Forget Netflix, Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

Re:Forget Netflix, Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid s... by lurk2 on Saturday August 16, 2025 @10:26AM (#44923732)

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?

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Re:Forget Netflix, Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid s... by sbarre on Saturday August 16, 2025 @10:33AM (#44923783)

> 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).

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Re:Forget Netflix, Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid s... by barrkel on Saturday August 16, 2025 @12:19PM (#44924743)

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.

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Re:Forget Netflix, Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid s... by lurk2 on Saturday August 16, 2025 @02:31PM (#44925810)

But then why offer the ability to unlock the engine’s full power on a model that isn’t engineered to accommodate it?

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Re:Forget Netflix, Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid s... by potato3732842 on Saturday August 16, 2025 @07:54PM (#44927800)

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.

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