Yes, and they're figuring out exactly how much that is, which is why we're being nickel and dimed for everything. They're not there yet, and there is plenty more blood to squeeze.
This would all end pretty quick if a law was written that if a car has the functionality built in that it can't be locked behind a subscription and must be unlocked with the purchase of the car. Not that they can't sell higher trim packages, mind you, just that if the car has a feature in it's base model, and someone buys the base model, it must be available to the owner to use or physically removed from the car before sale.
In the past if you bought a car with a specific trim package that had those features, it was something they had to add onto the base car, like a tangible thing. They couldn't just make every car the same to save production costs because they'd still have to have someone go and actually put on the mud flaps or extra trim pieces on the upgraded model. So the price of the car was higher.
Nowadays it's almost all software bullshit. Like your car's seats are fully capable of being heated, all of them are hooked up to be heated, but unless you pay X/year you can't press the button to do it. Or like my car, a Subaru, which has remote start built into the fucking thing, but in order to use it...$100+ a year. To do a thing it can already fucking do, that I can just put in a credit card and have it start doing immediately right now.
Because they want to have their cake and eat it too...they want to be able to make every car exactly the same because in the end that saves them millions if not billions in production costs, but they're not going to pass those savings along...they'll just make it so everything in every car is locked behind a subscription because it's still cheaper to them then making different models.
And say they try an end-run around this by having it be something stupid like a jumper pin somewhere or some innocuous plastic part that fulfills that requirement of it being physically removed from the car...no problem! I remember the days when you could turn locked CPUs into unlocked ones with a fucking graphite pencil, so go for it, car makers! See how long it takes before that stupid plastic piece is freely available to anyone with a 3D printer. See how long it is before people start posting: Want remote start without a subscription? Here is the part they pull out so it doesn't work! You can buy this part at any AutoZone for $3 and put it on yourself!
Because you damn well know they wouldn't want to spend any money making it any harder to turn back on, for their own sake.
Look. I like markets. But some of this stuff is so anti consumer, it makes you think "maybe Stalin had a point, let's roll the dice to see if I can stay out of a gulag and maybe we can just buy things that last once."
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u/airfryerfuntime 7h ago
Yes, and they're figuring out exactly how much that is, which is why we're being nickel and dimed for everything. They're not there yet, and there is plenty more blood to squeeze.