
It's ridiculous and insulting to buy a new car (a big purchase for many) to be presented with options where the manufacturer went through considerable effort to _make the car worse_. Manufacturers should be in fierce competition to offer the best cars at the lowest price point.
Chinese competitors will absolutely crush Volkswagen and Volkswagen will have nobody to blame but themselves.
They are getting the better engine. It’s right there in the car.
The thing that is confusing people is it was introduced backwards, I’d imagine intentionally. As stated, it reads as if the engine is being crippled. If you fired up the engine, it would not have the max performance without tweaking the timings, but it would still work. So paying more for the higher model is paying for the software tweaks.
It’s not much different from buying a couple of sticks of RAM and then overclocking them to get extra performance. The RAM works as advertised without any tweaks.
> So paying more for the higher model is paying for the software tweaks.
No way. If they were just making the lower model it would not have the same hardware. This was designed as a higher model and then limited, so you're paying for limiter removal.
But even if that was true, it would still be a very obnoxious sales practice. Those tweaks did not take very much effort and would be useful to almost all of their customers. Software tweaks that cost a miniscule percentage of the hardware cost should come with the hardware.
This is more like the manufacturer selling a four set car sold as a two-seater with razor blades in the back seat so you can’t sit there. Then those blades get disabled if you purchase a monthly “sedan subscription”.
In this sort of case my needs would be something like 'at least 100HP'. Then someone says we have this 150HP engine here that costs $X and we are going to charge you $X+markup for it (if they sold less than $X they would go out of business so for sure I will be paying for the full cost of the engine plus a mark-up).
I say that's great, its better than my minimum requirements.
Then they say, 'well actually, we are willfully sabotaging this engine with software so that it will never ever give you more than the minimum, but are still charging you for the full cost of its manufacture plus markup'.
And I say, why would you deliberately make my engine worse. Just let me use it the way I want.
And they say, because by sabotaging your engine we can make other people pay even more markup for the same engine. It's the philosophy that instead of charging more for making something better, we charge more for not making it worse. Like the mafia would charge you money to not bomb your small business.
It seems you're thinking of the "full cost of the engine" as like material + labor to produce 1 engine. So profit vs loss is equivalent to whether you pay more or less than the unit cost of 1 engine.
Car manufacturer thinks of the cost of the engine as something like research + development + testing + sourcing + manufacturing lines + materials for all engines produced + labor for all engines produced. So for the manufacturer profits are total revenue of units sold minus total costs. To maximize profits they need to identify market segments and figure out the best way to sell into them, in some cases by selling one physical model at different price points.
If a manufacturer only targeted your market segment with a model you wouldn't get a cheaper car, you'd most likely get roughly the same car for the same price. (Ignoring design/feature compromises made to try to address one model to multiple market segments)
Not that I agree with VW or holding features behind a subscription. Just that we can understand the unit economics of why. And anyway subscriptions for hardware features are a different matter entirely.
Although I didn't say it, I was treating the 'full cost' as being all of the development etc also. It doesn't change the situation, the car company still needs to set the price to recover everything else they go under. In very special cases, companies do sometimes sell at a loss but even in this situation, purposefully making any part of the car worse is still wrong and bad. I see limiting HP with software as no different than charging extra to NOT take a hammer to windshield.
'Do you want to pay extra for the non-cracked windsheild?
'But the cars on the lot all look fine, no cracks'
'Unless you pay us $100, we will smash your windshield with a hammer before giving it to you. You also have to pay that $100 every month from now on, else the TOS says we can come to your house and smash your windshield. This has been shown to maximize our profits.'
> I see limiting HP with software as no different than charging extra to NOT take a hammer to windshield.
The example seems a bit contrived and exaggerated. I don't think many people see things that way. A car with a suboptimally-tuned engine isn't equivalent to a car with a smashed windshield. The latter isn't even legal to drive.
Also, thanks to the internet, you can know exactly the power output of the specific model and trim (perhaps even the specific vehicle) you'll be buying before you even step foot onto a lot.
The example was of course exaggerated as it was intended to showcase the absurdity of the situation. You could of course replace the smashed windshield, with them ripping up the seats or spraying the interior with skunk smell. The point is they are making something worse about the car.
And yes you can know these things before you buy, though with modern TOS, there's no saying they can't change the terms and further downgrade your performance unless you pay up. My point is they shouldn't be allowed to do any of this in the first place. If its in the car you bought, you should have access to it.
> The point is they are making something worse about the car.
Put another way, they aren't tuning your car for you, and that's okay, because you never knew your 110 power car was even capable of putting out 150 if you tuned it. You looked up the specific car you were buying online, saw it was listed as having 110, and thus expected it to have 110 the whole time. Then, you drove it, felt 110, were happy with 110, and bought it. No surprises there.
> there's no saying they can't change the terms and further downgrade your performance unless you pay up
Sure, just like anybody selling you a car can later come and smash it and beat you up and take your wallet and steal your identity etc etc. None of those things seem to actually be happening though?
> My point is they shouldn't be allowed to do any of this in the first place.
Why not? Your viewpoint is fair and valid, but all you've shared so far in support of it is an analogy that doesn't fit and repeating that you don't think things should be this way.
> Car manufacturers already give you the same powerful engine that you can't afford/don't want to buy and "shrink" it with SW. If you jailbreak it, you lose the warranty and bye bye insurance.
What was the point of doing this prior to selling a subscription to unlock it?
> What was the point of doing this prior to selling a subscription to unlock it?
There are/were legitimate considerations for this too--I've had a few GTIs that ended up 'tuned.'
Typical failures on tuned cars, past a certain power, level were clutches (both in MT and DSG models) and probably other ancillary components.
I'm sure there's also lifespan calculations for components at the stock power levels too. Probably a shorter lifespan/the projected failure rates only account for the stock output etc etc.
To match the offer to the market - if the base engine is more powerful than the market standard at a given price then you can lower the power because the customer will not choose another car on that basis anyway. And you can take more money from enthusiasts.
So if I’m understanding you correctly, the play here is:
1) Build engine with $market_leading_horsepower.
2) Throttle engine so that base models of a car have $market_leading_horsepower - $throttle_amount.
3) Price discrimination for enthusiasts removes the throttling back to the original $market_leading_horsepower while also saving the effort of having to design a faster engine.
Is there no extra cost associated with machining the faster engine? That is, would manufacturing a slower engine for the base model not be any cheaper than just building the fastest engine they can into all models?
> Is there no extra cost associated with machining the faster engine?
There probably is but it's much less than the cost of having different engines for different performance specs of the same model of car (which is very common).
Done right, a more powerful engine needs uprating of a bunch of other components - clutch, brakes, suspension, tyre profile, cooling, exhaust, air intake and so on. Almost certainly not a big deal with a 10% bump, but if it was a big bump, costs could be saved elsewhere in a less powerful vehicle.
In a laboratory run by Redditors in a universe where cows are spherical then sure.
In reality cramming a little more air through the thing is no big deal because it'll be within the fudge factor of all the other parts.
Nobody is engineering a clutch to within an inch of it's life on a 200hp shitbox, they'll use the same clutch as the 300hp version of the same engine. Yeah the trans shifting tune will be different but that doesn't necessarily mean that the components in it are different.
Generally you don't have to lose your insurance just because you modify your car. You just have to let them know you're doing it, and probably pay a little more.
You're looking at it from a cost allocation perspective.
I don't agree with that perspective but, if I did, then I would wonder how the company should recoup sunk costs and fixed costs related to the turbo part.
Should they charge all customers for that, or allow customers who don't want turbo to opt out of both the benefit of that feature, and also opt out of paying for the related R&D, extra capex and extra fixed costs?
How about in-app purchases and subscriptions? The code is already there. Is it abusive?
Is it abusive because it is tied to hardware?
No, I see it as the opposite. I see it as Volkswagen simplifying production by limiting variability and giving you the option to get a less capable product at at a cheaper price.
A 6 and a 8 core processor is probably the same die also and produced at the same cost. Maybe 2 cord were turned off because they were faulty or maybe they were turned off because some people don’t have the need and money for 8 cores. Does it matter? Now they can still buy a computer. Is that a bad thing?
> How about in-app purchases and subscriptions? The code is already there. Is it abusive?
Sometimes yes and sometimes no. Pure software is a bit different than hardware as copies are effectively zero cost. Same would go for e-books, music, etc. Not that they get a full free pass, these media can also engage in abusive practices.
> Is it abusive because it is tied to hardware?
Yes. Another example of the absurdity is if you want to buy half an apple and the store charges you enough to cover the costs of a full apple, then pull out a full apple and destroy half of it before handing it to you. Does that seem ok? Putting in extra effort to make something worse is bad.
> A 6 and a 8 core processor is probably the same die also and produced at the same cost. Maybe 2 cord were turned off because they were faulty or maybe they were turned off because some people don’t have the need and money for 8 cores.
Big difference between these two cases. If the two extra cores were faulty, then charging a lower price makes sense. Like paying less for used tires that have some wear on them. But taking a perfectly good chip and purposefully disabling two cores is like taking a belt sander to a new tire and then charging less.
The thing with batteries you can overlock your VW to do a single use 1000HP, 100k km 500hp vehicle or 1 million mile 100HP vehicle. Asking users to pay at expense of increased chance of warranty claim makes perfect sense.
Similarly Chinese EVs that advertise 1000 KW charging - unclear what is battery longevity at those c-rates.
Price of a car is not a fixed thing. All prices are made up, including markups, so you can't say what you're specifically paying for or not. Also, companies commonly price things at a loss, often to entice you to buy some subscription along side it.
This is about trapping people into paying a subscription forever. That's what is abusive. There's no need to make up other things on top of that. Thankfully, there are a lot of choices in this space.
> This is abusive, wasteful, and should be illegal in my opinion.
I don't agree with this. Let's say they make 2 engines, one normal one and one powerful one. Customer pay different price points.
Now it turns out that making 2 different engines is actually pretty wasteful, and it's way more efficient to make 1 engine, and limit the possibilities for the lower price point (this is already happening).
Now you come along and say "Illegal!". Now they have to sell this engine at the same price, which doesn't make sense in the market. So they are back to the inefficient way of producing 2 different engines for 2 different markets.
Calling this "wasteful" is weird in my eyes.
I'm not in the automotive industry, so I don't know all the details, and I might be wrong on the above reasoning, but this is what I got from it.
1 engine production line, serving 2 different price points.
Going "back to the inefficient way" is wasteful, and artificial limiting is also wasteful. Nothing weird about two things both being bad.
In a competitive market they wouldn't be able to get away with either of those. Multiple companies that know how to make their lower end models better for free would do it, because they want more market share.
So we need to figure out how to get as close to that state as possible.
Also the proposed law wouldn't make multiple prices illegal.
That's the whole idea of having 2 or more price points, because you have 2 or more types of customers. If you can only sell at 1 price point, I'm asking which one that is going to be? Or in other words, either as a company you start selling at a loss, or you lose your bottom tier customers.
If you don't understand this, there is no point in discussing this further.
What was unclear about "the proposed law wouldn't make multiple prices illegal"
As for what would happen in a competitive market with everyone acting in their best interest, I'm not sure what exactly would happen. But they're allowed to have multiple prices. It's not the prices causing the problems. And there are other ways to distinguish products that aren't artificial limits.
> Now it turns out that making 2 different engines is actually pretty wasteful, and it's way more efficient to make 1 engine
Generally speaking gas/diesel engines are used across several models, mass market manufacturers aren't making bespoke engines for one specific vehicle trim that isn't used elsewhere. The overall direction is further standardization of platforms (esp with electric vehicles) but large companies like Toyota, Ford, etc. are going to have a variety of engines available for engineers to slot into vehicles to handle different use cases. I'm not terribly interested in counting but here's some examples of the variety:
This is just one example of anti-consumer antics bordering on extortion that have been building for a very long time.
The overall idea is simple --- reduce the sticker price to a competitive level and try to increase profits with prepaid maintenance, insurance, data collection and other "subscription" services. In VW's case, this appears to be an act of desperation.
Consumers don't have to "subscribe" to this sort of gamesmanship. There are alternatives --- as evidenced by VW earnings --- down almost 40% over the past year.
To be honest, I prefer this to what other car makers do.
Example: Ford.
In many cases they ship 1 engine type and restrict it by software. This way they reduce manufacturing costs, I understand, it's just unfair that you have the same engine of someone with officially more horsepower and all you can do is cheat (with software that enables the feature) and hence say goodbye to your insurance.
I have one of these, but it’s not a Ford. It’s a BMW motorcycle.
At the time, the F-series came in the F-750 and F-850 models.
The motors are identical, the computers restrict the top end horsepower.
But, those aren’t the only differences. The 850 is more designed for off road than the 750. The bike is taller, large front wheel, spoked wheels.
I’m have the 750, the more street oriented version. But here’s the thing.
As they say in motorsports, there’s no replacement for displacement. My peak HP may be down to the 850, but I get all of the torque, which is one aspect that makes a motorcycle better to ride. Torque really helps with acceleration, and my bike will get to ludicrous speed quite handily.
Also in some jurisdictions, riders are limited by HP as to what bikes they’re allowed to ride due to tiered licensing. The 750 falls under one of those lines.
So I can’t speak to Ford, but I think the way BMW uses this in the F-series is quite reasonable on several levels.
Same thing on the current F-800 and F-900: identical engine blocks, different power outputs, F-900 comes with taller suspension, spoked wheels, and so forth.
I believe part of the rationale is that Euro A2 licenses permit a "restrictor kit" to reduce motor power below 47 hp, but only if maximum horsepower is less than 94 hp (double the limit). One can buy an F-800 with a restrictor, and then remove the restrictor once one has obtained the upgraded license.
Now, looking at the motor torque and power curves, most of that extra power comes in the high RPMs. In practical riding of BMW twins, I find that I rarely place the motor into the high RPMs, because the torque curve is nice and flat and there's plenty of pull in the low range :)
This is a very specific case, to be honest, and I am happy you can enjoy your motorbike like the model with more HPs, etc.
The thing is - for mass production, it has become cheaper for a manufacturer to produce 1 engine type and block it with software rather then 2,3...N types and to allow people to choose.
The subscription model in my opinion makes sense, because you can also decide to unlock the feature entirely and it stays. If not, you can try and decide. It sounds reasonable to me - they didn't sell you 4 wheels and a steering wheel with "entry level" model that can be upgraded to "all in the entry model + car seats, radio" etc. We're talking about some very specific upgrades that make the car cost less by default and yet still good.
Who the hell needs 230HPs on a daily basis? So shrink that, make the entry model more reasonable, and let them upgrade if they want to.
Often times it is ECU engine timings. See the many ECU tune kits available for many cars.
More aggressive tunings can also be harder on the engine. Factory tunes work a bit like binning and overclocking - the higher clocked CPUs are often selected for better quality control, and lower clocked CPUs are the same part, but with less rigorous quality control (or at least they don't have to pass at the same extreme high level).
So just like you can overclock a CPU, you can often overclock an engine... but if there are mild defects in the engine block the results can be disastrous.
This also affects fuel economy, which is regulated, and also affects consumer buying decisions. So optimizing the ECU tune for performance and for fuel economy are often somewhat different optimization points. For instance, BMWs have a button for "Eco/Comfort/Sport" mode, which among other things, can sometimes change the engine timings from a button in the cabin.
Just like underclocking a GPU can get 80% of the performance for a fraction of the power, and overclocking by 10% can use 20% more power, the same is true of the ECU timings.
Do we need this many car companies now? There’s so little variation between your typical SUV that they’re looking the same. I wish we had a better and more modular base to work with. Can we have a base car and then make the options (seat type, color, engine, finishes, light style, etc) where the money is made? Maybe even make a system for other manufacturers to make those interior pieces. Like software developers for a platform. And you could encourage regularly changing or upgrading. And make a new paint job easier. It’s just insane that people are expected to drop $40k on a vehicle every few years.
The emission scandal is something that VW paid while literally everyone else didn't - they got caught because they installed cheating software and deinstalled it after the test lab, while the others did pretty much the same in the same software which was more sophisticated, as it could somehow recognize the car wasn't being driven in real use cases, which reduced the emissions, to drastically increase once it was driven outside.
So yeah, Ford, Nissan, etc., also did their cheating, but due to some loopholes they are all good :)
IIRC, VWs in the wild would pass emissions tests, as long as only the drive wheels moved and the steering wasn't touched.
Of course, most people drive on roads, so the non-drive wheels move, and most trips involve turns.
Since the emissions tests were conducted on a dynamometer, the average affected car would likely pass. Researchers did tests in real world conditions and found the emissions varied significantly.
The difference is, some people say "VW, never again!", meanwhile they don't notice that all car manufacturers are probably guilty.
There is an old news article that said UK, French and German authorities argued to keep lax emissions testing (e.g. "they should be done while the car is going downhill!"), no doubt due to their car industry lobbyists, but since search engines suck now I can't find it anymore
So basically VW got shit all over not for cheating but for being the lowest dollar, lowest effort, trashiest implementation of cheating that makes a fool out of the regulating agency. That's actually makes perfect sense if you're jaded enough
They're reducing manufacturing costs by producing the same car, and just selling it at different prices based on performance.
I think this is quite common with EVs especially, where the same motors are used in the base and performance models - they do normally add other stuff like bigger batteries etc too, but also cost a lot more than just 600 quid extra.
What I mostly see from EVs is varying the number of motors. You get the manufacturing cost reduction on your motors without having to actually over-spec your base model.
Even this isn't the whole story though, at least at the high end. The Model S Plaid has an extra motor but also uses different rear motors, designed to be more efficient at high RPM. And Tesla puts a lot of emphasis on parts commonality in general.
I have found that there are very few absolutes in life --- so use your best judgment.
In my judgment, European manufacturers have jumped on this bandwagon more than most. Probably out of desperation and necessity --- they can't compete solely on price.
As another example, Mercedes vehicles seem to be good for about 3 years before the planned maintenance (aka gouging) really starts kicking in. I've known people with $10K bills for the scheduled maintenance from a dealership --- for a 3-4 year old car that seems to be running just fine.
"Mercedes-Benz is one of the fastest depreciating car brands in the world!"
For used car buyers this is a boon. You can pick up a nice older E class for a few thousand dollars if you know a bit about what to look for and what to avoid.
Yes, this might make sense if you could do the maintenance yourself --- but this is not at all easy or even possible in some cases without expensive/specialized electronic tools --- and this is all by design.
Something that should be simple like changing the battery is actually an intricate process on some models involving all sorts of resets and nonsense. A mistake can "brick" your car. I know someone who did this and had to have the car towed to the dealership where they were subjected to a good ole fashioned ($$$) reaming --- all for a dead battery.
For me, a 5 year old Mercedes is just not worth the headache --- and again, this is by design IMO. If you choose to buy one for basic transportation, my advice is make sure you have a backup vehicle.
Yes this is more and more true of any car. And yes I'm assuming you can handle at least routine maintenance and repairs yourself. My newest is a W211 which is about 20 years old now. Reliable drivetrain, pretty easy to work on overall, most electronic systems can be at least read if not managed by a generic scan tool such as a YouCanic.
You can find them cheap enough so that if they have a major failure you just scrap it and find another one. If they last a few years, you have a comfortable solid car for way less than making payments and depreciation on a new one.
> The overall idea is simple --- reduce the sticker price to a competitive level and try to increase profits with prepaid maintenance, insurance, data collection and other "subscription" services.
Passenger airline carriers and printer manufacturers have a similar model of using their flagship products (flights and printers) as loss leaders for their actual products (credit cards and ink).
That has more to do with their legacy ICE business than with their EVs. Their EV business is apparently growing quite nicely. And they have issues with tariffs in the US of course. But so do all their competitors.
> Consumers don't have to "subscribe" to this sort of gamesmanship.
But some happily do. Modern cars have a lot of software that defines their behavior and characteristics. Getting access to some of the feature flags is a natural control point. There's no need to introduce a lot of variation at the hardware level.
In the end you get what you pay for. If you can get a better deal for the same money, you should take it of course. Nobody stops you. Or if on the other hand horsepower doesn't really matter to you and you would mostly drive the car in economy mode, you might pay a bit less for a decent car. EVs offer a ridiculous amount of horsepower and torque. Limiting that a bit via software isn't that strange and actually necessary to prevent them from shredding their own tires. Conservative settings are better for the tires and limit the amount of wear and tear (and resulting warranty and insurance claims).
VW actually uses the same base platform for a lot of different cars and sub brands. At the hardware level there is far less difference than the amount of models would suggest. Any differences in driving experience are mostly software. And the cool thing with software is that you can change things. So, why not try to charge for that?
I personally wouldn't care about paying a subscription for stuff like this. But I appreciate some people might care enough to hand over some cash that don't necessarily have a lot of cash on hand to outright buy a more expensive model. And technically any car that has the option, is unmonetized potential. So, a subscription isn't the weirdest thing to tap into that potential. Many people lease their car anyway. So, they are already paying per month. Pay a little extra for some redundant fun on the daily commute. Or don't and pay a little less.
I don't think that's consumer hostile. Of course the FOMO for pointless features that this creates causes some people to get irrationally angry about the perceived injustice of somebody not giving them something on the cheap.
Unfortunately, this sort of thing is not limited to "pointless features".
The motor for the windshield wipers on some VW models cost $600 plus installation which is likely to be at least as much as the part itself.
So just buy an aftermarket part and install it yourself? Sorry, no can do. The wiper motor is computer controlled using a proprietary protocol protected by DMCA.
We broke the charging port cover on our car a few weeks after we got it. Someone clipped it with their leg walking past while it was open. Small piece of plastic to replace. £60.
I think not. Sure there are features that people want and would pay for, but I'd bet given the option that a lot of people would prefer to pay a bit more up front then have a monthly subscription. Personally, I want that choice back. Every subscription like this is a shift of power from the consumer to a corporation with all those TOS that can be unilaterally changed at will and features that can be remotely disabled by some half-assed AI.
> Sure there are features that people want and would pay for, but I'd bet given the option that a lot of people would prefer to pay a bit more up front then have a monthly subscription. Personally, I want that choice back.
No one is taking that choice away from you, it is right there in the article. You can either pay the monthly subscription cost or pay the lifetime outright purchase cost (which is under $700 iirc), and it stays with the car forever (in case you decide to resell it later).
I might have been looking ahead then, without resistance that buy once option will likely vanish as it already has with many types of software (I'm looking at you photoshop).
> Their EV business is apparently growing quite nicely
Their EV business is a disaster. Expensive cars plagued by ugly software bugs (reset of instrument cluster during driving). The whole VW holdind is competing with themselves (Skoda, VW, Audi, Porsche, Cupra)
"As the car is registered at 228bhp from the factory, owners won’t need to inform their insurance company, either way."
So does this imply that if insurance companies charge higher rates for higher hp, that non subscribers incur higher costs for a feature that they don't get the benefit of?
The base is 201 and with the subscription it goes to 228. I doubt an insurance company would change premium for that increase, but I'm also not an insurance rep.
The last thing I want from a car purchase is subscription nonsense that also brings extra worry or work to make sure the car doesn't cross some annoyance policy threshold in insurance or operating registration etc. I think I'd turn around and walk away from a purchase if I discover the car has subscriptions built into the fundamental car operation.
I'm sure that by having fewer parts in the logistics chain they can build a car cheaper. They then define models via software almost for free. And that would be great if the saving was passed to the consumer. Instead every saving is definitely captured by the manufacturer and the consumer gets to buy a car that definitely does everything but "computer says no".
But the situation is objectively worse than today because it doesn't just involve a "software defined car" but a "subscription defined car". Today you buy your specs and own them, you're not at the manufacturer's mercy on the monthly price.
I'm afraid it's just a matter of time until everyone does it. It only takes one company to go first and take the heat to make it mainstream, the rest will follow.
Its a funny situation: they a put larger battery in the car, which makes the car heavier. Then they derate the battery to give you less mileage with the added “benefit” that you carry with you a deadweight that you can’t get rid of and contributes further to reduced mileage.
And someone at VW looked at this and said: amazing idea.
My single take from this is that batteries have become so cheap that you can put more in a car and still make a good profit.
It would have been nice if the savings would be passed on to the consumer.
> It sounds to me like they're just limiting the kW output of the pack.
That's what he means by derating. Using the battery as if it were specced lower than it is. The deadweight is that you're hauling around a battery that is heavier than it needs to be if it were actually that spec.
OK, let’s try this another way: they could have sold a car with a say 70kW battery. Instead they are selling it with say 100kW battery.
Am smaller battery would weigh less than a bigger battery.
Because they de-rate the battery via software, you are carrying a bigger battery which weighs more than a smaller battery, while you only get the mileage of a smaller battery.
And then all we'll need is a federal government that's friendly to free trade and all of the domestic auto manufacturers will go out of business because they can't compete.
It might not happen this year, it might not happen this decade, but it will eventually happen.
Organizing your business in such an anti-consumer way is a huge liability, but executives who will have extracted all the wealth anyways will probably be long gone by then.
If it’s just extra revenue that implies that, if the manufacturer actually made 2 physically different models, they could just sell the cheaper model at the expensive model price and then charge extra for the upgrade on top of that. In other words there is zero customer price sensitivity. That seems unlikely.
> Instead every saving is definitely captured by the manufacturer and the consumer gets to buy a car that definitely does everything but "computer says no".
Or enabling full power puts more load on the vehicle's components and costs the manufacture more in warrant and reduced resale values.
Suspect it is a bit of both, but without access to the books.
I recently bought a Honda, and yesterday they emailed me a survey focused on what subscription services I'd find useful at various price points.
Unfortunately the survey gave me no opportunity to explain how much the basic concept of them continuing to be up my business post-purchase pisses me off.
Cars already have a recurring “subscription” in the form of fuel, maintenance, repairs, insurance, and cleaning. Unless more companies are pulling a Volvo and offering a comprehensive maintenance subscription that covers all the above via a monthly fee, then they can collectively FOAD.
EDIT: I am keenly aware how cars work and don’t need eSplaining on them. I articulate my point better in a comment deeper in the thread. Apologies for my snark and vitriol over unnecessary and exploitative subscriptions coming off as somehow condoning VW-formulated petrol or Tesla-approved electricity.
Poor comparison, none of these are attached to the manufacturer, you can and usually do get these services from other companies of your choice. You don't need VW-Gas(TM) from VW-Station(TM) in your tank for the car to run.
That’s…that’s literally what my point was. I didn’t think my snark and vitriol was papering over my opinion of subscriptions in vehicles as being awful things or of maintenance items being cheaper outside of dealerships, but instead merely highlighting that the only really acceptable subscription model was something like Volvo offered - a single monthly or yearly price for handling most maintenance and repair items.
I’m never - let me be clear - never going to condone proprietary bullshit like specialized gas or electricity or what-have-you. But if car dealers and makers really want recurring revenue, just take the pain out of maintenance and repairs via subscription. Most people I know of (across multiple income strata) would gladly pay for that peace of mind instead of fretting over a repair bill.
Also you can do maintenance/repairs yourself for the cost of parts, self-insure, and, obviously, clean it yourself. For EVs and hybrids, you can provide the fuel yourself (solar). The manufacturer intentionally making things like repairs difficult would be the only reason you "need" to pay for regular services, though that also doesn't really fit into a subscription model either since it's going to depend on how much you've driven.
Fundamentally I don’t care about cars. I want reliable transport available 24/7, ideally for a given price per mile.
The costs of a true per-mile option which I can guarentee is available at 3am is not available where I live (taxis don’t fill this niche), so until then it’s
Capital (for the car amortised over say 3 years - I buy second hand and don’t worry about deprecation)
Time based price (insurance, tax, some maintenence)
Mile price (petrol, some maintenence)
Location price (top road, parking)
This encourages me to use the car more once I have it though, there should be a better way to smooth occasional use (which all travel is - 95% of the time my car sits idle even if I drive an hour a day)
That's part of the motivation for them to come up with cockamamie subscription ideas: the car companies and the dealers rely on maintenance revenue, which is significantly reduced in EVs. Tire shops are the only ones happy about EVs.
Seriously people selling a product at a fair price and that being that is a centuries old thing, why does everything need to be a subscription now just because it's possible?
There’s no single universal legal definition of “lifetime” for products — it’s vague and often depends on the warranty’s own wording. It can mean the buyer’s lifetime, the product’s “useful life,” or as long as the manufacturer supports it. Courts usually interpret it based on context and disclosures.
If they can enable it remotely, then they can disable it remotely at any time. The actual lifetime is up to them, and I guarantee the terms of service give them latitude to disable it under certain circumstances. Legally, “lifetime” is never as black and white as the layman might expect.
That's what the article says, and it might be true. But it is very strange to describe a one-off purchase as a subscription, lifetime or otherwise. You can't be certain of exactly what the deal is without seeing the actual contract.
This isn't exactly centuries ago, but my dad started a company selling a widget in the 90s; their business plan was to charge not just for the widget, but a yearly cost for having the widget installed at all. I remember thinking this was weird even back then, but apparently that was the only way the company could have been profitable - if they sold the widgets for a flat fee, eventually everyplace the widget could be used would be used, and they'd run out of money, except occasionally replacing broken widgets.
It depends on what you want in a car. If you're expecting reliability like VW was known for years ago, you may well feel like the newer ones are awful.
>I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that a company founded by Adolf Hitler behaves in this way.
this is pure anti-German hatred and bigotry, Uncle H has been dead for many decades, and there is nothing to suggest that the current VW is still somehow connected to the Third Reich, while ignoring all the alt-right/nazi undercurrent brewing inside the United States among the so called "foundational americans"
The US has guaranteed this will become the norm with increased auto tariffs. An auto manufacturer can produce a car with significantly lower value for import to another country, and "features and services" can be enabled later for a fee.
This is called transfer pricing.
VW can make cars in the US, but barely make any profit, thus minimizing taxes paid to the US.
The subscription payments however can flow freely to the Switzerland directly, where royalty payments are taxed at the lowest possible rate.
This is how pharma works: pharma entities in the US dont make any profit, because they send royalty to the IP holder entity in Switzerland, where these royalty payments are taxes at the lowest rate possible and profits are sheltered that way from the US and EU taxation
Hypotethetically speaking, there could be a design office in Switzerland for these features that charges a crazy amount in IP
rights for every car sold by VW anywhere in the world.
Another possibility is that without the subscription, the car runs efficiently and meets all sorts of emission standards. But with the subscription, all that goes out the window, because it's got to deliver more power now. It might be a new loophole to get around emission standards.
I don't buy this much at all (without making any kind of opinion statement on tariffs).
They're going to do the same thing in Europe (where the US tariffs don't apply).
Subscription-based features that are already built into the car and only activated by software have been talked about since at least 2020.
Car companies have been leaning on (BS, IMO) software revenue since the days of the $100+ GPS data update sticks, at the latest.
I don't think this is the future any consumer wants, but it's the one we're gonna get from every industry where money can be turned on with the flip of a Boolean.
So, you are not the type that buys new cars. Nothing wrong with that of course. I don't own a car at all. And I don't see the logic of spending non trivial amounts of my income on a new one. But why should VW concern themselves with what you or I want considering that we are apparently not in the market anyway? Especially not for a high performance/high status type car. Because, no offense, your choice of car marks you as "definitely does not care about that sort of thing". And good for you.
I might at some point buy a second hand one. And VW has a lot of pretty decent EVs in the market that are trickling down to the second hand market at increasingly more attractive prices. Probably not my dream second hand car (I think they are kind of ugly) but they aren't horrible vehicles. I don't think I'll ever want to hand over cash to the oil industry voluntarily. I have driven rental petrol and diesel cars in the past. But it just feels a bit stupid to fill up a car for 50+ euros. A few years worth of money saved on not buying fuel easily adds up to a pretty nice budget for a modest second hand EV these days.
This makes sense to me. (Not that I would personally ever buy a car with that mechanism baked in.)
They could either make two models (incurring the costs associated with having two different SKUs) and let people pay more for the one with more power or make one with intrinsically more power and let the people that don't want it pay less with it nerfed.
I would have thought that people (like me) that have spent our lives making a zero marginal cost product would understand the economics at work here.
This is quite common already, where they’ll offer a higher performance tier, but that power only comes from the engine control unit, no physical differences.
It makes even more sense in EVs where you don’t have to be concerned with the performance of supporting components to the engine.
The difference here, is that it’s a subscription, not a one time upgrade, and as a result, not an upgrade you can sell on.
> The difference here, is that it’s a subscription, not a one time upgrade, and as a result, not an upgrade you can sell on.
From the article, if you buy "lifetime" subscription, it persists.
> Auto Express, who first reported the story, said a lifetime subscription would be for the car rather than the individual - meaning the upgrade would remain on the car if it was sold on.
People do understand the economics: tomorrow the subscription costs 3x more, or they chose to stop supporting it when a new model comes out, or etc.
The analogy to software is great though; nobody paying for software owns it, or even has the option to own it. This is not fully the case for physical things, and people are rightly angry about “owning” things without owning them.
just multiply the monthly payment by 12*6 (avg time to own a car) and imagine giving the full amount upfront to the dealer for the full horsepower.
I dont understand why people balk at car subscription for some feature, but perfectly fine with leasing a car => which is basically a car subscription driven to its logical end?
does it matter if you have to pay $700 to your bank for lease and separately $20 to VW for some feature?
would it matter if you had to pay $720 to your bank instead for full features???
> I dont understand why people balk at car subscription for some feature, but perfectly fine with leasing a car => which is basically a car subscription driven to its logical end?
Because that’s a choice with alternatives. This time they offer a “lifetime subscription”, not a purchase mind you! a subscription, next time they might not.
And since it’s a life subscription, does it transfer to the next owner? Or do they have to pay it again, a la Tesla? Will it get invalidated if I make a modification to the car?
They said lifetime of the car. So they can decide the car lifetime is 5 years, or 3 years. Amd then charge you again for an “extended support” subscription.
I absolutely balk at these sorts of subscriptions. I'm allergic to subscriptions generally, and especially when the "subscription" isn't to compensate for the ongoing cost of a service, but to allow the use of something that I already own.
The difference is that the bank can't suddenly decide that you owe them $800 each month instead of $720, but VW can decide that your subscription costs $100 instead of $20.
because they can do, but doesn't mean they will do that.
You know what else VW can do: price each car at million dollar MSRP minimum, to make more money, but they dont do that. What do you think holds them from jacking up prices to $1 mln ?
Jacking the price up before you buy allows you to decide not to buy, and to switch to an alternative instead. So VW has an incentive to keep up-front prices low.
Once you have bought the car, you are locked into paying the higher subscription costs, because the costs of switching are much higher than the increased subscription costs. There are no alternative suppliers for "increased performance" of your VW. Thus, the disincentive of lost sales is removed, and VW is not incentivised to keep subscription prices low.
To my understanding, most people who do leasing (at least in EU) do it because it's much cheaper due to tax regulations (if you buy a car for the company you own).
I loathe that model. I recognized it decades ago when, each year or so, Sony came out with a new phalanx of new televisions. They would have price points of high-end, less than high-end and moderate. What was frustrating was when the same panel (LCD) was used in a line up and the only features that differentiated the various price tiers were seemingly in the software. High-end might have picture-in-picture for example. Maybe that required a whole additional tuner? Maybe — but other features seemed like they were simply nerfed in the lower priced models.
It's as though, and now I know this sounds crazy, as though some bean-counter with a spreadsheet was actually the one determining price and features and not a team of engineers saying, "Here's what we can deliver competitively."
And while to a younger crowd, that might sound obvious, I would like to suggest that the older U.S. model (and now we're going back to the early days of the wireless, perhaps up to early Hewlett Packard times) was to beat your competition on price and features. You would never nerf a thing in your product line up.
Am I wildly off base here, naive, or have an ignorant reading of the history of U.S. Capitalism? I'm merely a layman so am happy to hear from someone who has studied this stuff.
A bit of a tangent, but I'm also reminded of the era when HeathKit was an option. My dad recalls at least that the HeathKit kits were not always inexpensive — but the completed consumer electronic project would be of very high quality. I know he but some of his early "hi-fi" equipment from HeathKit kits.
A recent headline decelared that China is run by engineers, the U.S. by lawyers. Perhaps it should have said the West is run by marketing.
I remember the exact moment when phone manufacturers removed the SD card slot so that they could sell integrated memory at huge markup while still technically advertising their phones as cheap. The excuse was that integrated memory is faster than SD card, except support of SD cards is on purpose shitty on Android just to enable this whole shitshow.
You could let consumers reap the benefits of improved technology and let everyone have the full power of the physically produced car. In a truly competitive market this is what would happen. Imagine if a $30,000 car was sold today artificially limited to 20 horsepower because that's what the Model T speced out at, and it would be too expensive for us to produce and sell a physical 20hp model and a physical 200hp model. It is just an attempt to convince consumers to let companies bank all the dividends of technological progress.
a lot of medical devcies are basically a single SKU, but with various features turned on/off based on license (bill).
same with cars, same parts with one SKU, but various features turned on/off allows car OEMs to make different price offerings at different prices to capture larger part of the demand curve
Same with a lot of software: the binaries / SaaS are the same, but your features are determined by your license key and what your subscription plan is.
There’s already a growing market for companies that just sell you a quality good without ongoing service fees or data harvesting/surveillance; cars only recently really joined that list, which frustrates me.
On the one hand, I appreciate the potential such data collection allows: proactive maintenance reminders, repair scheduling, TCO reductions, and even factory-line improvements by identifying flaws before they turn into class actions.
On the other hand, none of that is what they’re actually doing. It’s all about juicing revenue instead of reducing costs, and treating paying customers like loot pinatas to be clubbed repeatedly for dosh.
I’d like to believe there’s a market for smaller, simpler, EV-based “retro-inspired” cars that aren’t jam-packed with modems and sensors to phone home. Maybe someday I’ll be proven right.
I was in Thailand recently and drove in an EV taxi. It was as plain as possible, just a simple sedan, analog speedometer, regular buttons, no screen of any kind. That’s the car I want - the simplicity of an EV without all the other BS that drives the price up and locks you into a manufacturer’s “value add” junk.
It would be nice, but unfortunately such a stripped-down car cannot be sold in the US because it doesn't have a lot of the safety features now required (screen and backup camera, lane change alerts, air bags, auto-tensioning seatbelts, etc.)
Adobe might be an example of how optimizing revenue can eventually bite you in the ass. Adobe is a profit machine. They have the best (in terms of making money) subscription model in the technology business. But the stock price indicates that investors don't think they can keep it up. VW is still in the FA stage of this revenue experiment.
Adobe stock has been heading up and down but there can be many reasons for that.
Revenue and profit has gone absolutely nuts since subscriptions started and is clearly the way forward for them.
This model makes a lot of sense for software but none for hardware.
Adobe customers are indeed pissed off but they should fix that with lower prices and better terms, not going back to the old model that had them losing money.
After I wrote that, I almost immediately regretted that I hadn't used price earnings ratio rather than stock price as the indication that investors don't have confidence that Adobe can continue to extract rent, even though I wouldn't bet against Adobe, I wouldn't short them.
Kind of remarkable how low the price earnings ratio is compared to magnificent seven stocks. Only Google gets stuck with a similarly pedestrian price earnings ratio.
If you think that's remarkable, look at major non-tech companies.
Banks, mines, energy, rail, telecoms - companies that are making big profits right now and will be with us for decades to come, all priced like they're going to evaporate in a matter of years.
> I’d like to believe there’s a market for smaller, simpler, EV-based “retro-inspired” cars that aren’t jam-packed with modems and sensors to phone home. Maybe someday I’ll be proven right.
Yeah, I think I'm just going to buy some old Lada from some local Russian or Ukrainian guy. I know that they're not the most reliable cars, but at least anyone can make aftermarket parts for them — and they're easy to repair as well.
I might buy an EV someday if someone makes one which: Does not connect to the internet, is user-serviceable, it's possible to create aftermarket parts for without reverse engineering firmware, uses Na-ion batteries, is not ridiculously overpriced, is preferably made in Europe/North America/Japan, and is not extremely ugly like 9/10 cars released in 2025 (VW ID Buzz... eww). I'm not getting anywhere close to this DRM-ridden driving IoT-device crap. Clippy says no.
I don't think any western car manufacturer will ever want to deal with the potential liability issues when it comes to having users screw around in a high voltage electric drive system. This is not like a normal 12V car battery that will not even hurt you if you directly touch the poles with your hands. These EV batteries contain more than enough juice to zap you out of existence if you don't have relevant training.
Whilst I hate subscriptions, I am not imediatly offended by a £650 reduction in the cost of a car to lock out the last 10% of power that I would expect to have a disproportionate cost to the warrenty.
I guess I'm way more comfortable with a one-time purchase unlock (kind of SW "license" upgrade) rather than a subscription for hardware that I have 100% of the time.
Example: Acceleration Boost is a 2k one-time upgrade. Once you purchase it, you get it forever. EAP and FSD are the same: pay once, get for life. Those who purchased FSD before HW3 also got/get included driving computer upgrade. Of course this was done from Tesla to avoid backslash, but at the same time it was done without back-and-forth: they understood the situation and simply rolled it out.
FSD subscription makes sense because you purchase more "features", maybe for a limited time, for a much lower price.
If your daily driving is 20mi, you probably are fine with AP, and won't justify spending 4k on EAP, 8k on FSD or 100$/mo on the FSD subscription. But maybe if you trip for holidays for a few weeks, you can purchase the subscription for a couple months.
If you're daily driving 50+mi, or drive in very busy cities, I can see the 8k purchase offering some value if you want to keep the car more than 6 years (8k/100$ - 80 months, ~6.5y), and you can still try it out via subscription beforehand and decide to not pay the full price upfront.
Basically Tesla's model is mostly one-time license fee, except for FSD subscription to ease the access to software-powered features.
What VW is doing is selling you hardware, and then asking you to pay every month if you want to unlock its full potential. Honestly this should be illegal, a one-time fee should be the only way allowed. And I recognize they have the option of a one-time fee, but of course they're banking on people opting for the low-cost option and forget they have it active. EDIT: this is also the test bed for more subscription stuff, they want to see how people react to it. If there's no big backslash, expect more subscriptions to come.
The stranger thing here is it's... a whole 27 brake horsepower. I don't even think there's a different part at play at all here, they just decided to figure out how to play with their throttle mappings and stuff and wanted to scrape an extra couple bucks out of the bottom of the barrel.
At least Tesla was using some sense of the "ship one battery and restrict it in software" for an actual tangible hardware good versus some software shenanigans in the VW camp (again).
If this (along with Tesla Acceleration boost) is the future of automobiles, count me out. I'd rather build an electric go kart with acrylic body panels.
These idiots are already losing market share to Chinese cars. Younger generations hesitate buying cars, especially in EU. These "creative sales strategies" will "drive" them to oblivion. No subscription is necessary ...
Photoshop license was $750 and I had to save for months to purchase one - all in a country where no one ever purchases software. Then Adobe introduced subscription model which made Photoshop available for me at $10/m. So yeah, I'm all in on subscriptions.
Having said that, I feel like I will never ever give a single cent for a purely hardware switch subscription. This doesn't look fair from any perspective.
I think Volvo already does this with their "Polestar" engine upgrade which is entirely software based and increases horsepower by 15 or so (and torque by a bit more). That costs $1200 retail as a one time fee. Is the main uproar here then just the subscription?
Tesla performance trims are physically different, and the Track Mode switch they have can be freely turned on and off at will, so that's not equivalent to what Volkswagen is doing here.
Tesla sells a $2000 Acceleration Boost package for certain non-Performance trims, which increases performance purely by toggling a software switch. You can buy it like DLC from the Tesla app.
Also, Track Mode isn't available outside of the Performance trim, despite presumably being pure software. Elon has even talked about making it part of the Acceleration Boost package, though I don't think that has materialized yet: https://www.notateslaapp.com/software-updates/upcoming-featu...
Because everybody is fighting over legal/illegal tuning:
When you just change your software and you gain 50bhp that DOES NOT make your car faster. The gears still have the same ratio and the maximum speed doesn't change because the engine went up to max rpm at 200bhp and now goes up to max rpm at 250bhp.
Even raising the max rpm won't get you anywhere because to go from let's say 6500rpm to 8000rpm requires so much power and modifications that you won't achieve that with software alone.
So as long as only the software is changed the maximum operating parameters of the car are NOT changed.
Great feature, this creates incentive among car enthusiasts to delve into IoT/embedded to hack these type of systems and unlock these subscriptions without paying.
What's going on with so many people defending this as if it's actually better for the consumer? It's not, it's enshittification of the car industry, it's wanting to extract more money from you even after you already bought the car. Doesn't matter that other companies do similar, it sucks and it's worse for everyone because you lose control over the damn car. The argument that you'd save money because you'd get a discount by not unlocking the extra power makes no sense, just buy a cheaper less powerful car
The suggestion of your post is that it's a heinous ripoff. I don't like it, and would find it annoying as a car owner, but I don't think it's quite that bad. It does make it, to me, a bad product.
Maybe an analogy is thus: I find often sports kit that is black or otherwise drab coloured is cheaper. I find this annoying, as I like my kit to be colorful - and I feel like I'm being made to pay extra for color pigment, which surely cost at most pennies more per item. On the flip side, if I go for the black item, it's kind of subsidised by the color-buyers (the comparator is one where black and colorful items cost the same average amount).
The fact that the hardware here is identical but software isn't is IMO an implementation detail.
> Volkswagen says that while selecting the performance upgrade increases net power by 27bhp and the maximum torque from 265Nm to 310Nm, it does not affect range.
Energy from thin air or "you won't push that pedal hard enough to use those extra HPs," except maybe a couple of demo runs, "so you're paying a subscription to please your ego but not to go any faster"?
I already have the option to pay for more HP on my Tesla model 3. Yes it’s not a subscription, but the capability already exists. It’s a software unlock. I’d prefer if I had the option to pay my the month. My wife already thinks the Model 3 accelerates too fast, but I’d want to try it for a month. No way is she going to support $2k, but she won’t notice $100 for a month.
I'm curious how this car would react to being offline? Like what if I pay for a month, then disconnect the cellular antenna. Will it just drop its max power after a certain date? What if I'm driving during that cutoff time?
The solution this issue is - of course - to not buy a car with a power subscription.
What I want is some seats with a roll cage, on a chassis with a power plant connected to wheels that have brakes. I should be able to buy and own these things without weird add ons.
People have been buying subscription cars for years. Buy a car on credit. Stop paying the installments, and the car goes away, just like a subscription.
The analogy isn't perfect. But the way the money moves, and the effect of not paying, are identical.
I wonder if the German government will let them go out of business. The only way they could do something this stupid and petty is if they think they have an incredible backstop.
They shouldn’t, but each bailout should be accompanied by consequences for the execs and partial nationalisation of the company. Companies that big should see the German government as the devil they never want rely on.
That’s my view - which I stole from N. N. Taleb - on how to deal with too-big-to-fail companies.
With Netflix you pay for licenses and ongoing costs like bandwidth and maintenance.
A better analogy here is having to pay Microsoft for unlocking Windows NT/Server's ability to use more CPUs. Paid-for OS is already capable of it but this ability is "paywalled" due to greed.
After which VW will deny any warranty claims or won't do any repairs. Or even worse, brick the car remotely. It will be akin to unlocking bootloaders on phones or Nintendo bricking consoles.
I’m always disappointed in journalism like this when they don’t ask the obvious questions, like in this case where the added cost for VW lies to not offer it part of the vehicle.
It's probably impossible to meet modern emissions, fuel economy, and safety standards without some computer control.
I haven't seen an analysis of whether regulations preclude those controls being open source and giving the car owner full access. Of course the owner could make the car noncompliant in that case, but the owner can do that on current and past cars using a wrench.
> "Can we lower the volume of that artificial sound?" // "In the internal configuration; should we modify it, you lose the warranty".
Plus, we have heard rumors of "tampering detected: degraded mode activated, contact a service office".
Basically, one should avoid in general critical products shipped with kill switches (and in fact I also saw cars that had mulfunctioning kill switches and "shut down" randomly while running).
When we think of computers Er think of solid state digital computers. But the first fuel injected vehicles were mechanical computers. I suspect it's still very possible to do the same today, but not practical to design.
Also I'm trying to think of what role the computer plays in emissions other than ensuring stoichiometry.
When the engine is cold, the mixture needs to be rich or it won't start. Engines with carburetors use a choke for that - a valve that blocks some airflow so there's more vacuum, causing the engine to suck in extra fuel. Electronic fuel injection can be much more precise about this, minimizing the amount and duration of enrichment.
Changes in air pressure and temperature change the ideal air/fuel ratio. Driving over a mountain will make an engine without the ability to react to run at a suboptimal air/fuel ratio.
Catalytic converters require that the ratio be kept very close to optimal to operate effectively. A small deviation for an extended period of time will result in a large increase in emissions and may even permanently damage the catalyst.
True, manufacturers must face very hard constraints in many territories (all new vechicles must have this and that).
But there is something wrong in the product planning if there are no vehicles outside the wave of "gadgetrification" ("Look, these come with holographic glove compartment. It's for your convenience. Yes, you pay for it").
What would your goal be, then? Only "good" products are able to be sold -- according to whom will this definition of "good" be decided?
I'm mainly playing devil's advocate here, but my point is that bringing value judgement into other people's decisions is not something I would regard as rational. People have their own reasons for doing things that I don't need to understand.
Rational agents. That quality is an abater of relativism.
> What would your goal be, then
Livability. That requires working systems, so that choice is still possible. In the current situation, there is in many vast territories no choice, in many areas (not just cars), and greatly suboptimal, very thin livability.
Let me know when you find one of these "rational agents". I'd love to meet an extraterrestrial alien made of silicon.
Again, livability "for whom?" Do you propose making cheap, accessible beachfront property a basic human right? Should we all live in equally-sized apartments given to us for free by the government? People do not all want the same thing.
This assumes that consumers have perfect information, that products never change in favor of the vendor (enshittification), limited choice of products, and ignores the power of quasi monopolies. Also ignores persuasion tactics which have great power, see The Internet.
This all makes me so glad I still own a 2001 Dodge Grand Caravan that I have been sinking money into for years and just grabbing cheap parts from junk yards.
But it is not only automobile DRM locks that keep me away from new cars, the costs of replacing the "modules", like for a headlight, are ridiculous.
All this is just pure profit seeking but people keep buying the cars and other devices so it will never stop.
Now you are seeing the great electric car scam - Selling you an under-powered electric car and to increase its power you must pay for a subscription to unlock it's full power capabilities.
The best part is, many won't care (when they should). But these days, it is okay to get scammed isn't it?
BMW tried selling a subscription on heated seats, but that failed. [0], So lets see how long this will last.
Keep your anti-EV hatred in check for a second and note that nothing in here is EV only. They could just as well do this with a gasoline car, that engine is also electronically controlled.
But you can replace the ECU in a gasoline powered car, or the entire engine if you want. You may have to recode some of the parts such as the headlights and the airbags. Often you can use parts from other brands. But replacing anything in an EV is a nightmare: all the parts, motor management, battery management, charging controller are tightly integrated, signed, coded to the car etc.
Fair enough, but it seems to be more prevalent with EVs because electric power is a given in such a car, where a diesel or gasoline car usually has fallbacks for most electric systems except the lights and the dashboard, and the alternator can keep the engine running if the battery suddenly dies.
BMW still sells a subscription to advanced headlight functions, live traffic info in their navigation and few other things. It's just now a packaged deal and they also opt you in by default into a three month trial. The car is also all but unusable without an online account, so there's that.
Regrettably, despite of all the brouhaha with the heated seats, all this b/s never really went away.
> The best part is, many won't care (when they should).
This is generally valid for current societies, not just specifically.
Conformism has infiltrated economics, so now the supply-demand mechanism is broken: the demand agents are not "informed and rational", as classical theory wanted, so the supply is degraded - spawning "shrinkflation" and "viliflation".
The really offensive part of this kind of thing is that you already paid for it. Like if you wanted to buy a regular car and you could get the engine with turbo then those are two different cars. The latter costing more because it has more/better stuff in it. This is all fine and good.
In this case, all the cars have turbo and you pay to have it turned on or not. The cost of the turbo is in the cost of the normal car because the company would not sell it at a loss. You already paid for it, but aren't allow to use it. So you are driving around with this perfectly good and usable turbo that you paid for and can't use unless you paid some extra extortion money. This is abusive, wasteful, and should be illegal in my opinion. You should only be charged extra if it is in fact extra. Not something that is already there and withheld.
The turbo example would be especially egregious because it adds complexity to the engine. You're paying for the hardware and paying more for all engine related repairs in the future. The same goes for BMW's infamous heated seat subscription.
I wish the smartcar didn’t suck so bad. We need alternatives to this “turn them upside down and shake the coins from them” approach to cars. We kind of screwed ourselves here in US because you have to drive places, you can’t walk. Even big cities aren’t that walkable (with the exception of a dozen neighborhoods sprinkled about a half dozen cities).
Digital payments ruined everything... video games are ruined, apps are ruined, now cars are ruined.
What next, fridges? "I see you bought ice cream. The optimal storage temperature is -18C, the cost to enable this mode is $5/week. Enable now?"
No, digital payments didn’t do it, lack of laws did. Courts can’t keep up with the pace of innovation to protect us from greed.
I’m ok with an app charging an install fee if it’s worth it. I’m ok with games selling micro transaction cosmetics. I’m not ok with features being behind yet another paywall or subscription.
It’s plain old false advertising. If I buy a car and it has a turbo, I expect it to go turbo. If I buy an app and it’s supposed to make things pretty, it better make things pretty. If I buy a cheeseburger, I don’t want to be charged extra for the condiments put on it or the onions, pickles, lettuce. I expected that comes included as part of Cogs.
> Courts can’t keep up with the pace of innovation to protect us from greed.
I wish we would start getting product innovation and not just Greed Innovation.
We would need to have laws against enshitification and limit patents to no more than a decade. Then we would be forced to innovate or lose competitive advantage. Greed Innovation will just bring more piñatas to hit.
We need to learn to protect ourselves by not buying that product.
> Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare – but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it's a dream they can't give up on. [...]
> But even amid all the complaining about cars getting stuck in the Internet of Shit, there's still not much discussion of why the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips. Are car execs just the latest generation of rubes who've been suckered by Silicon Valley bullshit and convinced that apps are a magic path to profitability? [...]
Absolutely worth a read https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-de...
Sorry, but a large percentage of people have never left their home state. The US is effectively a collection of 50 countries that formed an American Union, so it sounds like you are suggesting that EU people would have no problem walking end-to-end across all of Europe, but that we are the ones who need cars.
Blaming dirt for political failures in providing better accessibility to transit seems like a pretty weird starting point for a discussion.
As I said in other comments, this is already happening since years (and I mentioned Ford, but literally everyone else does it).
Car manufacturers already give you the same powerful engine that you can't afford/don't want to buy and "shrink" it with SW. If you jailbreak it, you lose the warranty and bye bye insurance.
You should not think that you're paying more for getting less. You should think that finally you can now enable more in your engine if you want to. Until today, you couldn't.
You just had to know that your car is more powerful than the papers say and live with that.
Insurance does not necessarily stop insuring modified cars. They do, however, require you to detail in depth your modifications and request a revised estimate of them. If your modification is “downloaded an Internet program and ran it to break the ECU lock”, they may be uncomfortable and either raise your premium or ask you to find another insurer. If instead it is “applied the attached two-byte change to the manufacturer-issued software after tracing all associated uses and determining that it exclusively activates a manufacturer-offered feature for the vehicle that is legal in my insured region(s)”, they’re probably not going to change your premium at all. Their job is to charge you a fee for the risk you pose to them, and the more effort you show in documenting and mitigating the risks of your mods, the more likely they are to be cool about it.
Insurance in the US DGAF, you just can't come to them later when a tree falls on it saying it ought to be worth more because of your sick modz.
I assume Europe is way worse and that you can't even change tire/rim size without permission.
It varies per region, whether you’re increasing body dimensions or power and by how much, and if you’re prepared to install a roll cage (look up Lithuania’s rules!).
More accurately, in the US they might or might not care. When you make a claim they might choose to investigate and they could deny your claim if they think it's ultimately your fault.
You can also choose to ask them for permission in advance but that's (usually, AFAIU) entirely optional.
How can companies get away with doing extra work to make their products worse in a market with healthy competition? What does it mean when things that happen in a competitive market aren't happening?
They are doing less work. Designing a lower performance engine is harder and more expensive than producing more of the higher performance engine and limiting it.
It works in the market because sellers sellers want to charge as much as buyers are ready to pay. People who want a powerful engine are ready to pay more, so make them pay more. The limited power option is sold at a lower but still profitable margin to those who don't want to pay for the extra.
Market segmentation like this is seen everywhere. It is just that the subscription thing makes it particularly obvious.
They have to sell most of the cars in the lower performance configuration to meet fleet average emissions requirements.
It's cheaper to design and engineer one common engine block, heads, camshafts, crank, pistons, etc. and regulate the output in software.
Artificially limiting the engine is the extra work. In a competitive market artificial limitations would mean that you lose to a competitor.
I should tell my personal background here: Half of what I'm arguing against is my own personal experience of having people tell me that free market competition rewards those who offer the best product at the lowest price. I'm saying this is a counter-example; and, yeah, I agree with you that similar counter-examples are seen everywhere.
Is hardly extra work, just a tune to reduce bust.
From manufacturer point of view it makes sense, less boost is less stress on engine and less warranty claims.
We're talking about paid subscriptions here though, setting all that up is extra work.
In scheme of things that get redesigned for no reason other than fashion its negligible.
I'd like to know specific examples of what you are referencing. I don't believe you have the correct interpretation of this.
If you’re talking about limiting the power through ECU it can be interesting for engine longevity. If I’m buying used I’d avoid the typical downsized turbo engine pushed to its limit and prefer the artificially limited one as it’ll have prevented the previous owners to have wear it out too much.
What cars is this true for and does it include all insurances ?
It's true of all 'sub-models' of a given make and model.
Consider the BMW G20 3-series petrol cars. Essentially all trims except the M340i have twin-turbo 2-litre inline-4 B48 engines. The engine output is tuned by the engine control unit (ECU, which is a bit of software running on an embedded computer) depending on the trim: 318i gets 115 kW, 320i is 125 kW, 330i is 190 kW. There are occasional hardware differences—typically the intake manifolds, radiators, and maybe belts, but the engine block is exactly the same across these trims—they're all B48. This is public knowledge; there is a detailed table on Wikipedia[1].
Engine 'tuning' is exactly tweaking numbers in the ECU. A stage 1 tune could involve mapping a 318i to a 320i or better without even popping the bonnet; just a laptop plugged into the OBD2 port above the driver's foot rest.
Naturally, as mentioned by others, some of these tunes are less than legal, because the price, road tax, and other legalese surrounding motor vehicles are determined by the performance and fuel economy of the vehicle from the factory. A car is so computerised that nowadays there are plug-in 'chip tuners' that remap the ECU signals on-the-fly and just-in-time, and can be removed before inspections. It's not dissimilar to overclocking computer chips.
This applies across all car makes, not just BMW and not even just European ones.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_3_Series_(G20)#Petrol_engi...
Intake and exhaust manifold shapes affect the power and torque characteristics of the engine. Also, these are not cheap parts. Also a quick glance at the parts catalogue suggests that the example engine, BMW B48, has different pistons and connecting rods for different tune levels, suggesting that the cast engine block is one of the few components which are actually interchangeable between the versions. Didn't check, but I'd guess the turbocharger compressor and turbine wheels might be different, too.
THIS.
The idea that those engines don't differ is an urban myth that exists at least since the mid 1990s and the first TDIs.
Of course they differ in more than one way and using the higher configuration can easily destroy them.
Different variants of B48 have different turbos and injectors (and the HPFP until the year 2020)
Manufacturers have been shipping cars with detuned engines forever, and tuners have been tweaking them to unlock the hidden power for just as long. Back in the beginning of the century I owned a 2000 Audi S4 twin-turbo. The torque curve on it looked like a perfect plateau between 2,500 and 5,300 rpm. I replaced the entire ECU with a chipped duplicate (a five minute swap) and instantly gained 50 horsepower. Of course, Audi limited the torque for a variety of reasons, including reliability and the fact that otherwise the car would have encroached on their higher-end RS4 line.
Similarly, the car I have as a track toy, a 1986 Porsche 944 Turbo, was famously limited by Porsche to avoid competing with their flagship 911 Turbo. Tuners figured this out and came up with all sorts of modifications, from mild to wild, to extract more performance.
Back in the 2000s I didn't have a problem with insurance. Probably not the same today.
I hesitate to call turbo cars detuned just because you can turn up the boost or add timing. A lot of the "hidden power" in turbo cars is for emissions and reliability. Just because you can run 30psi doesn't mean the car is gonna last 200k miles like that.
This is an honest question, because I have no knowledge about cars at all. Could the "detuning" rather be interpreted as akin to the "binning" that CPU manufacturers do? So, if you buy a higher model car, you get qualified and tested parts for that performance rating. And if you buy a lower model, and "overclock" it, you're on your own?
I don't know if I exactly follow the analogy, but engines are not binned like CPU's. If you have questions about if you're "on your own" with mods, check with whoever has your warranty and insurance. It might be different car to car or even state to state. Likely, you can get some work done at a dealership that won't void your warranty and tune to a level that doesn't affect your insurance.
I don't think the analogy works because you're not getting different hardware, just different mixtures of fuel/air/timing that trade reliability and mpg for more performance.
The short answer is no. OEMs don't really do quality control tiers. They'll do new vs service tolerances and that's about it.
> Could the "detuning" rather be interpreted as akin to the "binning" that CPU manufacturers do?
No, it is typically for emissions and fuel economy purposes. Engines are pretty consistent in specs when they come off the line.
I was into sports cars more in the 90s, so my knowledge of this stuff today isn't great, but I mean it was at least true of most sports cars. Most famously the Nissan Skyline R34. The RB26DETT engine is known to have been under-tuned from the factory. You can get so much more horsepower out of it.
That's different. Look up the gentleman's agreement for why, but every Japanese car from that era had 276hp on paper. The supra had close to 320 as sold. The skyline had a marked boost controller hose that you could remove part of and turn up boost for more power. None of this was to sell a higher power variant using the same parts but software locked. It was all to secretly continue the horsepower war while publicly sticking to the agreed limits.
This was the whole point of the grease monkey scene starting back in the 50s. You take the car from the dealer, and then start adding, tweaking to get every last bit of power from it. Take a set of twin single barrel carbs off to be replaced with a single four barrel. Add a better set of manifolds. Add better __________. Once computers were introduced for air/fuel mixing, fuel injection, and any of the other things it can do, there have been shops that specialize in tuning them to max out performance. Just watch any show on your favorite streaming platform about building/enhancing cars.
That is not true, and even TFA points at why that can't be true: to your insurance, to vehicle taxes, etc. you declare the power _of the installed engine_, not of whatever software interlocks you, your tax advisor, or the manufacturer have decided to install on it.
TFA already says the car is registered at the maximum power level regardless of the actual software cap. So you are _quite literally_ paying for it, at least in terms of increased insurance and taxes.
It is unfortunately true and pretty much everyone does it. You should look it up [0] or talk to car mechanics.
Ps: Just to be clear, it's not 1 engine type installed in all the cars from the same brand. It's more of a family type, to reduce costs.
[0]: a 2016 (!!) article https://www.automotive-iq.com/powertrain/articles/engine-dow...
That article says the opposite you're trying to say (it clearly says Ford uses physically different engines for different variations, just that the volume is no longer the comparable or even advertised metric). That engine volume, size (and other like metrics) no longer correlates with power has been a thing since the 1950s ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_horsepower ). Which is why since then the tax is not computed by size alone.
It doesn't say about manufacturers using the same physical engine, and/or having software interlocks for engine power, which would imply that on paper (and on registration) you have an engine paid for X power that can only do Y (with Y < X). People would riot if they noticed such things, as like on what is claimed on TFA.
I got downsizing mixed up, you're right. We're talking about something I didn't look up for a while now, so in mind the downsizing was connected to the ability to resize the engine with software. While the downsizing was done for different reasons, the engine configuration can and is often provided through software.
> One of the best-selling examples of ‘downsizing’ is Ford’s 1.0-litre EcoBoost petrol engine, which is available with outputs of 99bhp, 123bhp and 138bhp, meaning it effectively replaces 1.4, 1.6 and even some 1.8-litre engines from the past.
> Other advances include the way the fuel is introduced into the engine, with powerful computers and software controlling fuel injection to the millisecond and allowing the engine to shut down in traffic where stop and start is fitted.
They understood that with SW you can provide multiple configurations for the same engine. This I know for sure it's the case of Ford Ecoboost 1.0.
Is this the same with EV though? The power of the installed engine is more nuanced, for example the full power is limited by software already to prevent wheel spin and improve range. Also, in the UK EVs are listed as a 0cc engine on the vehicle ownership records so effectively have no engine.
Effectively and technically. A motor is not an engine.
It is true, the performance of the engine depends on the version of the software - manufacturer declares that this engine with this software can achieve this maximum performance and the software can't be legally nad officially tuned or changed. Btw in my country tax depends on engine displacement so it doesn't really change anything.
In most countries I know of (almost all of western EU), for electrical vehicles, you have to register the real maximum power output by the engine. If a software update allows you to increase that over the registered power, then you are in violation of motor vehicle codes and would need to a) pay a fine b) then update the registration, which is usually a $$$ process.
If, like TFA, they register the power output as larger than the actual one in order to give room to these "unlocks", then you basically have a vehicle which can do less than what its registration says, which people tend to notice and riot about (you pay more taxes and insurance).
In which country does the tax rate depend still only on volume?
You know that you can tune your engine right? And this is done with software that does ECU tuning. So in theory all cars are illegal?
The issue is not that you can do it, the issue (as stated in the VW article) is how to update your car papers to reflect the changes. You do it illegally with your friends? You can't. VW does it through the subscription? (I guess) allowed.
Don't ask me how, but when you buy such cars (with an engine that can support multiple configuration), you won't register your engine for something it is not. It's what's enabled to do. Simple example: you buy the ford ecoboost 1.0 100HPs. It won't be registered as the 150HPs model, although it's 100% the same hardware.
> You know that you can tune your engine right? And this is done with software that does ECU tuning. So in theory all cars are illegal?
You know that you CANNOT tune your engine, without going through your state's motor vehicle department, right ??
If the manufacturer tunes the ECU via whatever method and as consequence lowers/raises the power, good for him, but the final maximum power number is what will appear on the registration, and only in case of huge negligence can he change it afterwards on sold cars.
> The issue is not that you can do it, the issue (as stated in the VW article) is how to update your car papers to reflect the changes. You do it illegally with your friends? You can't. VW does it through the subscription? (I guess) allowed.
As I have repeated in literally each one of the 3 messages I have written in this thread: TFA clearly says the register the car for the maximum unlocked power level. Which means you _are literally paying for the maximum power even if you don't unlock it_, in terms of insurance and tax.
> you buy the ford ecoboost 1.0 100HPs. It won't be registered as the 150HPs model, although it's 100% the same hardware.
That's unsourced bullshit. I'm not familiar with Ford US cars, but Wikipedia clearly lists that the different models _are differently sized_.
But, even if it was true, and software was used as in the interlock mechanism, Ford would have to register these engines as with their maximum, unlocked power, and that's something people tend to notice.
> You should not think that you're paying more for getting less. You should think that finally you can now enable more in your engine if you want to. Until today, you couldn't.
I can think the way I want to think. I'm not going to pretend that I'm not paying more and getting less when that is what's happening!
> You just had to know that your car is more powerful than the papers say and live with that.
Or I voice my opposition to this sort of bullshit in the hopes that enough like-minded people can gather enough force to make it change for the better.
> I'm not going to pretend that I'm not paying more and getting less when that is what's happening!
I'm confused by this statement.
You're only paying more if you want the extra capability. If you don't pay more you get the capability appropriate for the price you paid (based on the market and competition).
In this example aren’t the two engines equally capable, with one being held back artificially?
I think what the other commenter is getting at, is that if the manufacturer puts a 300hp engine in a car but limits it to 250hp, they still need to charge enough to make a profit. If the manufacturer produced a cheaper 250hp engine for the 250hp car, they could probably charge less for the same profit.
So it’s a double loss for the consumer of the 250hp car. They pay a higher cost and are artificially kept from the full performance of what they bought
Understood your thinking and we don't know if that is the case or not, I can see a few different ways they could have handled it:
1-As you stated, full extra cost is paid by the buyer regardless of opting for extra capability, and that cost is non-trivial
2-Same as #1 but the cost is trivial due to some internal mfg conditions we are unaware of
3-Extra cost is non-trivial and is prorated across all units based on the expected rate of purchasing the extra capability and the overall revenue vs costs. So in this case it's a partial increase.
3-Extra cost is non-trivial but the buyer does not pay more than if they had used the less powerful engine, the buyers of extra capability are expected to fully fund the cost increase to the entire group of vehicles in the program. This could still be competitive with the market for the extra capability because people can pick and choose when they want to spend the money, that flexibility has value.
We don't really know how they handled the situation but I would be surprised if it was #1 because it would make the car less competitive for buyers that don't want the extra capability.
From a manufacturer perspective it costs less to produce and test 1 engine type than 5.
So it's questionable to me that you believe you're paying more.
You're just getting better hardware, but it doesn't mean it would be cheaper it it was specifically crafted for your needs. (= I buy 100HP and my engine supports only 100HPs).
If the manufacturer doesn't want to go through the trouble of creating a less powerful engine because it's not economically advantageous then the consumer should just get the better engine by default.
It's ridiculous and insulting to buy a new car (a big purchase for many) to be presented with options where the manufacturer went through considerable effort to _make the car worse_. Manufacturers should be in fierce competition to offer the best cars at the lowest price point.
Chinese competitors will absolutely crush Volkswagen and Volkswagen will have nobody to blame but themselves.
They are getting the better engine. It’s right there in the car.
The thing that is confusing people is it was introduced backwards, I’d imagine intentionally. As stated, it reads as if the engine is being crippled. If you fired up the engine, it would not have the max performance without tweaking the timings, but it would still work. So paying more for the higher model is paying for the software tweaks.
It’s not much different from buying a couple of sticks of RAM and then overclocking them to get extra performance. The RAM works as advertised without any tweaks.
> So paying more for the higher model is paying for the software tweaks.
No way. If they were just making the lower model it would not have the same hardware. This was designed as a higher model and then limited, so you're paying for limiter removal.
But even if that was true, it would still be a very obnoxious sales practice. Those tweaks did not take very much effort and would be useful to almost all of their customers. Software tweaks that cost a miniscule percentage of the hardware cost should come with the hardware.
This is more like the manufacturer selling a four set car sold as a two-seater with razor blades in the back seat so you can’t sit there. Then those blades get disabled if you purchase a monthly “sedan subscription”.
You pay a subscription to overclock your RAM?
No, the subscription concept is total bullshit. The previous versions just sold a higher end model with the engine in a higher performance version.
In this sort of case my needs would be something like 'at least 100HP'. Then someone says we have this 150HP engine here that costs $X and we are going to charge you $X+markup for it (if they sold less than $X they would go out of business so for sure I will be paying for the full cost of the engine plus a mark-up).
I say that's great, its better than my minimum requirements.
Then they say, 'well actually, we are willfully sabotaging this engine with software so that it will never ever give you more than the minimum, but are still charging you for the full cost of its manufacture plus markup'.
And I say, why would you deliberately make my engine worse. Just let me use it the way I want.
And they say, because by sabotaging your engine we can make other people pay even more markup for the same engine. It's the philosophy that instead of charging more for making something better, we charge more for not making it worse. Like the mafia would charge you money to not bomb your small business.
It seems you're thinking of the "full cost of the engine" as like material + labor to produce 1 engine. So profit vs loss is equivalent to whether you pay more or less than the unit cost of 1 engine.
Car manufacturer thinks of the cost of the engine as something like research + development + testing + sourcing + manufacturing lines + materials for all engines produced + labor for all engines produced. So for the manufacturer profits are total revenue of units sold minus total costs. To maximize profits they need to identify market segments and figure out the best way to sell into them, in some cases by selling one physical model at different price points.
If a manufacturer only targeted your market segment with a model you wouldn't get a cheaper car, you'd most likely get roughly the same car for the same price. (Ignoring design/feature compromises made to try to address one model to multiple market segments)
Not that I agree with VW or holding features behind a subscription. Just that we can understand the unit economics of why. And anyway subscriptions for hardware features are a different matter entirely.
Although I didn't say it, I was treating the 'full cost' as being all of the development etc also. It doesn't change the situation, the car company still needs to set the price to recover everything else they go under. In very special cases, companies do sometimes sell at a loss but even in this situation, purposefully making any part of the car worse is still wrong and bad. I see limiting HP with software as no different than charging extra to NOT take a hammer to windshield.
'Do you want to pay extra for the non-cracked windsheild?
'But the cars on the lot all look fine, no cracks'
'Unless you pay us $100, we will smash your windshield with a hammer before giving it to you. You also have to pay that $100 every month from now on, else the TOS says we can come to your house and smash your windshield. This has been shown to maximize our profits.'
> I see limiting HP with software as no different than charging extra to NOT take a hammer to windshield.
The example seems a bit contrived and exaggerated. I don't think many people see things that way. A car with a suboptimally-tuned engine isn't equivalent to a car with a smashed windshield. The latter isn't even legal to drive.
Also, thanks to the internet, you can know exactly the power output of the specific model and trim (perhaps even the specific vehicle) you'll be buying before you even step foot onto a lot.
The example was of course exaggerated as it was intended to showcase the absurdity of the situation. You could of course replace the smashed windshield, with them ripping up the seats or spraying the interior with skunk smell. The point is they are making something worse about the car.
And yes you can know these things before you buy, though with modern TOS, there's no saying they can't change the terms and further downgrade your performance unless you pay up. My point is they shouldn't be allowed to do any of this in the first place. If its in the car you bought, you should have access to it.
> The point is they are making something worse about the car.
Put another way, they aren't tuning your car for you, and that's okay, because you never knew your 110 power car was even capable of putting out 150 if you tuned it. You looked up the specific car you were buying online, saw it was listed as having 110, and thus expected it to have 110 the whole time. Then, you drove it, felt 110, were happy with 110, and bought it. No surprises there.
> there's no saying they can't change the terms and further downgrade your performance unless you pay up
Sure, just like anybody selling you a car can later come and smash it and beat you up and take your wallet and steal your identity etc etc. None of those things seem to actually be happening though?
> My point is they shouldn't be allowed to do any of this in the first place.
Why not? Your viewpoint is fair and valid, but all you've shared so far in support of it is an analogy that doesn't fit and repeating that you don't think things should be this way.
> You should not think that you're paying more for getting less.
You're paying more for something that you're not allowed to use.
> You're paying more for something that you're not allowed to use.
You only pay more if you want the extra capability, otherwise you pay less than what the person paid that did want the extra capability.
Even if you don't pay the unlock, you're paying for the locked hardware.
> Car manufacturers already give you the same powerful engine that you can't afford/don't want to buy and "shrink" it with SW. If you jailbreak it, you lose the warranty and bye bye insurance.
What was the point of doing this prior to selling a subscription to unlock it?
> What was the point of doing this prior to selling a subscription to unlock it?
There are/were legitimate considerations for this too--I've had a few GTIs that ended up 'tuned.'
Typical failures on tuned cars, past a certain power, level were clutches (both in MT and DSG models) and probably other ancillary components.
I'm sure there's also lifespan calculations for components at the stock power levels too. Probably a shorter lifespan/the projected failure rates only account for the stock output etc etc.
To match the offer to the market - if the base engine is more powerful than the market standard at a given price then you can lower the power because the customer will not choose another car on that basis anyway. And you can take more money from enthusiasts.
So if I’m understanding you correctly, the play here is:
1) Build engine with $market_leading_horsepower.
2) Throttle engine so that base models of a car have $market_leading_horsepower - $throttle_amount.
3) Price discrimination for enthusiasts removes the throttling back to the original $market_leading_horsepower while also saving the effort of having to design a faster engine.
Is there no extra cost associated with machining the faster engine? That is, would manufacturing a slower engine for the base model not be any cheaper than just building the fastest engine they can into all models?
> Is there no extra cost associated with machining the faster engine?
There probably is but it's much less than the cost of having different engines for different performance specs of the same model of car (which is very common).
Done right, a more powerful engine needs uprating of a bunch of other components - clutch, brakes, suspension, tyre profile, cooling, exhaust, air intake and so on. Almost certainly not a big deal with a 10% bump, but if it was a big bump, costs could be saved elsewhere in a less powerful vehicle.
In a laboratory run by Redditors in a universe where cows are spherical then sure.
In reality cramming a little more air through the thing is no big deal because it'll be within the fudge factor of all the other parts.
Nobody is engineering a clutch to within an inch of it's life on a 200hp shitbox, they'll use the same clutch as the 300hp version of the same engine. Yeah the trans shifting tune will be different but that doesn't necessarily mean that the components in it are different.
But then why offer the ability to unlock the engine’s full power on a model that isn’t engineered to accommodate it?
Generally you don't have to lose your insurance just because you modify your car. You just have to let them know you're doing it, and probably pay a little more.
You're looking at it from a cost allocation perspective.
I don't agree with that perspective but, if I did, then I would wonder how the company should recoup sunk costs and fixed costs related to the turbo part.
Should they charge all customers for that, or allow customers who don't want turbo to opt out of both the benefit of that feature, and also opt out of paying for the related R&D, extra capex and extra fixed costs?
How about in-app purchases and subscriptions? The code is already there. Is it abusive?
Is it abusive because it is tied to hardware?
No, I see it as the opposite. I see it as Volkswagen simplifying production by limiting variability and giving you the option to get a less capable product at at a cheaper price.
A 6 and a 8 core processor is probably the same die also and produced at the same cost. Maybe 2 cord were turned off because they were faulty or maybe they were turned off because some people don’t have the need and money for 8 cores. Does it matter? Now they can still buy a computer. Is that a bad thing?
> How about in-app purchases and subscriptions? The code is already there. Is it abusive?
Sometimes yes and sometimes no. Pure software is a bit different than hardware as copies are effectively zero cost. Same would go for e-books, music, etc. Not that they get a full free pass, these media can also engage in abusive practices.
> Is it abusive because it is tied to hardware?
Yes. Another example of the absurdity is if you want to buy half an apple and the store charges you enough to cover the costs of a full apple, then pull out a full apple and destroy half of it before handing it to you. Does that seem ok? Putting in extra effort to make something worse is bad.
> A 6 and a 8 core processor is probably the same die also and produced at the same cost. Maybe 2 cord were turned off because they were faulty or maybe they were turned off because some people don’t have the need and money for 8 cores.
Big difference between these two cases. If the two extra cores were faulty, then charging a lower price makes sense. Like paying less for used tires that have some wear on them. But taking a perfectly good chip and purposefully disabling two cores is like taking a belt sander to a new tire and then charging less.
It's not the same comparison at all. Part of the problem why IT people developing electric shitboxes has ruined the car industry.
I personally think the answer to this is "yes” and have never bought any product that did this. I don't even do subscriptions.
The turbo example is insane. It's literally unwanted dead weight probably slightly negatively affecting fuel economy.
The thing with batteries you can overlock your VW to do a single use 1000HP, 100k km 500hp vehicle or 1 million mile 100HP vehicle. Asking users to pay at expense of increased chance of warranty claim makes perfect sense.
Similarly Chinese EVs that advertise 1000 KW charging - unclear what is battery longevity at those c-rates.
Assume I am the same height and weight as a typical US 12 year old.
Do you object to cinemas charging me a higher price than they do a child?
Price of a car is not a fixed thing. All prices are made up, including markups, so you can't say what you're specifically paying for or not. Also, companies commonly price things at a loss, often to entice you to buy some subscription along side it.
This is about trapping people into paying a subscription forever. That's what is abusive. There's no need to make up other things on top of that. Thankfully, there are a lot of choices in this space.
> This is abusive, wasteful, and should be illegal in my opinion.
I don't agree with this. Let's say they make 2 engines, one normal one and one powerful one. Customer pay different price points.
Now it turns out that making 2 different engines is actually pretty wasteful, and it's way more efficient to make 1 engine, and limit the possibilities for the lower price point (this is already happening).
Now you come along and say "Illegal!". Now they have to sell this engine at the same price, which doesn't make sense in the market. So they are back to the inefficient way of producing 2 different engines for 2 different markets.
Calling this "wasteful" is weird in my eyes.
I'm not in the automotive industry, so I don't know all the details, and I might be wrong on the above reasoning, but this is what I got from it.
1 engine production line, serving 2 different price points.
Going "back to the inefficient way" is wasteful, and artificial limiting is also wasteful. Nothing weird about two things both being bad.
In a competitive market they wouldn't be able to get away with either of those. Multiple companies that know how to make their lower end models better for free would do it, because they want more market share.
So we need to figure out how to get as close to that state as possible.
Also the proposed law wouldn't make multiple prices illegal.
So what price point do you suggest for this non-limited, high end engine?
I don't even know what engines cost now. No idea. Why do you ask?
That's the whole idea of having 2 or more price points, because you have 2 or more types of customers. If you can only sell at 1 price point, I'm asking which one that is going to be? Or in other words, either as a company you start selling at a loss, or you lose your bottom tier customers.
If you don't understand this, there is no point in discussing this further.
> If you can only sell at 1 price point
What was unclear about "the proposed law wouldn't make multiple prices illegal"
As for what would happen in a competitive market with everyone acting in their best interest, I'm not sure what exactly would happen. But they're allowed to have multiple prices. It's not the prices causing the problems. And there are other ways to distinguish products that aren't artificial limits.
> Now it turns out that making 2 different engines is actually pretty wasteful, and it's way more efficient to make 1 engine
Generally speaking gas/diesel engines are used across several models, mass market manufacturers aren't making bespoke engines for one specific vehicle trim that isn't used elsewhere. The overall direction is further standardization of platforms (esp with electric vehicles) but large companies like Toyota, Ford, etc. are going to have a variety of engines available for engineers to slot into vehicles to handle different use cases. I'm not terribly interested in counting but here's some examples of the variety:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Toyota_engines
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ford_engines
> I'm not in the automotive industry, so I don't know all the details, and I might be wrong on the above reasoning, but this is what I got from it.
I'm sorry but your speculation is pretty far off base and isn't based in fact.
> I'm sorry but your speculation is pretty far off base and isn't based in fact.
So you claim VW is not selling the same engine to different market segments, and limiting it through software?
If they do, why are they doing it?
Forget Netflix
Better idea --- forget Volkswagen.
This is just one example of anti-consumer antics bordering on extortion that have been building for a very long time.
The overall idea is simple --- reduce the sticker price to a competitive level and try to increase profits with prepaid maintenance, insurance, data collection and other "subscription" services. In VW's case, this appears to be an act of desperation.
Consumers don't have to "subscribe" to this sort of gamesmanship. There are alternatives --- as evidenced by VW earnings --- down almost 40% over the past year.
To be honest, I prefer this to what other car makers do.
Example: Ford.
In many cases they ship 1 engine type and restrict it by software. This way they reduce manufacturing costs, I understand, it's just unfair that you have the same engine of someone with officially more horsepower and all you can do is cheat (with software that enables the feature) and hence say goodbye to your insurance.
I have one of these, but it’s not a Ford. It’s a BMW motorcycle.
At the time, the F-series came in the F-750 and F-850 models.
The motors are identical, the computers restrict the top end horsepower.
But, those aren’t the only differences. The 850 is more designed for off road than the 750. The bike is taller, large front wheel, spoked wheels.
I’m have the 750, the more street oriented version. But here’s the thing.
As they say in motorsports, there’s no replacement for displacement. My peak HP may be down to the 850, but I get all of the torque, which is one aspect that makes a motorcycle better to ride. Torque really helps with acceleration, and my bike will get to ludicrous speed quite handily.
Also in some jurisdictions, riders are limited by HP as to what bikes they’re allowed to ride due to tiered licensing. The 750 falls under one of those lines.
So I can’t speak to Ford, but I think the way BMW uses this in the F-series is quite reasonable on several levels.
Same thing on the current F-800 and F-900: identical engine blocks, different power outputs, F-900 comes with taller suspension, spoked wheels, and so forth.
I believe part of the rationale is that Euro A2 licenses permit a "restrictor kit" to reduce motor power below 47 hp, but only if maximum horsepower is less than 94 hp (double the limit). One can buy an F-800 with a restrictor, and then remove the restrictor once one has obtained the upgraded license.
Now, looking at the motor torque and power curves, most of that extra power comes in the high RPMs. In practical riding of BMW twins, I find that I rarely place the motor into the high RPMs, because the torque curve is nice and flat and there's plenty of pull in the low range :)
This is a very specific case, to be honest, and I am happy you can enjoy your motorbike like the model with more HPs, etc.
The thing is - for mass production, it has become cheaper for a manufacturer to produce 1 engine type and block it with software rather then 2,3...N types and to allow people to choose.
The subscription model in my opinion makes sense, because you can also decide to unlock the feature entirely and it stays. If not, you can try and decide. It sounds reasonable to me - they didn't sell you 4 wheels and a steering wheel with "entry level" model that can be upgraded to "all in the entry model + car seats, radio" etc. We're talking about some very specific upgrades that make the car cost less by default and yet still good.
Who the hell needs 230HPs on a daily basis? So shrink that, make the entry model more reasonable, and let them upgrade if they want to.
How does the computer restrict power? Is it just a lower rev limiter?
Often times it is ECU engine timings. See the many ECU tune kits available for many cars.
More aggressive tunings can also be harder on the engine. Factory tunes work a bit like binning and overclocking - the higher clocked CPUs are often selected for better quality control, and lower clocked CPUs are the same part, but with less rigorous quality control (or at least they don't have to pass at the same extreme high level).
So just like you can overclock a CPU, you can often overclock an engine... but if there are mild defects in the engine block the results can be disastrous.
This also affects fuel economy, which is regulated, and also affects consumer buying decisions. So optimizing the ECU tune for performance and for fuel economy are often somewhat different optimization points. For instance, BMWs have a button for "Eco/Comfort/Sport" mode, which among other things, can sometimes change the engine timings from a button in the cabin.
Just like underclocking a GPU can get 80% of the performance for a fraction of the power, and overclocking by 10% can use 20% more power, the same is true of the ECU timings.
Do we need this many car companies now? There’s so little variation between your typical SUV that they’re looking the same. I wish we had a better and more modular base to work with. Can we have a base car and then make the options (seat type, color, engine, finishes, light style, etc) where the money is made? Maybe even make a system for other manufacturers to make those interior pieces. Like software developers for a platform. And you could encourage regularly changing or upgrading. And make a new paint job easier. It’s just insane that people are expected to drop $40k on a vehicle every few years.
I never trusted VW after the emissions scandal : https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn5r9rgg6yno
Now I trust them even less, if that's even possible .
The emission scandal is something that VW paid while literally everyone else didn't - they got caught because they installed cheating software and deinstalled it after the test lab, while the others did pretty much the same in the same software which was more sophisticated, as it could somehow recognize the car wasn't being driven in real use cases, which reduced the emissions, to drastically increase once it was driven outside.
So yeah, Ford, Nissan, etc., also did their cheating, but due to some loopholes they are all good :)
IIRC, VWs in the wild would pass emissions tests, as long as only the drive wheels moved and the steering wasn't touched.
Of course, most people drive on roads, so the non-drive wheels move, and most trips involve turns.
Since the emissions tests were conducted on a dynamometer, the average affected car would likely pass. Researchers did tests in real world conditions and found the emissions varied significantly.
So yeah, Ford, Nissan, etc., also did their cheating, but due to some loopholes they are all good :)
Just provide your proof of this to one of the millions of greedy lawyers out there and you can easily become rich.
I guess grandfather isn't that accurate:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltaylor/2021/07/08/german...
https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/10/nissan_admits_falsify...
The difference is, some people say "VW, never again!", meanwhile they don't notice that all car manufacturers are probably guilty.
There is an old news article that said UK, French and German authorities argued to keep lax emissions testing (e.g. "they should be done while the car is going downhill!"), no doubt due to their car industry lobbyists, but since search engines suck now I can't find it anymore
So basically VW got shit all over not for cheating but for being the lowest dollar, lowest effort, trashiest implementation of cheating that makes a fool out of the regulating agency. That's actually makes perfect sense if you're jaded enough
They're reducing manufacturing costs by producing the same car, and just selling it at different prices based on performance.
I think this is quite common with EVs especially, where the same motors are used in the base and performance models - they do normally add other stuff like bigger batteries etc too, but also cost a lot more than just 600 quid extra.
What I mostly see from EVs is varying the number of motors. You get the manufacturing cost reduction on your motors without having to actually over-spec your base model.
Even this isn't the whole story though, at least at the high end. The Model S Plaid has an extra motor but also uses different rear motors, designed to be more efficient at high RPM. And Tesla puts a lot of emphasis on parts commonality in general.
You’re going to struggle to find any car manufacturer that you can trust then because they all cheat.
And this subscription trend is exactly that, a common trend these days. It’s far from unique to VW.
Public transport (in the UK at least) cheats the system whenever they can too. So you’re probably best sticking to push bikes.
It’s far from unique to VW.
I have found that there are very few absolutes in life --- so use your best judgment.
In my judgment, European manufacturers have jumped on this bandwagon more than most. Probably out of desperation and necessity --- they can't compete solely on price.
As another example, Mercedes vehicles seem to be good for about 3 years before the planned maintenance (aka gouging) really starts kicking in. I've known people with $10K bills for the scheduled maintenance from a dealership --- for a 3-4 year old car that seems to be running just fine.
"Mercedes-Benz is one of the fastest depreciating car brands in the world!"
https://yourgreatcar.com/do-mercedes-hold-their-value/
For used car buyers this is a boon. You can pick up a nice older E class for a few thousand dollars if you know a bit about what to look for and what to avoid.
Yes, this might make sense if you could do the maintenance yourself --- but this is not at all easy or even possible in some cases without expensive/specialized electronic tools --- and this is all by design.
Something that should be simple like changing the battery is actually an intricate process on some models involving all sorts of resets and nonsense. A mistake can "brick" your car. I know someone who did this and had to have the car towed to the dealership where they were subjected to a good ole fashioned ($$$) reaming --- all for a dead battery.
https://www.mercedesmedic.com/mercedes-battery-replacement-d...
For me, a 5 year old Mercedes is just not worth the headache --- and again, this is by design IMO. If you choose to buy one for basic transportation, my advice is make sure you have a backup vehicle.
Yes this is more and more true of any car. And yes I'm assuming you can handle at least routine maintenance and repairs yourself. My newest is a W211 which is about 20 years old now. Reliable drivetrain, pretty easy to work on overall, most electronic systems can be at least read if not managed by a generic scan tool such as a YouCanic.
You can find them cheap enough so that if they have a major failure you just scrap it and find another one. If they last a few years, you have a comfortable solid car for way less than making payments and depreciation on a new one.
With all due respect, your experience is kinda out of date.
A lot has changed over 20 years. Just as an example, a lot of new Mercedes are now being equipped with Renault engines.
https://cartriple.com/mercedes-models-with-a-renault-engine/
I'd never consider any of the cheap classes. Most of those are not available in the USA where I am anyway.
E or S class only for what I'm talking about. And S are generally too complicated unless you can find one that's been really well kept up.
> The overall idea is simple --- reduce the sticker price to a competitive level and try to increase profits with prepaid maintenance, insurance, data collection and other "subscription" services.
Passenger airline carriers and printer manufacturers have a similar model of using their flagship products (flights and printers) as loss leaders for their actual products (credit cards and ink).
For Euro cars, the "actual" product is parts, service/maintenance and subscriptions.
> down almost 40% over the past year.
That has more to do with their legacy ICE business than with their EVs. Their EV business is apparently growing quite nicely. And they have issues with tariffs in the US of course. But so do all their competitors.
> Consumers don't have to "subscribe" to this sort of gamesmanship.
But some happily do. Modern cars have a lot of software that defines their behavior and characteristics. Getting access to some of the feature flags is a natural control point. There's no need to introduce a lot of variation at the hardware level.
In the end you get what you pay for. If you can get a better deal for the same money, you should take it of course. Nobody stops you. Or if on the other hand horsepower doesn't really matter to you and you would mostly drive the car in economy mode, you might pay a bit less for a decent car. EVs offer a ridiculous amount of horsepower and torque. Limiting that a bit via software isn't that strange and actually necessary to prevent them from shredding their own tires. Conservative settings are better for the tires and limit the amount of wear and tear (and resulting warranty and insurance claims).
VW actually uses the same base platform for a lot of different cars and sub brands. At the hardware level there is far less difference than the amount of models would suggest. Any differences in driving experience are mostly software. And the cool thing with software is that you can change things. So, why not try to charge for that?
I personally wouldn't care about paying a subscription for stuff like this. But I appreciate some people might care enough to hand over some cash that don't necessarily have a lot of cash on hand to outright buy a more expensive model. And technically any car that has the option, is unmonetized potential. So, a subscription isn't the weirdest thing to tap into that potential. Many people lease their car anyway. So, they are already paying per month. Pay a little extra for some redundant fun on the daily commute. Or don't and pay a little less.
I don't think that's consumer hostile. Of course the FOMO for pointless features that this creates causes some people to get irrationally angry about the perceived injustice of somebody not giving them something on the cheap.
Of course the FOMO for pointless features
Unfortunately, this sort of thing is not limited to "pointless features".
The motor for the windshield wipers on some VW models cost $600 plus installation which is likely to be at least as much as the part itself.
So just buy an aftermarket part and install it yourself? Sorry, no can do. The wiper motor is computer controlled using a proprietary protocol protected by DMCA.
Maintenance is not just a "pointless feature".
We broke the charging port cover on our car a few weeks after we got it. Someone clipped it with their leg walking past while it was open. Small piece of plastic to replace. £60.
'happily'?
I think not. Sure there are features that people want and would pay for, but I'd bet given the option that a lot of people would prefer to pay a bit more up front then have a monthly subscription. Personally, I want that choice back. Every subscription like this is a shift of power from the consumer to a corporation with all those TOS that can be unilaterally changed at will and features that can be remotely disabled by some half-assed AI.
> Sure there are features that people want and would pay for, but I'd bet given the option that a lot of people would prefer to pay a bit more up front then have a monthly subscription. Personally, I want that choice back.
No one is taking that choice away from you, it is right there in the article. You can either pay the monthly subscription cost or pay the lifetime outright purchase cost (which is under $700 iirc), and it stays with the car forever (in case you decide to resell it later).
I might have been looking ahead then, without resistance that buy once option will likely vanish as it already has with many types of software (I'm looking at you photoshop).
> Their EV business is apparently growing quite nicely
Their EV business is a disaster. Expensive cars plagued by ugly software bugs (reset of instrument cluster during driving). The whole VW holdind is competing with themselves (Skoda, VW, Audi, Porsche, Cupra)
"As the car is registered at 228bhp from the factory, owners won’t need to inform their insurance company, either way."
So does this imply that if insurance companies charge higher rates for higher hp, that non subscribers incur higher costs for a feature that they don't get the benefit of?
This is how I understand it. Which might be the reason why consumers could react against this.
Worse than that. My country's car ownership tax is based on the kW of the engine.
The base is 201 and with the subscription it goes to 228. I doubt an insurance company would change premium for that increase, but I'm also not an insurance rep.
The last thing I want from a car purchase is subscription nonsense that also brings extra worry or work to make sure the car doesn't cross some annoyance policy threshold in insurance or operating registration etc. I think I'd turn around and walk away from a purchase if I discover the car has subscriptions built into the fundamental car operation.
I'm sure that by having fewer parts in the logistics chain they can build a car cheaper. They then define models via software almost for free. And that would be great if the saving was passed to the consumer. Instead every saving is definitely captured by the manufacturer and the consumer gets to buy a car that definitely does everything but "computer says no".
But the situation is objectively worse than today because it doesn't just involve a "software defined car" but a "subscription defined car". Today you buy your specs and own them, you're not at the manufacturer's mercy on the monthly price.
I'm afraid it's just a matter of time until everyone does it. It only takes one company to go first and take the heat to make it mainstream, the rest will follow.
Its a funny situation: they a put larger battery in the car, which makes the car heavier. Then they derate the battery to give you less mileage with the added “benefit” that you carry with you a deadweight that you can’t get rid of and contributes further to reduced mileage.
And someone at VW looked at this and said: amazing idea.
My single take from this is that batteries have become so cheap that you can put more in a car and still make a good profit.
It would have been nice if the savings would be passed on to the consumer.
I'm confused, what do you mean by "derate the battery", and how would that cause some of the battery to be deadweight?
It sounds to me like they're just limiting the kW output of the pack.
> It sounds to me like they're just limiting the kW output of the pack.
That's what he means by derating. Using the battery as if it were specced lower than it is. The deadweight is that you're hauling around a battery that is heavier than it needs to be if it were actually that spec.
I mean you have a 100kW battery that is limited by the software at 70-80kW. This is what I mean by de-rating.
Secondly, a 100kW battery is heavier than a 70-80kW one.
If you don’t pony up for the upgrade fee, you carry around all the time probably 50kgs of useless mass. More mass, less mileage.
There's no additional battery cells, is the 50kg extra cooling or something?
OK, let’s try this another way: they could have sold a car with a say 70kW battery. Instead they are selling it with say 100kW battery.
Am smaller battery would weigh less than a bigger battery.
Because they de-rate the battery via software, you are carrying a bigger battery which weighs more than a smaller battery, while you only get the mileage of a smaller battery.
Hence, you have deadweight in your car.
Oh man all this theorizing and getting units of measurement wrong.
It is not dead weight. De-rating is good for longevity.
Any car with LiFePO4 batteries has a battery pack which should outlast the rest of the car.
300 miles per charge, 5000 charges, that's 1.5 million miles.
This. Overclocking has increased probability of earlier failure but within warranty period. You are essentially paying for this.
Giving people options how to pay for this is not a bad thing, as long as you can pay outright, per month, per mile, per unit delivered.
So apparently we will download a car.
And (again) possess it but not own it.
Friend’s adult kid has a tshirt: if buying isn’t owning then copying isn’t theft.
And then all we'll need is a federal government that's friendly to free trade and all of the domestic auto manufacturers will go out of business because they can't compete.
It might not happen this year, it might not happen this decade, but it will eventually happen.
Organizing your business in such an anti-consumer way is a huge liability, but executives who will have extracted all the wealth anyways will probably be long gone by then.
Or cry foul when the chinese EV manufacturares give you more bang for the buck because they don’t play silly games like this.
It is actually a good thing for consumers buying the base model as their car is effectively subsidized by those who pay for the subscription.
Note that here, subscription is just an option, you can also buy the permanent upgrade.
Why would this saving in particular get captured by the manufacturer?
I’ve always wanted to see the data for this.
Very curious to know - are the efficiencies of scale being passed on, or is this just additional revenue for manufacturers?
If it’s just extra revenue that implies that, if the manufacturer actually made 2 physically different models, they could just sell the cheaper model at the expensive model price and then charge extra for the upgrade on top of that. In other words there is zero customer price sensitivity. That seems unlikely.
> Instead every saving is definitely captured by the manufacturer and the consumer gets to buy a car that definitely does everything but "computer says no".
Or enabling full power puts more load on the vehicle's components and costs the manufacture more in warrant and reduced resale values.
Suspect it is a bit of both, but without access to the books.
I recently bought a Honda, and yesterday they emailed me a survey focused on what subscription services I'd find useful at various price points.
Unfortunately the survey gave me no opportunity to explain how much the basic concept of them continuing to be up my business post-purchase pisses me off.
Cars already have a recurring “subscription” in the form of fuel, maintenance, repairs, insurance, and cleaning. Unless more companies are pulling a Volvo and offering a comprehensive maintenance subscription that covers all the above via a monthly fee, then they can collectively FOAD.
EDIT: I am keenly aware how cars work and don’t need eSplaining on them. I articulate my point better in a comment deeper in the thread. Apologies for my snark and vitriol over unnecessary and exploitative subscriptions coming off as somehow condoning VW-formulated petrol or Tesla-approved electricity.
Poor comparison, none of these are attached to the manufacturer, you can and usually do get these services from other companies of your choice. You don't need VW-Gas(TM) from VW-Station(TM) in your tank for the car to run.
That’s…that’s literally what my point was. I didn’t think my snark and vitriol was papering over my opinion of subscriptions in vehicles as being awful things or of maintenance items being cheaper outside of dealerships, but instead merely highlighting that the only really acceptable subscription model was something like Volvo offered - a single monthly or yearly price for handling most maintenance and repair items.
I’m never - let me be clear - never going to condone proprietary bullshit like specialized gas or electricity or what-have-you. But if car dealers and makers really want recurring revenue, just take the pain out of maintenance and repairs via subscription. Most people I know of (across multiple income strata) would gladly pay for that peace of mind instead of fretting over a repair bill.
Also you can do maintenance/repairs yourself for the cost of parts, self-insure, and, obviously, clean it yourself. For EVs and hybrids, you can provide the fuel yourself (solar). The manufacturer intentionally making things like repairs difficult would be the only reason you "need" to pay for regular services, though that also doesn't really fit into a subscription model either since it's going to depend on how much you've driven.
Fundamentally I don’t care about cars. I want reliable transport available 24/7, ideally for a given price per mile.
The costs of a true per-mile option which I can guarentee is available at 3am is not available where I live (taxis don’t fill this niche), so until then it’s
Capital (for the car amortised over say 3 years - I buy second hand and don’t worry about deprecation)
Time based price (insurance, tax, some maintenence)
Mile price (petrol, some maintenence)
Location price (top road, parking)
This encourages me to use the car more once I have it though, there should be a better way to smooth occasional use (which all travel is - 95% of the time my car sits idle even if I drive an hour a day)
That's part of the motivation for them to come up with cockamamie subscription ideas: the car companies and the dealers rely on maintenance revenue, which is significantly reduced in EVs. Tire shops are the only ones happy about EVs.
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Seriously people selling a product at a fair price and that being that is a centuries old thing, why does everything need to be a subscription now just because it's possible?
Because a project manager somewhere can make a metric go up and get a promotion by doing it
Because some assholes manage to convince everybody that being only motivated by money benefits everyone.
There is a lifetime “subscription” option which is a lump sum payment and stays with the car even after being sold.
Still something distasteful about it but not quite as vampiric
"lifetime"
What do you want to imply with this pithy reply? It's for the life of the car and is not bound to an owner.
There’s no single universal legal definition of “lifetime” for products — it’s vague and often depends on the warranty’s own wording. It can mean the buyer’s lifetime, the product’s “useful life,” or as long as the manufacturer supports it. Courts usually interpret it based on context and disclosures.
If they can enable it remotely, then they can disable it remotely at any time. The actual lifetime is up to them, and I guarantee the terms of service give them latitude to disable it under certain circumstances. Legally, “lifetime” is never as black and white as the layman might expect.
That's what the article says, and it might be true. But it is very strange to describe a one-off purchase as a subscription, lifetime or otherwise. You can't be certain of exactly what the deal is without seeing the actual contract.
This isn't exactly centuries ago, but my dad started a company selling a widget in the 90s; their business plan was to charge not just for the widget, but a yearly cost for having the widget installed at all. I remember thinking this was weird even back then, but apparently that was the only way the company could have been profitable - if they sold the widgets for a flat fee, eventually everyplace the widget could be used would be used, and they'd run out of money, except occasionally replacing broken widgets.
The company ended up folding either way.
Cause there is consumer surplus out there to be eaten and return more profits to shareholders.
Because customers tolerate it. Volkswagen would stop doing this tomorrow if there was a full boycott.
I wouldn't mind boosting my car when we need to go for a road trip and bring it back to a cheaper/smaller engine for everyday drive.
Of course, if you have a car 2.0+cc and 150HPs why would you care. But the opposite can be useful.
That is fine. Your car has the ability to do that, great.
Why should you have to pay money each time you want to move that slider?
Because consumers willing to pay anyway.
Thanks for the crystal clear signaling on what type of people are running the company so I can be sure to never consider buying a VW.
Unfortunately I'm pretty sure that's the type of person who eventually ends up running all large corporations.
“I bought this car before Adolf became problematic.”
Funny, but not fair.
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> On top of all that, they’re awful cars.
They certainly aren't.
It depends on what you want in a car. If you're expecting reliability like VW was known for years ago, you may well feel like the newer ones are awful.
> I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that a company founded by Adolf Hitler behaves in this way.
A leopard never and cannot change its spots.
>I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that a company founded by Adolf Hitler behaves in this way.
this is pure anti-German hatred and bigotry, Uncle H has been dead for many decades, and there is nothing to suggest that the current VW is still somehow connected to the Third Reich, while ignoring all the alt-right/nazi undercurrent brewing inside the United States among the so called "foundational americans"
The US has guaranteed this will become the norm with increased auto tariffs. An auto manufacturer can produce a car with significantly lower value for import to another country, and "features and services" can be enabled later for a fee.
This is called transfer pricing. VW can make cars in the US, but barely make any profit, thus minimizing taxes paid to the US. The subscription payments however can flow freely to the Switzerland directly, where royalty payments are taxed at the lowest possible rate.
This is how pharma works: pharma entities in the US dont make any profit, because they send royalty to the IP holder entity in Switzerland, where these royalty payments are taxes at the lowest rate possible and profits are sheltered that way from the US and EU taxation
https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/deadly-prices-pharma...
This is also how US companies operate in Europe, e.g. Starbucks in Europe paying enormous royalty fees to the US for the name.
US companies (big tech and others) use Ireland[1], Netherlands[2], and other tax havens[3] for that
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bermuda_Black_Hole
Though Starbucks is a francise, so it's expected.
Why would it flow to Switzerland? I believe VW headquarters are still in Germany.
Hypotethetically speaking, there could be a design office in Switzerland for these features that charges a crazy amount in IP rights for every car sold by VW anywhere in the world.
Another possibility is that without the subscription, the car runs efficiently and meets all sorts of emission standards. But with the subscription, all that goes out the window, because it's got to deliver more power now. It might be a new loophole to get around emission standards.
I don't buy this much at all (without making any kind of opinion statement on tariffs).
They're going to do the same thing in Europe (where the US tariffs don't apply).
Subscription-based features that are already built into the car and only activated by software have been talked about since at least 2020.
Car companies have been leaning on (BS, IMO) software revenue since the days of the $100+ GPS data update sticks, at the latest.
I don't think this is the future any consumer wants, but it's the one we're gonna get from every industry where money can be turned on with the flip of a Boolean.
Well VW just made my list of cars to avoid. Boy, that list is getting huge. I will probably be in my 2007 toyota for a long time to come.
Yeah, it breaks my heart because I love my 2012 Passat, but no way will I buy a car with a subscription like this, or for heated seats. Idiots.
So, you are not the type that buys new cars. Nothing wrong with that of course. I don't own a car at all. And I don't see the logic of spending non trivial amounts of my income on a new one. But why should VW concern themselves with what you or I want considering that we are apparently not in the market anyway? Especially not for a high performance/high status type car. Because, no offense, your choice of car marks you as "definitely does not care about that sort of thing". And good for you.
I might at some point buy a second hand one. And VW has a lot of pretty decent EVs in the market that are trickling down to the second hand market at increasingly more attractive prices. Probably not my dream second hand car (I think they are kind of ugly) but they aren't horrible vehicles. I don't think I'll ever want to hand over cash to the oil industry voluntarily. I have driven rental petrol and diesel cars in the past. But it just feels a bit stupid to fill up a car for 50+ euros. A few years worth of money saved on not buying fuel easily adds up to a pretty nice budget for a modest second hand EV these days.
If Toyota made an EV version of my 2007 highlander I'd buy it.
This makes sense to me. (Not that I would personally ever buy a car with that mechanism baked in.)
They could either make two models (incurring the costs associated with having two different SKUs) and let people pay more for the one with more power or make one with intrinsically more power and let the people that don't want it pay less with it nerfed.
I would have thought that people (like me) that have spent our lives making a zero marginal cost product would understand the economics at work here.
This is quite common already, where they’ll offer a higher performance tier, but that power only comes from the engine control unit, no physical differences.
It makes even more sense in EVs where you don’t have to be concerned with the performance of supporting components to the engine.
The difference here, is that it’s a subscription, not a one time upgrade, and as a result, not an upgrade you can sell on.
> The difference here, is that it’s a subscription, not a one time upgrade, and as a result, not an upgrade you can sell on.
From the article, if you buy "lifetime" subscription, it persists.
> Auto Express, who first reported the story, said a lifetime subscription would be for the car rather than the individual - meaning the upgrade would remain on the car if it was sold on.
People do understand the economics: tomorrow the subscription costs 3x more, or they chose to stop supporting it when a new model comes out, or etc.
The analogy to software is great though; nobody paying for software owns it, or even has the option to own it. This is not fully the case for physical things, and people are rightly angry about “owning” things without owning them.
just multiply the monthly payment by 12*6 (avg time to own a car) and imagine giving the full amount upfront to the dealer for the full horsepower.
I dont understand why people balk at car subscription for some feature, but perfectly fine with leasing a car => which is basically a car subscription driven to its logical end?
does it matter if you have to pay $700 to your bank for lease and separately $20 to VW for some feature?
would it matter if you had to pay $720 to your bank instead for full features???
> I dont understand why people balk at car subscription for some feature, but perfectly fine with leasing a car => which is basically a car subscription driven to its logical end?
Because that’s a choice with alternatives. This time they offer a “lifetime subscription”, not a purchase mind you! a subscription, next time they might not.
And since it’s a life subscription, does it transfer to the next owner? Or do they have to pay it again, a la Tesla? Will it get invalidated if I make a modification to the car?
They said lifetime of the car. So they can decide the car lifetime is 5 years, or 3 years. Amd then charge you again for an “extended support” subscription.
I absolutely balk at these sorts of subscriptions. I'm allergic to subscriptions generally, and especially when the "subscription" isn't to compensate for the ongoing cost of a service, but to allow the use of something that I already own.
I would also never lease a car.
The difference is that the bank can't suddenly decide that you owe them $800 each month instead of $720, but VW can decide that your subscription costs $100 instead of $20.
And at some point the bank says “You’re done! Loan paid in full!”
because they can do, but doesn't mean they will do that.
You know what else VW can do: price each car at million dollar MSRP minimum, to make more money, but they dont do that. What do you think holds them from jacking up prices to $1 mln ?
Jacking the price up before you buy allows you to decide not to buy, and to switch to an alternative instead. So VW has an incentive to keep up-front prices low.
Once you have bought the car, you are locked into paying the higher subscription costs, because the costs of switching are much higher than the increased subscription costs. There are no alternative suppliers for "increased performance" of your VW. Thus, the disincentive of lost sales is removed, and VW is not incentivised to keep subscription prices low.
(See also: Netflix)
To my understanding, most people who do leasing (at least in EU) do it because it's much cheaper due to tax regulations (if you buy a car for the company you own).
It's because turning the hardware on or off based on the payment is more or less pure rent seeking.
I mean, lots of people here resent charging for software also!
I loathe that model. I recognized it decades ago when, each year or so, Sony came out with a new phalanx of new televisions. They would have price points of high-end, less than high-end and moderate. What was frustrating was when the same panel (LCD) was used in a line up and the only features that differentiated the various price tiers were seemingly in the software. High-end might have picture-in-picture for example. Maybe that required a whole additional tuner? Maybe — but other features seemed like they were simply nerfed in the lower priced models.
It's as though, and now I know this sounds crazy, as though some bean-counter with a spreadsheet was actually the one determining price and features and not a team of engineers saying, "Here's what we can deliver competitively."
And while to a younger crowd, that might sound obvious, I would like to suggest that the older U.S. model (and now we're going back to the early days of the wireless, perhaps up to early Hewlett Packard times) was to beat your competition on price and features. You would never nerf a thing in your product line up.
Am I wildly off base here, naive, or have an ignorant reading of the history of U.S. Capitalism? I'm merely a layman so am happy to hear from someone who has studied this stuff.
A bit of a tangent, but I'm also reminded of the era when HeathKit was an option. My dad recalls at least that the HeathKit kits were not always inexpensive — but the completed consumer electronic project would be of very high quality. I know he but some of his early "hi-fi" equipment from HeathKit kits.
A recent headline decelared that China is run by engineers, the U.S. by lawyers. Perhaps it should have said the West is run by marketing.
I remember the exact moment when phone manufacturers removed the SD card slot so that they could sell integrated memory at huge markup while still technically advertising their phones as cheap. The excuse was that integrated memory is faster than SD card, except support of SD cards is on purpose shitty on Android just to enable this whole shitshow.
If you think the US is consumer capitalism in the raw, visit China. It’s a whole other level.
You could let consumers reap the benefits of improved technology and let everyone have the full power of the physically produced car. In a truly competitive market this is what would happen. Imagine if a $30,000 car was sold today artificially limited to 20 horsepower because that's what the Model T speced out at, and it would be too expensive for us to produce and sell a physical 20hp model and a physical 200hp model. It is just an attempt to convince consumers to let companies bank all the dividends of technological progress.
a lot of medical devcies are basically a single SKU, but with various features turned on/off based on license (bill).
same with cars, same parts with one SKU, but various features turned on/off allows car OEMs to make different price offerings at different prices to capture larger part of the demand curve
Same with a lot of software: the binaries / SaaS are the same, but your features are determined by your license key and what your subscription plan is.
Yep. I detest that practice as well.
I guess there are times I don’t mind it - for example, if there is a decent free plan, I feel like the enterprise / pro users are subsidizing me :)
But how are you going to brag about your car when it is the same with or without subscription?
I saw that current VW models feature very prominent (and IMO ugly, unibrow style) LED strips.
Does the car light up in a different color if you pay for the subscription?
If buy the premium package, they project “Money Money Money” in from of the car as you drive ;)
With the current market, for a price you can turn things off.
Thaaaat makes a lot of sense. The unibrow with the illuminated VW logo is pretty ugly ;-)
There’s already a growing market for companies that just sell you a quality good without ongoing service fees or data harvesting/surveillance; cars only recently really joined that list, which frustrates me.
On the one hand, I appreciate the potential such data collection allows: proactive maintenance reminders, repair scheduling, TCO reductions, and even factory-line improvements by identifying flaws before they turn into class actions.
On the other hand, none of that is what they’re actually doing. It’s all about juicing revenue instead of reducing costs, and treating paying customers like loot pinatas to be clubbed repeatedly for dosh.
I’d like to believe there’s a market for smaller, simpler, EV-based “retro-inspired” cars that aren’t jam-packed with modems and sensors to phone home. Maybe someday I’ll be proven right.
I was in Thailand recently and drove in an EV taxi. It was as plain as possible, just a simple sedan, analog speedometer, regular buttons, no screen of any kind. That’s the car I want - the simplicity of an EV without all the other BS that drives the price up and locks you into a manufacturer’s “value add” junk.
It would be nice, but unfortunately such a stripped-down car cannot be sold in the US because it doesn't have a lot of the safety features now required (screen and backup camera, lane change alerts, air bags, auto-tensioning seatbelts, etc.)
Adobe might be an example of how optimizing revenue can eventually bite you in the ass. Adobe is a profit machine. They have the best (in terms of making money) subscription model in the technology business. But the stock price indicates that investors don't think they can keep it up. VW is still in the FA stage of this revenue experiment.
Adobe stock has been heading up and down but there can be many reasons for that.
Revenue and profit has gone absolutely nuts since subscriptions started and is clearly the way forward for them.
This model makes a lot of sense for software but none for hardware.
Adobe customers are indeed pissed off but they should fix that with lower prices and better terms, not going back to the old model that had them losing money.
After I wrote that, I almost immediately regretted that I hadn't used price earnings ratio rather than stock price as the indication that investors don't have confidence that Adobe can continue to extract rent, even though I wouldn't bet against Adobe, I wouldn't short them.
Kind of remarkable how low the price earnings ratio is compared to magnificent seven stocks. Only Google gets stuck with a similarly pedestrian price earnings ratio.
If you think that's remarkable, look at major non-tech companies.
Banks, mines, energy, rail, telecoms - companies that are making big profits right now and will be with us for decades to come, all priced like they're going to evaporate in a matter of years.
> I’d like to believe there’s a market for smaller, simpler, EV-based “retro-inspired” cars that aren’t jam-packed with modems and sensors to phone home. Maybe someday I’ll be proven right.
This might come close: https://www.slate.auto/en
Refreshingly small.
Yeah, I think I'm just going to buy some old Lada from some local Russian or Ukrainian guy. I know that they're not the most reliable cars, but at least anyone can make aftermarket parts for them — and they're easy to repair as well.
I might buy an EV someday if someone makes one which: Does not connect to the internet, is user-serviceable, it's possible to create aftermarket parts for without reverse engineering firmware, uses Na-ion batteries, is not ridiculously overpriced, is preferably made in Europe/North America/Japan, and is not extremely ugly like 9/10 cars released in 2025 (VW ID Buzz... eww). I'm not getting anywhere close to this DRM-ridden driving IoT-device crap. Clippy says no.
I don't think any western car manufacturer will ever want to deal with the potential liability issues when it comes to having users screw around in a high voltage electric drive system. This is not like a normal 12V car battery that will not even hurt you if you directly touch the poles with your hands. These EV batteries contain more than enough juice to zap you out of existence if you don't have relevant training.
Don’t ever buy a car from a company that locks features behind a subscription. That’s how they turn us all into techno future peasants.
Whilst I hate subscriptions, I am not imediatly offended by a £650 reduction in the cost of a car to lock out the last 10% of power that I would expect to have a disproportionate cost to the warrenty.
Tesla already does this. Why no kickback there?
I guess I'm way more comfortable with a one-time purchase unlock (kind of SW "license" upgrade) rather than a subscription for hardware that I have 100% of the time.
Example: Acceleration Boost is a 2k one-time upgrade. Once you purchase it, you get it forever. EAP and FSD are the same: pay once, get for life. Those who purchased FSD before HW3 also got/get included driving computer upgrade. Of course this was done from Tesla to avoid backslash, but at the same time it was done without back-and-forth: they understood the situation and simply rolled it out.
FSD subscription makes sense because you purchase more "features", maybe for a limited time, for a much lower price.
If your daily driving is 20mi, you probably are fine with AP, and won't justify spending 4k on EAP, 8k on FSD or 100$/mo on the FSD subscription. But maybe if you trip for holidays for a few weeks, you can purchase the subscription for a couple months.
If you're daily driving 50+mi, or drive in very busy cities, I can see the 8k purchase offering some value if you want to keep the car more than 6 years (8k/100$ - 80 months, ~6.5y), and you can still try it out via subscription beforehand and decide to not pay the full price upfront.
Basically Tesla's model is mostly one-time license fee, except for FSD subscription to ease the access to software-powered features.
What VW is doing is selling you hardware, and then asking you to pay every month if you want to unlock its full potential. Honestly this should be illegal, a one-time fee should be the only way allowed. And I recognize they have the option of a one-time fee, but of course they're banking on people opting for the low-cost option and forget they have it active. EDIT: this is also the test bed for more subscription stuff, they want to see how people react to it. If there's no big backslash, expect more subscriptions to come.
Per the article:
> VW says the "optional power upgrade" will cost £16.50 per month or £165 annually - or people can choose to pay £649 for a lifetime subscription
Agree it sucks, but there is a lifetime option, just like with Tesla.
Do these "upgrades" stay with the cat between owners?
The stranger thing here is it's... a whole 27 brake horsepower. I don't even think there's a different part at play at all here, they just decided to figure out how to play with their throttle mappings and stuff and wanted to scrape an extra couple bucks out of the bottom of the barrel.
At least Tesla was using some sense of the "ship one battery and restrict it in software" for an actual tangible hardware good versus some software shenanigans in the VW camp (again).
In both cases hardware is throttled by software. Theres is no difference, its all software shenanigans.
This is a reason also not to purchase a Tesla. Tesla's software subscriptions additionally have the problem that they don't work as advertised.
If this (along with Tesla Acceleration boost) is the future of automobiles, count me out. I'd rather build an electric go kart with acrylic body panels.
I have one rule I follow very strictly: I don't subscribe. If you have something to sell, I can buy it. But I won't pay for subscriptions.
These idiots are already losing market share to Chinese cars. Younger generations hesitate buying cars, especially in EU. These "creative sales strategies" will "drive" them to oblivion. No subscription is necessary ...
I love software subscriptions.
Photoshop license was $750 and I had to save for months to purchase one - all in a country where no one ever purchases software. Then Adobe introduced subscription model which made Photoshop available for me at $10/m. So yeah, I'm all in on subscriptions.
Having said that, I feel like I will never ever give a single cent for a purely hardware switch subscription. This doesn't look fair from any perspective.
I think Volvo already does this with their "Polestar" engine upgrade which is entirely software based and increases horsepower by 15 or so (and torque by a bit more). That costs $1200 retail as a one time fee. Is the main uproar here then just the subscription?
Unless they undercut the Chinese (same class) car prices in Europe, people will run from such products like the plague.
And we all know which way this is gonna go ;)
PS: Morally worse, only privatized water that used to be public free access, Nestlé-style. These people sure know how to win the public opinion.
No different than Tesla track/performance mode which is also a software switch.
Tesla performance trims are physically different, and the Track Mode switch they have can be freely turned on and off at will, so that's not equivalent to what Volkswagen is doing here.
Tesla sells a $2000 Acceleration Boost package for certain non-Performance trims, which increases performance purely by toggling a software switch. You can buy it like DLC from the Tesla app.
Also, Track Mode isn't available outside of the Performance trim, despite presumably being pure software. Elon has even talked about making it part of the Acceleration Boost package, though I don't think that has materialized yet: https://www.notateslaapp.com/software-updates/upcoming-featu...
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Which part of my post are you disagreeing with?
Because everybody is fighting over legal/illegal tuning:
When you just change your software and you gain 50bhp that DOES NOT make your car faster. The gears still have the same ratio and the maximum speed doesn't change because the engine went up to max rpm at 200bhp and now goes up to max rpm at 250bhp.
Even raising the max rpm won't get you anywhere because to go from let's say 6500rpm to 8000rpm requires so much power and modifications that you won't achieve that with software alone.
So as long as only the software is changed the maximum operating parameters of the car are NOT changed.
Great feature, this creates incentive among car enthusiasts to delve into IoT/embedded to hack these type of systems and unlock these subscriptions without paying.
Car hacking will be normalized even more
> Car hacking will be normalized even more
We should be concerned of the increased possibility of malicious third-party hacking of other people's property.
And, I should not hack into my desk to open my drawers.
BMW tried doing the same thing two years ago with heated seats.
What's going on with so many people defending this as if it's actually better for the consumer? It's not, it's enshittification of the car industry, it's wanting to extract more money from you even after you already bought the car. Doesn't matter that other companies do similar, it sucks and it's worse for everyone because you lose control over the damn car. The argument that you'd save money because you'd get a discount by not unlocking the extra power makes no sense, just buy a cheaper less powerful car
The suggestion of your post is that it's a heinous ripoff. I don't like it, and would find it annoying as a car owner, but I don't think it's quite that bad. It does make it, to me, a bad product.
Maybe an analogy is thus: I find often sports kit that is black or otherwise drab coloured is cheaper. I find this annoying, as I like my kit to be colorful - and I feel like I'm being made to pay extra for color pigment, which surely cost at most pennies more per item. On the flip side, if I go for the black item, it's kind of subsidised by the color-buyers (the comparator is one where black and colorful items cost the same average amount).
The fact that the hardware here is identical but software isn't is IMO an implementation detail.
> Volkswagen says that while selecting the performance upgrade increases net power by 27bhp and the maximum torque from 265Nm to 310Nm, it does not affect range.
Energy from thin air or "you won't push that pedal hard enough to use those extra HPs," except maybe a couple of demo runs, "so you're paying a subscription to please your ego but not to go any faster"?
I already have the option to pay for more HP on my Tesla model 3. Yes it’s not a subscription, but the capability already exists. It’s a software unlock. I’d prefer if I had the option to pay my the month. My wife already thinks the Model 3 accelerates too fast, but I’d want to try it for a month. No way is she going to support $2k, but she won’t notice $100 for a month.
Let me guess: emissions standards don't apply if its a mod, and a subscription counts as a mod.
I'm curious how this car would react to being offline? Like what if I pay for a month, then disconnect the cellular antenna. Will it just drop its max power after a certain date? What if I'm driving during that cutoff time?
The solution this issue is - of course - to not buy a car with a power subscription.
What I want is some seats with a roll cage, on a chassis with a power plant connected to wheels that have brakes. I should be able to buy and own these things without weird add ons.
People have been buying subscription cars for years. Buy a car on credit. Stop paying the installments, and the car goes away, just like a subscription.
The analogy isn't perfect. But the way the money moves, and the effect of not paying, are identical.
This seems to be an UK thing, possibly to keep the sticker price below the 40k GBP tax limit. The option for a lifetime purchase supports this.
So it's an extra that you can try with a subscription and buy once, if desired. Seems fair to me.
I wonder if the German government will let them go out of business. The only way they could do something this stupid and petty is if they think they have an incredible backstop.
They shouldn’t, but each bailout should be accompanied by consequences for the execs and partial nationalisation of the company. Companies that big should see the German government as the devil they never want rely on.
That’s my view - which I stole from N. N. Taleb - on how to deal with too-big-to-fail companies.
Guess I won't be getting a 2all when it comes out after all.
Coming soon: Get more trunk space for just $10 a month. Unlock more trunk space with our innovative retractable metal bar!
Volkswagen, das arschloch.
Seems they're trying as hard as they can to get rid of their user base.
I don’t trust vag for anything after the diesel scandal. I prefer any other brand than this.
I wonder if part of this is increased warranty claim expectations
With Netflix you pay for licenses and ongoing costs like bandwidth and maintenance.
A better analogy here is having to pay Microsoft for unlocking Windows NT/Server's ability to use more CPUs. Paid-for OS is already capable of it but this ability is "paywalled" due to greed.
If it’s behind a software lock, then a resourceful cracker can find a way to get around it
Welcome to the era of jailbreaking cars
After which VW will deny any warranty claims or won't do any repairs. Or even worse, brick the car remotely. It will be akin to unlocking bootloaders on phones or Nintendo bricking consoles.
I’m always disappointed in journalism like this when they don’t ask the obvious questions, like in this case where the added cost for VW lies to not offer it part of the vehicle.
If capitalism were a thing, could someone market a newly made chip-free vehicle?
It's probably impossible to meet modern emissions, fuel economy, and safety standards without some computer control.
I haven't seen an analysis of whether regulations preclude those controls being open source and giving the car owner full access. Of course the owner could make the car noncompliant in that case, but the owner can do that on current and past cars using a wrench.
> the owner could make the car noncompliant
Real dialogue:
> "Can we lower the volume of that artificial sound?" // "In the internal configuration; should we modify it, you lose the warranty".
Plus, we have heard rumors of "tampering detected: degraded mode activated, contact a service office".
Basically, one should avoid in general critical products shipped with kill switches (and in fact I also saw cars that had mulfunctioning kill switches and "shut down" randomly while running).
When we think of computers Er think of solid state digital computers. But the first fuel injected vehicles were mechanical computers. I suspect it's still very possible to do the same today, but not practical to design.
Also I'm trying to think of what role the computer plays in emissions other than ensuring stoichiometry.
Ensuring stoichiometry is kind of a big deal.
When the engine is cold, the mixture needs to be rich or it won't start. Engines with carburetors use a choke for that - a valve that blocks some airflow so there's more vacuum, causing the engine to suck in extra fuel. Electronic fuel injection can be much more precise about this, minimizing the amount and duration of enrichment.
Changes in air pressure and temperature change the ideal air/fuel ratio. Driving over a mountain will make an engine without the ability to react to run at a suboptimal air/fuel ratio.
Catalytic converters require that the ratio be kept very close to optimal to operate effectively. A small deviation for an extended period of time will result in a large increase in emissions and may even permanently damage the catalyst.
It's my understanding that said vehicle would be illegal to sell in most jurisdictions, so it probably wouldn't be a very lucrative endeavor.
True, manufacturers must face very hard constraints in many territories (all new vechicles must have this and that).
But there is something wrong in the product planning if there are no vehicles outside the wave of "gadgetrification" ("Look, these come with holographic glove compartment. It's for your convenience. Yes, you pay for it").
Capitalism does not necessarily act in the interest of consumers, if that is what you were thinking.
If no one buys this car, making more of them will lose money until they stop. If consumers buy the car, then it will live on.
In other words, CONSUMERS do not necessarily act in the interest of consumers.
> consumers do not necessarily act in the interest of consumers
That's what I am saying with "broken market, broken supply-demand system, non-rational and non-informed economic agents".
Bad products that sell are a reality since a long time.
Broken for whom? "Bad" according to whom?
What would your goal be, then? Only "good" products are able to be sold -- according to whom will this definition of "good" be decided?
I'm mainly playing devil's advocate here, but my point is that bringing value judgement into other people's decisions is not something I would regard as rational. People have their own reasons for doing things that I don't need to understand.
> whom?
Rational agents. That quality is an abater of relativism.
> What would your goal be, then
Livability. That requires working systems, so that choice is still possible. In the current situation, there is in many vast territories no choice, in many areas (not just cars), and greatly suboptimal, very thin livability.
Let me know when you find one of these "rational agents". I'd love to meet an extraterrestrial alien made of silicon.
Again, livability "for whom?" Do you propose making cheap, accessible beachfront property a basic human right? Should we all live in equally-sized apartments given to us for free by the government? People do not all want the same thing.
> Let me know when you find one of these "rational agents".
Hi there.
> Again, livability "for whom?"
For the rational. The people who tend to dis-want electroshocking cutlery and miasmatic nail polish.
> Do you propose
That societies work on making citizens informed and rational, just like classic economic theory suggested and as is required for the common advantage.
If you are basing your metrics on the same bad axioms a system was built on, you will not understand the other side of the story.
If your choice is to get beaten or get sick then you can’t act in your interest.
This assumes that consumers have perfect information, that products never change in favor of the vendor (enshittification), limited choice of products, and ignores the power of quasi monopolies. Also ignores persuasion tactics which have great power, see The Internet.
This is absurd. I would never buy a vehicle like that.
Another automaker looking to takes it's own life quickly...
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This all makes me so glad I still own a 2001 Dodge Grand Caravan that I have been sinking money into for years and just grabbing cheap parts from junk yards.
But it is not only automobile DRM locks that keep me away from new cars, the costs of replacing the "modules", like for a headlight, are ridiculous.
All this is just pure profit seeking but people keep buying the cars and other devices so it will never stop.
Now you are seeing the great electric car scam - Selling you an under-powered electric car and to increase its power you must pay for a subscription to unlock it's full power capabilities.
The best part is, many won't care (when they should). But these days, it is okay to get scammed isn't it?
BMW tried selling a subscription on heated seats, but that failed. [0], So lets see how long this will last.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421730
> Now you are seeing the great electric car scam
Keep your anti-EV hatred in check for a second and note that nothing in here is EV only. They could just as well do this with a gasoline car, that engine is also electronically controlled.
But you can replace the ECU in a gasoline powered car, or the entire engine if you want. You may have to recode some of the parts such as the headlights and the airbags. Often you can use parts from other brands. But replacing anything in an EV is a nightmare: all the parts, motor management, battery management, charging controller are tightly integrated, signed, coded to the car etc.
But that’s not because the car is an EV, that’s because the manufacturer is greedy.
The door handles, infotainment, tire pressure gauges, gas cap, etc. all could have a digital locks on them to bless them with DMCA protection.
Fair enough, but it seems to be more prevalent with EVs because electric power is a given in such a car, where a diesel or gasoline car usually has fallbacks for most electric systems except the lights and the dashboard, and the alternator can keep the engine running if the battery suddenly dies.
I absolutely agree. I think the only reason they don’t do it for all gasoline cars is because of the cost.
If everything is done in software for the EV you have to write that software anyway. Might as well write it to pull more money from your customer.
This will require legislative changes to stop, right to repair laws (looking at you John Deere) are a good first step.
BMW still sells a subscription to advanced headlight functions, live traffic info in their navigation and few other things. It's just now a packaged deal and they also opt you in by default into a three month trial. The car is also all but unusable without an online account, so there's that.
Regrettably, despite of all the brouhaha with the heated seats, all this b/s never really went away.
At least the heated seats are "free"! [0]
(commented with the utmost sarcasm)
0- https://www.thedrive.com/news/bmw-is-giving-up-on-heated-sea...
> The car is also all but unusable without an online account
Please explain. What would make it almost unusable?
> The best part is, many won't care (when they should).
This is generally valid for current societies, not just specifically.
Conformism has infiltrated economics, so now the supply-demand mechanism is broken: the demand agents are not "informed and rational", as classical theory wanted, so the supply is degraded - spawning "shrinkflation" and "viliflation".
Who are you to tell other people what they should care about? Each person can decide for themselves what is important, and what is not.
Minding one's own business is an underrated virtue.
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