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I have trouble putting my finger on exactly why this feels wrong, but to me, the idea of buying a car - buying anything that has hardware in it that I have to p

I have trouble putting my finger on exactly why this feels wrong, but to me, the idea of buying a car - buying anything that has hardware in it that I have to pay extra to activate, it just seems wrong. I suppose it's the sense of wastefulness, or perhaps the idea that the extra widget could break and take down other things along with it. Consider how you would do this with a battery. The battery has to have extra cells in order to have extra capacity, and the software allows the user to use or not use the extra cells if you pay for the privilege. But if one of those extra cells fails, the entire battery pack does as well. In your example, the hardware IS configured differently, and there's no sense of waste or increased failure therein. You bought a car with a crappier engine or a smaller tank, and that's what is in it. There's no software key to fix it. Something about the idea of software letting you access hardware you already paid for (even if you didn't pay for the software to use it), just feels wrong.

fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
On the other hand, the extra cells give you more wear-leveling, right? So, in theory at least, a 75KWh battery limited to 60KWh has a longer lifetime than the unlocked one.
- KMag 6y ago
  It's not wear levelling, but yes, my understanding is that Li-ion batteries still last longer if you don't fully top them up and don't fully discharge them. What kind of warranty does Tesla have on the batteries? Is it conceivable that a firmware change that prevents fully topping up or fully discharging the battery statistically saves Tesla money in its warranty costs?
prostoalex 6y ago
To preface, I think the 60 kWh models were unpopular, and Tesla eventually removed them from the lineup. But your argument suggests that auto manufacturers will be penalized for making premium features easily upgradable, and lauded (or at least given a free pass) for selling premium features that are pain in the butt to get upgraded, even when it’s artificial busywork. E.g., the navigation maps on my 2013 Lexus can only be updated by the dealer and carry a $1,500 fee. There are obviously easier ways to make the navigation upgrades easier, but I suspect if Lexus made it too easy, that would land them in hot water with the same kind of argument (and probably generate quite a bit of wrath from the dealers).
maximente 6y ago
> Something about the idea of software letting you access hardware you already paid for (even if you didn't pay for the software to use it), just feels wrong. isn't this what iPhones do, at the end of the day? in effect, by not being able to load applications of your own choosing, you accept the implicit limiting effect of the software you're given, similar to the bargain (?) described here.
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  Why yes, that is what iPhones do. How about that.
jay_kyburz 6y ago
It feels wrong because it is wrong. When you buy physical things, you should be paying the total cost for the hardware to be manufactured, distributed, and finally recycled or disposed of. When you buy something, you should own the hardware and should be free to do what you want with it. I would like governments to make this clear in law, but I understand why some people feel might feel this is an overreach. We can try and avoid buying hardware that has software restrictions, but without laws ensuring we can run whatever software we want on our hardware, manufacturers will take these rights away from us. We are living in an age of environmental catastrophe, and I think we need to appreciate our physical things more, build them to last, and have laws that help us get the most out of the things we build.
- erpellan 6y ago
  Intel don’t have production runs of CPUs with different clock speeds. They make a batch, test them then work out the clock speed that batch is good for. Then sell them at a variety of prices. You can overclock and 90% of the time it’ll be fine. Maybe it dies after 5 years instead of 10. Or maybe after a week. In the case of Tesla maybe that move took brought forward the EOL of the battery by 2 years or maybe 2 weeks. Even our bodies don’t work that way - our brains prevent us from using our full strength except in extremis because if we did our muscles and tendons would be seriously damaged. Soft limits are everywhere.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    The word for CPU manufacturers making multiple SKUs is “binning”. Every processor wafer made could attempts at an 8 core beast, but if 1 isn’t working, they disable another and sell it as a 6 core. If the chip isn’t stable enough for hyperthreading, that feature is disabled. Unstable at high frequencies? The turbo clock is lowered. Are the manufacturers benevolent in this? Not always. Sometimes an 8 core chip will be locked to 4 just to make more lower end SKU pieces available for purchase. Or Intel disabling overclocking so you have to buy a “K” processor that costs more. But when people say things like: > When you buy physical things, you should be paying the total cost for the hardware to be manufactured, distributed, and finally recycled or disposed of. They’re ignoring the fact that soft limits actually can make manufacture cheaper. The reason Intel/AMD/etc don’t have a separate silicon template for every SKU is it’s too wasteful (money wise). Each run has a setup cost, and if that can be lowered by reusing the same wafer template, they do that. It’s cheaper to have less manufacturing SKUs and just disable features later. In addition, when soft limits are used on chips, it actually prevents waste. Imagine if the yield on an 8 core wafer was 70%. That means only 70% of the produced chips works at spec. The other 30% would be tossed if binning didn’t happen. By binning, that 30% can be sold (with reduced feature sets).
ghostpepper 6y ago
> I have trouble putting my finger on exactly why this feels wrong, but to me, the idea of buying a car - buying anything that has hardware in it that I have to pay extra to activate, it just seems wrong. I suppose it's the sense of wastefulness, or perhaps the idea that the extra widget could break and take down other things along with it. Wastefulness may be distasteful, and you are welcome to boycott companies you feel are wasteful, but I don't think wastefulness should be a crime. If it's cheaper for Tesla to store unusable battery cell tech in your car than to throw it in a landfill, do we really want to make the landfill the cheaper option?
- brokenmachine 6y ago
  > If it's cheaper for Tesla to store unusable battery cell tech in your car than to throw it in a landfill, do we really want to make the landfill the cheaper option? The end result is the same, isn't it? An unused battery cell that is driven around until the car is scrapped and goes to landfill. The case could even be made that carrying that extra weight for the lifetime of the car is more wasteful than throwing it away at the start. I think more likely, if such wastage were a crime or at least financially discouraged, Tesla would do the obvious thing and just design a more modular battery with a way for them to either install or not install the extra battery cell, which is a much more desirable outcome than the current situation of wasting battery cells. Wasting the planet's finite resources should be discouraged, either by law or financial disincentives.
forgotagain99 6y ago
I agree that it feels wrong but what about this scenario: A company produces an item with two features A and B. It costs the company $200 to build a fully featured item. It now builds two of them for the market but also realizes not everyone needs both A and B. Yet they'll still need to earn back the production cost of $400. So instead of selling fully featured items for $200 they sell one soft-locked version with only one feature for $100 and the fully featured one for $300. More people who can benefit from the product/more customers while still earning back the $400.
perryizgr8 6y ago
> the idea of buying a car - buying anything that has hardware in it that I have to pay extra to activate, it just seems wrong. I made this point in another thread but this seems to be appropriate too. If you use an iPhone or android you are under a similar regime. The hardware is capable of running any set of instructions that can exist. But it is artificially restricted to the subset found in the app store. You can pay an extra fee to partially unlock it. You still cannot fully utilize it though.
nwallin 6y ago
AMD and Intel have been doing this for longer than I've been buying computers. You go to your local computer shop and want to buy a 486. You have a choice between buying a 486DX that is expensive and can perform floating point arithmetic quickly, and a 486SX is cheap and cannot. The 486DX and 486SX are the exact same hardware, but the SX has the X87 FPU disabled. You might say well yeah, but that's just a computer, not a car, but in 1990 you could easily spend $20,000 on a home computer with all the bells and whistles, which would be in the ballpark of $40,000 in 2020 dollars. Intel, AMD, and NVidia still do this. If anything, they're better at it today than they were back then.
jacquesm 6y ago
> I have trouble putting my finger on exactly why this feels wrong, but to me, the idea of buying a car - buying anything that has hardware in it that I have to pay extra to activate, it just seems wrong. In the 1970's Opel sold a model (the 'Kadett') that had an optional RPM indicator. But in reality all cars had that indicator installed, if you paid to buy the option the dealer would remove a blank plate that obscured the indicator.
Corrado 6y ago
This has been happening for a long, long time. Back in the day, we had an voice-mail system with a certain amount of storage. When you paid to increase the storage a technician came on-site and removed a bolt that allowed the hard drive head to move farther into the disk. Camera manufacturers are a recent example. There are firmware "hacks" that allow you to access more advanced features from a less expensive body. Are these things bad? Maybe, but if you were the manufacturer would you rather source 2 (or 15) different components or just use 1 and modify it to fit the need and price point?
- DrSiemer 6y ago
  Reminds me of drilling a hole in an LD 3.5‑inch floppy disk to format it as HD and gain 720 kb. Not very reliable, but it did work.

fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago

On the other hand, the extra cells give you more wear-leveling, right? So, in theory at least, a 75KWh battery limited to 60KWh has a longer lifetime than the unlocked one.

KMag 6y ago
It's not wear levelling, but yes, my understanding is that Li-ion batteries still last longer if you don't fully top them up and don't fully discharge them. What kind of warranty does Tesla have on the batteries? Is it conceivable that a firmware change that prevents fully topping up or fully discharging the battery statistically saves Tesla money in its warranty costs?

prostoalex 6y ago

To preface, I think the 60 kWh models were unpopular, and Tesla eventually removed them from the lineup. But your argument suggests that auto manufacturers will be penalized for making premium features easily upgradable, and lauded (or at least given a free pass) for selling premium features that are pain in the butt to get upgraded, even when it’s artificial busywork. E.g., the navigation maps on my 2013 Lexus can only be updated by the dealer and carry a $1,500 fee. There are obviously easier ways to make the navigation upgrades easier, but I suspect if Lexus made it too easy, that would land them in hot water with the same kind of argument (and probably generate quite a bit of wrath from the dealers).

maximente 6y ago

> Something about the idea of software letting you access hardware you already paid for (even if you didn't pay for the software to use it), just feels wrong. isn't this what iPhones do, at the end of the day? in effect, by not being able to load applications of your own choosing, you accept the implicit limiting effect of the software you're given, similar to the bargain (?) described here.

andrewflnr 6y ago
Why yes, that is what iPhones do. How about that.

jay_kyburz 6y ago

It feels wrong because it is wrong. When you buy physical things, you should be paying the total cost for the hardware to be manufactured, distributed, and finally recycled or disposed of. When you buy something, you should own the hardware and should be free to do what you want with it. I would like governments to make this clear in law, but I understand why some people feel might feel this is an overreach. We can try and avoid buying hardware that has software restrictions, but without laws ensuring we can run whatever software we want on our hardware, manufacturers will take these rights away from us. We are living in an age of environmental catastrophe, and I think we need to appreciate our physical things more, build them to last, and have laws that help us get the most out of the things we build.

erpellan 6y ago
Intel don’t have production runs of CPUs with different clock speeds. They make a batch, test them then work out the clock speed that batch is good for. Then sell them at a variety of prices. You can overclock and 90% of the time it’ll be fine. Maybe it dies after 5 years instead of 10. Or maybe after a week. In the case of Tesla maybe that move took brought forward the EOL of the battery by 2 years or maybe 2 weeks. Even our bodies don’t work that way - our brains prevent us from using our full strength except in extremis because if we did our muscles and tendons would be seriously damaged. Soft limits are everywhere.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  The word for CPU manufacturers making multiple SKUs is “binning”. Every processor wafer made could attempts at an 8 core beast, but if 1 isn’t working, they disable another and sell it as a 6 core. If the chip isn’t stable enough for hyperthreading, that feature is disabled. Unstable at high frequencies? The turbo clock is lowered. Are the manufacturers benevolent in this? Not always. Sometimes an 8 core chip will be locked to 4 just to make more lower end SKU pieces available for purchase. Or Intel disabling overclocking so you have to buy a “K” processor that costs more. But when people say things like: > When you buy physical things, you should be paying the total cost for the hardware to be manufactured, distributed, and finally recycled or disposed of. They’re ignoring the fact that soft limits actually can make manufacture cheaper. The reason Intel/AMD/etc don’t have a separate silicon template for every SKU is it’s too wasteful (money wise). Each run has a setup cost, and if that can be lowered by reusing the same wafer template, they do that. It’s cheaper to have less manufacturing SKUs and just disable features later. In addition, when soft limits are used on chips, it actually prevents waste. Imagine if the yield on an 8 core wafer was 70%. That means only 70% of the produced chips works at spec. The other 30% would be tossed if binning didn’t happen. By binning, that 30% can be sold (with reduced feature sets).

ghostpepper 6y ago

> I have trouble putting my finger on exactly why this feels wrong, but to me, the idea of buying a car - buying anything that has hardware in it that I have to pay extra to activate, it just seems wrong. I suppose it's the sense of wastefulness, or perhaps the idea that the extra widget could break and take down other things along with it. Wastefulness may be distasteful, and you are welcome to boycott companies you feel are wasteful, but I don't think wastefulness should be a crime. If it's cheaper for Tesla to store unusable battery cell tech in your car than to throw it in a landfill, do we really want to make the landfill the cheaper option?

brokenmachine 6y ago
> If it's cheaper for Tesla to store unusable battery cell tech in your car than to throw it in a landfill, do we really want to make the landfill the cheaper option? The end result is the same, isn't it? An unused battery cell that is driven around until the car is scrapped and goes to landfill. The case could even be made that carrying that extra weight for the lifetime of the car is more wasteful than throwing it away at the start. I think more likely, if such wastage were a crime or at least financially discouraged, Tesla would do the obvious thing and just design a more modular battery with a way for them to either install or not install the extra battery cell, which is a much more desirable outcome than the current situation of wasting battery cells. Wasting the planet's finite resources should be discouraged, either by law or financial disincentives.

forgotagain99 6y ago

I agree that it feels wrong but what about this scenario: A company produces an item with two features A and B. It costs the company $200 to build a fully featured item. It now builds two of them for the market but also realizes not everyone needs both A and B. Yet they'll still need to earn back the production cost of $400. So instead of selling fully featured items for $200 they sell one soft-locked version with only one feature for $100 and the fully featured one for $300. More people who can benefit from the product/more customers while still earning back the $400.

perryizgr8 6y ago

> the idea of buying a car - buying anything that has hardware in it that I have to pay extra to activate, it just seems wrong. I made this point in another thread but this seems to be appropriate too. If you use an iPhone or android you are under a similar regime. The hardware is capable of running any set of instructions that can exist. But it is artificially restricted to the subset found in the app store. You can pay an extra fee to partially unlock it. You still cannot fully utilize it though.

nwallin 6y ago

AMD and Intel have been doing this for longer than I've been buying computers. You go to your local computer shop and want to buy a 486. You have a choice between buying a 486DX that is expensive and can perform floating point arithmetic quickly, and a 486SX is cheap and cannot. The 486DX and 486SX are the exact same hardware, but the SX has the X87 FPU disabled. You might say well yeah, but that's just a computer, not a car, but in 1990 you could easily spend $20,000 on a home computer with all the bells and whistles, which would be in the ballpark of $40,000 in 2020 dollars. Intel, AMD, and NVidia still do this. If anything, they're better at it today than they were back then.

jacquesm 6y ago

> I have trouble putting my finger on exactly why this feels wrong, but to me, the idea of buying a car - buying anything that has hardware in it that I have to pay extra to activate, it just seems wrong. In the 1970's Opel sold a model (the 'Kadett') that had an optional RPM indicator. But in reality all cars had that indicator installed, if you paid to buy the option the dealer would remove a blank plate that obscured the indicator.

Corrado 6y ago

This has been happening for a long, long time. Back in the day, we had an voice-mail system with a certain amount of storage. When you paid to increase the storage a technician came on-site and removed a bolt that allowed the hard drive head to move farther into the disk. Camera manufacturers are a recent example. There are firmware "hacks" that allow you to access more advanced features from a less expensive body. Are these things bad? Maybe, but if you were the manufacturer would you rather source 2 (or 15) different components or just use 1 and modify it to fit the need and price point?

DrSiemer 6y ago
Reminds me of drilling a hole in an LD 3.5‑inch floppy disk to format it as HD and gain 720 kb. Not very reliable, but it did work.