You should forget about what the car "has" and consider if the price makes sense for the features you get access to. This is for example how CPUs and GPUs are sold, and many other products. Consumers usually find it odd that they have the exact same specs (and smart consumers can enable those features for free), but it does provide for lower costs for manufacturing, which dictate how everything else works.
This is not true. They are binned by capability, and sold at different price points.
I don't mind that idea - if it turned out installing heated seats failed in say... 28% of installations, fine - charge me more for a model with functioning heated seats.
Instead - this is introducing a fixed, recurring charge, and undermining the concept of ownership. That heated seat has zero cost for the manufacturer after installation, and that should be reflected in the costs to the consumer.
I find this a pretty un-ethical (appalling - really) attack on ownership, and long term, a way to undermine the used market for these goods (attack on doctrine of first sale).
Frankly - I think this should absolutely be targeted with regulation. This is literally rent-seeking, with no potential upside.
That's only for the very high yield ones which get sold for specific computing purposes. The GPUs you buy at the store are already from the shit pile. Within that shit pile though, they all have exactly the same amount of transistors in there usually across different versions of the same product line, and if you buy the highest end version you get use of all of the transistors, if not you don't - but they are still there.
At one point, the old Geforce 6800 cards came in three varieties. The cheapest model had two disabled functional units. You could often unlock one successfully (6800XT to 6800), but both (6800XT to 6800GS) was prone to much higher instability and failure. Even if all the transistors worked, the rest of the board (power delivery, heatsinking) was often downgraded on cheap models.
I know you just chose this as an example, but clearly it wouldn't be acceptable to anyone to have a failed installation of something like this. On one extreme, it could cause a fire; but otherwise, it's just a button that doesn't work, and damages the quality reputation of the car.
Processor binning only works because it is a black box, indistinguishable from the outside. You can purposely disable components if your yields get high enough, etc. and nobody will ever notice the difference.
For vehicles, automakers will learn from customers that this kind of nickel-and-diming is not appreciated, when people turn to other manufacturers that still "get it", e.g. Mazda.
But there's no connection between adding it to every car and charging a subscription to use it. You could just as easily add the heater to every car and only allow people to use them if they pay a one-time charge, similar to the model today where you pay a one time fee to add the option at build-time.
It would be ironic if manufacturers were roasted for offering more options for payment rather than fewer.
I would not feel this way if the one-time cost were higher than before (I think $500 is about standard), or if purchases were locked to the original purchaser. And I recognize that some of these examples are of companies that do not offer one-time options.
That's a good call-out. I don't think there's anything wrong with offering a monthly option (it seems weird and I think there's probably some social commentary in there, but whatever), I just don't want to be forced to pay monthly.
There is - it means someone who bought the car not intending to use the feature, or who bought the car second-hand, can enable it later.
Pretty fun for them. Rent seeking usually is.
Pretty fucking terrible for everyone else. Perfect case of market failure, and an ideal target for regulation.
This kind of thing genuinely triggers disgust for me. Personally - I will NEVER buy from these brands again (and I'm in their target market for luxury cars). I'll also enthusiastically vote for politicians who propose regulation on this. In my opinion - nuke this bullshit from orbit.
Why is it 'pay for them' in the current model but 'waste money on them' in the new model?
This winds me up because it's a raw, shitty deal: $18/m * 12m/y * forever = infinity.
Even assuming a short lifespan for the car (10 years) it's STILL a raw, shitty, dumpster fire of a deal: $2160 vs the $500 for the actual heated seats today.
BMW knows this. They are double dipping - optimize production costs, ream consumers, violate doctrine of first sale.
Happy life for our corporate masters.
Something being too expensive for you doesn't make the seller unethical (unless it's a necessary good maybe - but not a luxury car.)
This is an unbounded cost. That makes sense when the service provided has an unbounded cost associated with it that the manufacturer is paying, but that's utterly untrue in this situation.
This is about a manufacturer taking a cost saving measure - simplified manufacturing lines
Then manipulating a digital device to also take a profit increasing measure - creating a digital on/off switch for heated seats that they refuse to provide a key for.
Do you think it's ethical for the previous owner of your home to keep the keys? "Hey - you own this house now, but if you want access to the basement - I got the keys and you have to pay up! It's only 25 bucks per month!"
That's clearly hostile. What makes you bend over so far backwards to let BMW ream you up the ass here in exactly the same way?
Why are you comfortable giving them digital control of something you (in theory only) own?
I wouldn't want it myself. I don't get why people think it's unethical though. Someone called it a 'crime' elsewhere. That boggles my mind. It's their product - they can offer whatever payment model they want. If it's a crap one then don't buy it. If enough people think it's crap the market will adjust. It's a luxury car, not baby formula.
This is a distinct misunderstanding of acceptable capitalism. To be very blunt, it's simply not true.
We accept the idea that "greed is good" when it comes to capitalism only because we regulate the cases where the market fails to align the interests of the customer and manufacturer.
In cases where interests are aligned: Greed is good. The seller wants to take actions that increase profit, and that usually means either reducing the cost to produce the item, or increasing the real (or perceived) value of the item for consumers. Both of those are good things for all parties.
In cases where interests are not aligned we regulate the ever-loving shit out of the market because we have incredibly detailed historical evidence that shows that it devolves to straight abuse.
Things like
- Cartels
- Monopolies
- Fraud
- Misleading advertising
- Contractual abuse
- Unequal bargaining
- Regulated goods (black markets)
and several hundred other specific laws we have that only exist because without them people end up killing each other due to real (or perceived) injustice without them.
They absolutely won't be paying you any extra money for those heated seats... they're already going to have to go pay BMW for the freaking subscription anyways.
At best you could argue you're slightly increasing the interested market for your car, but even that feels incredibly flimsy. The market for used cars is vibrant, and very rarely is trim level a deciding factor on used car purchases.
Usually you can negotiate price on trim - but this decidedly removes that option. You just get fucked right round as the original buyer.
It's not a digital asset that costs nothing to produce/host/sustain. These are raw materials, refined, that will someday end up in a landfill.
this subscription approach is just rent-seeking behavior, which is another sign that there's something wrong with the market.
I'm optimist though, I see the discourse moving in this direction and many countries starting to investigate properly how to implement these ideas from the 70's.
It's like how it's "cheaper" to farm some foods and ship them half way around the world via plain and ship, than it is to farm the same food and ship it 100km across land. The "cost" doesn't reflect _in any way_ the resource/energy usage, or pollution emission of the system: only the human "cost", which is biased and lobbied strongly towards maintaining existing power centres.
Our systems stink.
So, you would need to ship something 2000km before it has equivalent emissions to a 100km trip by road. So yea you're right that it'd be silly to ship something around the world rather than drive it 100km - but that's a a rather small distance. For a real-world example, you would produces less carbon shipping something from Shenzhen in China to San Francisco (11,078 km) than you would produce shipping it from San Francisco to Los Angeles by truck (616km by road).
No country has the density of population and the natural resources to have every conceivable industry within a 100 miles of every conceivable destination - eventually some goods are going to have to travel a longer distance, and once you get more than a couple of hundred kilometres away by road it genuinely becomes more efficient to move it across thousands of kilometres of ocean.
This is the crux, and I totally and completely agree
Many products use a consistent manufacturing process with binning... a qa step where their performance is measured and then sorted, so you pay more for the top 10 percentile. That makes sense to me... but things like this always seem wasteful regardless of the industry.
Absolutely not: manufacturers should forget about having their cake and eating it too.
I could tolerate car "binning", but only if it was burned into the hardware/firmware by the dealer and always transferred along with the physical vehicle.
It's a way for companies to extract more revenue. They hope that customers don't mind too much that they are segmented into groups.
But they do. They feel hurt and outraged if they discover that they paid more than the neighbor for the same product or if the product could be elevated to a higher level at no cost for the producer if only someone had the right key. Companies then try to be clandestine, to mollify customers with cheap added value or offering opt-in by a complicated process for free (loyalty cards, coupons, rebates with conditions, and so on).
It's a fundamental conflict between producers and consumers.
If you want a perfect market economy price segmentation should be avoided. It causes confusion for customers and therefore prevents price transparency. It enables rent seeking by companies.
What they could do is allow you to enable that feature later, albeit at higher cost. Imagine what that could do for the used car market? I buy a car where the previous owner hadn't enabled heated seats. I contact the manufacturer and say I'd like to enable the heated seats. Heck, why stop there? The manufacturer may respond asking whether I'd like to purchase an option package instead that included a bunch of other features. This seems reasonable and pro-consumer. Subscribing to a feature does not.
What on earth kind of CPU or GPU have you bought where basic features require a reoccurring subscription?!
No, this conclusion is not plausible at all. It doesn't explain why the payment should be recurring rather than paid only once (even if it's delayed post-manufacture).
I didn't think Sony would follow Microsoft in charging a subscription for online play, but they pretty much had to because buyers didn't weight the hidden costs of it appropriately and Microsoft was already doing it giving them a big margin advantage (which could bleed over into marketshare advantage by investing it in marketing and exclusive titles).
This is explicitly why I'd never buy a PS5, and really didn't touch PS4 except to play Bloodborne. All digital services seem to eventually become anti-consumer. You become reliant on the service, the service keeps changing for the worse or becoming more expensive, and it becomes harder and harder for the user to extricate themselves from it.
Even in cases where it's easy to step away from a service, it almost always either degrades over time, or else morphs into something you don't have any interest in. It's like a ticking clock. You can't even enjoy this product because you know it's totally ephemeral. Eventually it will be worse than it was, exploit you in some way, or price you out of it.
There are a few exceptions here, but they are rare, and I suspect they are still going to go extinct at some point as well, they will merely take longer.
If you want to turn something that used to cost me $400 one-time into a subscription that costs me $1.49/mo, I'll be happy that you've offered me the subscription and will buy it in subscription form. Charge $9.99/mo for that same subscription and I'll be incensed.
If the car was instead sold/bought with the heated seats as a subscription, I don’t see any problem with them being, well, a subscription.
Strong and broad consumer rejection is the only recourse for people not being ripped off by turning what was an owned asset into a rental through this method of cost hiding, which is why I think people are being worked up.
If I buy a car with heated seats physically there then i own them.
On that note, if someone just enables them without payment i'm curious of the legality. (or selling devices to enable it)
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150316090012/https://purchase.... https://www.youneedabudget.com/pricing/
Remote start does not require a subscription or the internet. We've had remote start for at least half a century with just a keyfob.
Satellite maps with updates? Maybe.
Does not require a subscription or the internet. My car's satnav is updated via a USB. $200 from the dealer, but is completely optional. Maybe I do it once every five years. Maybe never. I don't need up-to-the-second maps of hiking trails 4,000 miles away from a place my car will never visit.
Moreover, the last time I looked into updating via USB, there was a community online that had instructions for doing it for free with data, I think from Garmin.
The MBAs want us to believe we are required to be tethered to recurring charges for the rest of our lives. With very few exceptions (electricity, water, etc.) we aren't.
Sorry to be pedantic, but it was GM not Ford mentioned in the article.
It means that those of us in generally warm states like CA can opt-in to heated seats for the month or two we spend doing winter sports, and just pay for that usage, instead of paying a few thousand upfront for the heated seat package.
(Thought experiment, don’t downvote me just because)
Leasing is just a different form of buying the car, in a sense. Yes, the contract/agreement is not equivalent to a purchase, but in essence what you are doing is transforming a set of unknowns (will I have to repair my car twice in the first three years? How much will I spend? How many kilometers will I drive?) with more known quantities ($X/month, Y miles per year included, etc), and you don't have to pay the car upfront, but pay a monthly installment. (approximation, give me some rope here).
Instead, paying a monthly fee to heat my car seats is an aberration of the economic model. It doesn't make any sense, from a customer perspective.
Of course, we are all moving towards a subscription economy, and most customers will simply be royally f*cked up by that, and regulation/government will turn the other way in most cases. Good luck to us.
I really don't get people's revulsion to this model.
As long as you know the deal up front, what is the ethical issue? How can it ever be 'greed' or 'blackmail' to offer a service or product (a luxury one at that)?
Do your sums and then either the total cost is worth it to you or it isn't. Why does the payment model get people so riled up?
I wouldn’t object to a model where I was charged a lot of money for a subscription in exchange for lowering the up front cost of the car.
But nickel-and-diming me for features like heated seats forever after I have already paid a huge price for the car? It seems like a petty cash grab, especially for a supposedly upscale manufacturer like BMW. And why would I even want to have to keep track of that subscription? Yet another stupid tax on my time and attention — when I could just buy a Honda instead and pay entirely upfront and be done with it.
Should it be illegal? Probably not, as long as the manufacturers aren’t colluding and I can still just buy from a manufacturer that doesn’t do this.
When I ask for a pay rise for doing the same job from my employer am I being unethical?
You're generally not doing the same job year over year. Your roles and responsibilities grow and evolve the longer you are there, so it makes sense that your pay would also grow with you.
But why? Why should they do that?
For example a band that plays a concert counts on extras like merchandise sales to cover costs. Should the ticket price cover all their costs and is it unethical to also offer merchandise if they need it to cover costs?
I can't understand the logic in this thread.
Concert merchandise is fine because it has a cost that they only incur for people who actually buy it. For your concert example to be a valid comparison, imagine that everyone who bought a ticket to the concert were given merchandise, but told they weren't allowed to use it and had to throw it away when they got home unless they paid for it.
And they’re recovering that cost and making some profit with these subscriptions.
I suspect this is... not always the case.
> I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further
There isn't much from stopping the manufacturers from changing the "up front" deal under this model. (Unless it becomes egregious enough to become illegal.) We'd like to get out in front of this and stop it from getting to that point.
"Sign this paper that says BMW/GM/Toyota/etc still owns and retains control over hardware X/Y/Z. You may utilize this part of your car as long as you continue paying $xx subscription fee."
In the good old days, you paid a dealership for a car and you had a car. Everything in the car was yours to use within the legal system of the country in which you reside. That you're now signing away your own rights in order to buy a car is not a good direction.
That last is not blackmail but a crime against humanity committed by politicians and citizens who allow that.
I feel like I can't take these reactions to an alternative payment plan for the heated seats in your luxury BMW seriously.
He was a German ultra-nationalist, member of hitler Freikorps who flee his country to the USA when his Jewish origins became a life-threatening issue in Germany. He became a famous UC Berkeley teacher and when the UC Regents demanded a loyalty oath against the Communism he resign stating that he surely be not a Communist, he fight them in the army, got blessed many times and decorated few times but as a historian he also see the nazi rise and see that any regime start with small low importance stuff like a simple dummy oath, an annual one, who get slightly changed at a slow peace trapping people slowly (what we all now the Chomsky's frog principle.
So far we see small things like in-car-infotainment systems ads, ads on phones, smart TVs even in some proprietary OS you pay for a EULA, connected devices who need a remote service (from Roomba to Kobo) and can't work without them etc after we start seeing ideas about legal IDs on smartphones, smart lock, ... a step at a time we will be entrapped and unable to correct the aim.
That's not a Luddite prediction and that's not a natural, unplanned evolution. Big of IT, conglomerates, financial cartels etc know very well this model and have always practiced it. And that's the crime you can't accept. The fact that we transition slowly to a society WEF/2030 alike [2] a small "innocent" step at a time.
If such kind of evolution hadn't been published here and there everywhere from WEF to G8 etc than yes, call it a crime would be a bold statement, but being published years ago and keep slowly evolving it is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Kantorowicz
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s...
But the idea of charging a recurring fee for something that's already in the car? Heated seats? Remote start with a fob? That's blackmail-powered greed. As far as I see it, that's the manufacturer's version of protection racket. If you stop paying them, then they're remotely breaking your car. Just because they planted a mole in it. Just because they can. This is so f-ed up beyond grasp.
The good thing is that they have the right lobbies, so that won't ever be changed by customer protection.
I wasn't surprised that BMW, Tesla or Ford would do something like that. But for whatever stupid reason, Toyota is a disappointment, because I thought they would be part of a few manufacturers not playing that game