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Audi owner finds basic HVAC function paywalled after pressing button

112 points by walrus01 5y ago

0des 5y ago
Don't cry, we bought and paid for this future.
LeoPanthera 5y ago
I think this has been misreported. This message is actually reporting that the car lacks the required AC hardware for that function. It's not a software feature. Although I agree that if the car isn't capable of a function, it shouldn't have a button for it, that is a very different story. It's not a paywall any more than any other hardware addition is a "paywall".
- modeless 5y ago
  Yeah it's funny that this is making the rounds as some kind of outrage when the hardware actually isn't present. There are plenty of real cases where the hardware is installed but disabled. Tesla has done it several times (battery capacity, rear heated seats, "acceleration boost").
  - TheDong 5y ago
    > Tesla has actually installed hardware in cars and locked it behind software paywalls, multiple times (battery capacity, rear heated seats, "acceleration boost", maybe more I'm unaware of). The most vaunted feature of teslas, "Full-Self-Driving" (note, not actually full self driving) is also a clear example of this. It's $10k, and it's a 100% software update for all modern teslas. The FSD stuff, as I understand it, is all on-car (i.e. no remote tesla-run service involved), so you really are just paying to unlock use of hardware already there.
    - grp000 5y ago
      I don't have a Tesla, but the hardware side of things is probably not close to $10k, and probably already being used in a multipurpose fashion. What I'm saying is, aren't you paying the $10k to use the self-driving model?
    - modeless 5y ago
      This is equivalent to saying that Microsoft shouldn't charge for Office because "you really are just paying to unlock use of hardware" to do word processing. It's not immoral to charge for software. There's a difference between charging money to add a toggle button for already existing heated seats on the touchscreen vs. charging money to license the most advanced driver assist software available to the public, still under development.
      - salawat 5y ago
        See, your statement of "charging for software not being immoral" is still a hotly ongoing topic of debate. It's just that the economic architecture that carried us out of a world primarily constrained by material scarcity is being naively applied to an area of one which does not. Introducing scarcity dynamics where none exist, is to me, one of the most immoral of willful actions to undertake.
        disillusioned 5y ago
        Isn't the scarcity dynamic simply... shifted left? Your point is that it's trivial to duplicate software and distribute it and there's no (or extremely low) incremental cost in doing so, but we both know the cost of software comes from, you know, people who have spent time to learn how to write software and then dedicating their waking hours to do so for years on end. There's scarcity in the number of developers available to perform that job. Now, a situation where I agree with the core thesis of "to introduce scarcity dynamics where none exist" is around, say, virtual real estate, or the most obvious one of them all: NFTs.
        modeless 5y ago
        I am actually sympathetic to this view somewhat. Copyright is not an inalienable right, it's something that we decided as a society to grant to people because we think the benefits outweigh the costs, and that may not be true. Personally I would be in favor of radical changes to copyright such as reducing the duration to something like 5 years. Artificial scarcity is useful but life+70 years of artificial scarcity is far beyond reasonable.
      - 5y ago
    - ceeplusplus 5y ago
      The difference there is that Tesla still gets value out of putting FSD hardware in cars that don't buy it because they can collect data. You can't say the same about an air conditioner.
    - disillusioned 5y ago
      Oh buddy, it's _$12k_ now. And yeah, the calculus here was to outfit every vehicle with the hardware, whether purchased or not, because the cost of the hardware is made up for not merely in potential future conversions/purchases, but in the ability to collect reams of data from a fleet of vehicles constantly annotating and sending back information to their model. To wit, the FSD stuff is indeed all on-car, but the FSD-as-a-work-in-progress-constantly-evolving requires significant tesla-run services: they ML work is being done centrally, and then updated models are pushed down to the cars to, hopefully not run down innocent pedestrians in the street.
  - mongol 5y ago
    If the hardware is not present, why is the button present?
    - t0mas88 5y ago
      To have only one version of the control unit, saves money on logistics.
    - xeromal 5y ago
      Probably an accident, but assembly lines are often optimized. I know that my old Isuzu trooper had wiring for heated seats. I just had to install a button to activate it and get a seat from the junkyard to hook in. It really depends on how a manufacturer does it but in some cases, it's cheaper to install the part and just deactivate it if the user doesn't purchase it instead of tooling two different lines in the factory
- seszett 5y ago
  > Although I agree that if the car isn't capable of a function, it shouldn't have a button for it, that is a very different story Maybe I misunderstood something but isn't that the whole problem discussed here? The important quote is this one: "Blank buttons aren’t rude," wrote the owner. "This one is reminding me that I’m cheap.". Obviously nobody expects to have functions when they haven't been paid for, but having a hardware button for it plus a message telling you you haven't purchased what was attached to this button is pretty bad.
- henriks 5y ago
  Are you sure? I have a VAG group car with the same sync button and it simply ensures that the set temperature is the same on both sides of the car. As this car already looks like it has automatic AC that shouldn’t require additional hardware, unless this is some fancier ”sync” than mine..
  - t0mas88 5y ago
    This car apparently doesn't have the separate temperature per area. So the button should just do nothing.
    - eps 5y ago
      This button shouldn't be there. That's how it is in older Audis. You don't order a feature - you get a plug for a button. If you retrofit it later, they add a button. What they did here is absolutely 100% tacky, shame on them. All of it, but especially the wording of the message. I sure hope they learn from this and never do it again. Saying as a die-hard Audi fan.
      - netsharc 5y ago
        Why tacky? I get it, from their point of view, it saves costs of manufacturing and logistics ("Customer wants car with button that does feature X, dealer only has cars without this button, now customer has to wait for a different car to be shipped or the button to be shipped and installed by the dealer, which will cost a few hours of the service department's time"). Of course they should've had a "Customer experience" department who would've told them how this improvement of their workflow would annoy the customer and look bad for them.
        seszett 5y ago
        Well, it makes sense for them to save cost, but it doesn't make having a useless button with a condescending message any less tacky.
- brigade 5y ago
  Ehh.... Audi's functions on demand does explicitly say that "the hardware for the functions that can be activated subsequently is installed in all vehicles at the factory" to reduce production costs [1], and the e-tron is one of the vehicles they're pushing this hard in. According to the reddit poster, the Denmark e-tron doesn't come with multizone climate standard, unlike most of Europe. And the function on demand store doesn't appear to have rolled out to Denmark yet, and climate zones doesn't appear to be one of the functions you can buy elsewhere (because it's standard outside of Denmark?) So it is literally true that it's not a post-sale option/paywall right now. But I strongly suspect that whatever hardware is needed is actually there and that this specific car will get the option to purchase the usage of it in the future once the store is rolled out to Denmark. [1] https://www.audi.com/en/company/sustainability/core-topics/products-and-services/audi-functions-on-demand.html https://www.audi.com/en/company/sustainability/core-topics/p...
  - Linosaurus 5y ago
    That sounds plausible. So if they want to upsell this feature in the future, the actual cost of installing the physical button (five minutes in a workshop) would dwarf the cost to install the hardware (0, already there). And so they decided to apply asshole interface design towards these customers. That's not a great solution.
    - sandermvanvliet 5y ago
      “Someone spent time to make it shit” It, unfortunately, applies to a ton of situations where instead of doing the simple, not asshole kind of thing, they chose to make the thing annoying and/or hostile
- mdmglr 5y ago
  Most cars (and I would expect this in a luxury car) have at minimum dual zone. The article mentions the car does not have the tri-zone option. So the sync button should set the same temperature on two zones and if they already are the same do nothing. I don’t understand why this message is necessary at all.
tommica 5y ago
Crazy to think that "micro" transactions are coming to cars - all the features are there, just need to switch a flag
- jsemrau 5y ago
  Coming to a Web3 near you : Drive to earn. The better you drive the more you earn.
- RedShift1 5y ago
  This is not the case here. For that sync button to work additional hardware is required which is not present on the car.
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  Different trims have different features isn't a particularly new phenomenon. I think the main novelty here is that Audi decided it's easier to leave the original button instead of replacing it with a nonfunctional unlabeled button (which is how most cars do it)
- PennRobotics 5y ago
  Make sure when buying a cheap electric VW to budget a weekly 2 Euros (or 4 Dollars, for the Volkswagen Audi Group In North America models). This will be the subscription cost to tell your car to start charging at night, when electric prices are lowest.
- nerdawson 5y ago
  I seem to recall that BMW were going to put Apple CarPlay behind a subscription. Even if you can get behind paying for what is purely a software feature in a car, introducing SaaS is beyond the pale.
RedShift1 5y ago
The reporter didn't reach out to Audi for comments... Maybe that sync button wasn't supposed to be there to begin with, with this car or level of trim?
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robertoandred 5y ago
You can tell the people up in arms about this have never had anything but the highest end of cars. You’ve always had to pay extra for extra features.
- youeseh 5y ago
  This is different. Generally, if you buy a base model car, it is missing buttons that would be available in a higher trim. In this case, the button is clearly there - it was cheaper to leave the button there and to lock the owner out using software.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    The software to do the climate zone sync is probably there too, just disabled by a feature flag. Edit: or maybe not, other comments indicate there is additional hardware required as well.
  - black_puppydog 5y ago
    It seems quaint now since we all got so used to it, but this is called an anti-feature. Someone spent engineering time (and every customer is paying for that) to make this thing less useful. I used to be up in arms about this after watching Benjamin Mako Hill's talk in 2010: https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/antifeatures-talk https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/antifeatures-talk In Hindsight, this was one of the first times during my university days that I thought "maybe tech isn't going the right way."
- pertymcpert 5y ago
  You can tell the people who didn’t read the article.
- blululu 5y ago
  This comes off more like name calling than dialog to me. Personally I drive an old Toyota Corolla that is about as close to the base model as one could get (windows doors and transmission are manual). There is nothing extraneous in that machine as far as I can tell. I know perfectly well that my car is the cheap model and I would need to pay extra for some automatic windows, but I would be annoyed if I had a dead switch on the side that does nothing. From the article it sounds like the manufacturer removed the hardware but left the button and didn’t do a great job patching the gap with good UX. This is just bad UX design and people have a right to be annoyed about these kinds of things.
slim 5y ago
If I was Audi, I would remove all the physical buttons and replace them with a touch screen. That would spare me all the drama in the future.
- bcraven 5y ago
  Audi have explicitly said they won't do that.[0] “Audi was – and still is, but was maybe more so in the past – known for this joy of use, the haptic sensation when you push and toggle buttons. This is exactly what we wanted to bring back in the car, but combining it with the touch-less [gesture control] interaction with the car. We believe… this is like an expensive watch, which you can really use often, and even show off to your friends. For sure we will have [physical controls in the future], yeah.” [0] https://www.carscoops.com/2021/09/audi-will-keep-physical-buttons-and-dials-in-future-models-interiors/ https://www.carscoops.com/2021/09/audi-will-keep-physical-bu...
- disgu 5y ago
  Oh I hope not. Audis are by far the best when it comes to what should and shouldn't be a button and their UI and its options are the best I've ever seen. Use a touchscreen where it makes sense and is _better_ than having a button. Use buttons for everything else.
- tirpen 5y ago
  So you would recklessly endanger the lives all users of your products just to stop them from venting off steam on a forum? I guess it's good you are not Audi then.
  - wewtyflakes 5y ago
    What about that seems reckless to you? There are examples of cars today that use this approach. It sounds like you are eagerly labeling it as being reckless, then assigning blame to the person you replied to as if they intended to be reckless. I do not have that same impression.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
  That would only make a different problem of having a only a touch screen and no physical buttons, which most people hate. Turns out knobs and buttons are really good UI for most functions. I don't ever want a car that doesn't have a volume knob, preferably one that doubles as the on/off for the audio.
WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
People will be abused to the extent they allow. I'm never going to buy this stuff. No wifi in my oven, either. No cameras in my TV. Manufacturers, know that if you put inappropriate computers in the product, I'm not going to buy it. Keep it simple and minimal and you will get my money.
- randunel 5y ago
  It's not the 0.1% money they're after, it's the rest. Keep your money (or don't, you may cave under your family's pressure). There's too few of us to have an impact.
dd444fgdfg 5y ago
"feature owner didn't pay for tells owner he didn't pay for it"
- t0mas88 5y ago
  But that's not nearly clickbait enough
- ls15 5y ago
  "Audi car keeps nagging car owners who decided against premium features when they bought their car." Would be appropriate too, I think. It is one thing to just not include a certain feature, but it is another thing to still include a button that only has the function to remind you of a possible paid upgrade. People thought that they bought a car, but they also bought a relation with a company. Like people who buy a smart TV and think they bought just a TV set. Actually they bought a TV set and a relationship with a TV producer who now keeps sucking up their data and shows ads on top of the programs that they intended to watch. How should I call this? Smartphoneification of everything? Is this a good thing?
- stingraycharles 5y ago
  Yeah, the way I read the title was that something suddenly became paywalled after pressing a wrong button. The actual story is much less interesting.
- izacus 5y ago
  Why are you defending corporations why they abuse their customers? What do you gain here?
  - alex_sf 5y ago
    Why do you consider giving someone what they paid for 'abuse'?
    - RealityVoid 5y ago
      Why should I pay for something that has zero marginal production cost to the producer? This is induced scarcity and I hate everything about it.
jimmont 5y ago
Has anyone priced the map updates? A friend told me how he updated firmware to change various things, learning in the process it's possible to adjust the turn signal (interval, etc). Fairly entertaining stuff.
pseingatl 5y ago
What about the GDPR? If this is a pure software function that can be purchased, it is linked to the purchaser. Subsequent owners? Other drivers? Will the service be turned off when the driver sells the car? What if the owner simply stores his vehicle and doesn't drive it? In the interim, Audi (as Google is known to do) end of lifes the service? Then what? Let me point out that this particular service isn't the only one. :) Which services are essential? A/C in Texas? Certainly. What about in Norway? Maybe not. What might be essential for you may not be to another customer. Interesting that no one mentioned IoT or baked-in Sims.
- raverbashing 5y ago
  GDPR doesn't apply here. The info is stored on the car in NVM probably. > If this is a pure software function that can be purchased, it is linked to the purchaser. Yes? Lots of things you buy are associated with your name on the vendor side. No issues there. As the article say, if you buy a car without a feature it might come with a blank button. And that's the equivalent of it here
  - pseingatl 5y ago
    If it crosses international borders, the GDPR is involved. Audi stores your information. So the GDPR is very much involved.
i1856511 5y ago
We are first familiar with this concept of payment activation in software where all product units are identical and the cost to produce an additional unit is 0. To implement this same concept in a machine is a little funnier. If this means the car units can be produced identically, at a lower cost of production per unit, I understand why companies do this. But it is also a natural human reaction to be frustrated by this concept implemented mechanically where the cost to produce is >0. Both sides have a point.
- oliwarner 5y ago
  Pay-walling software features —like this— means you also have to stop the user from modifying or maintaining the software running on the thing I own. Slightly reductive but if I can't do what I like with something I buy, is it really mine? If it's not, why am I expected to pay full price? Hopefully consumer rights will catch up, and make nonsense features like this go away. But I expect manufacturers to resist this as much as they can, probably tying it into certified safety systems and playing a "think of the children" argument.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >Slightly reductive but if I can't do what I like with something I buy, is it really mine? Software is almost always licensed, not sold/owned. >If it's not, why am I expected to pay full price? This isn't really a good argument. For one, it implies that if it's on sale for black friday or whatever, that it's magically fine because you're no longer paying "full price". Moreover, the concept of a "full price" is nebulous at best. Suppose the "full price" of a product is $999,999,999, and the discounted price (with locked down hardware) is $1,000. I doubt that would alleviate your concerns.
    - Tostino 5y ago
      Okay, and you are talking around the point GP was making entirely. The minutiae of if software is generally licensed or sold really doesn't matter to their argument, and you acting like it does is strange.
    - 5y ago
outsidein 5y ago
It seems some people may prefer it the tesla way to get automatically charged with potentially astronomical prices on your credit card, see https://www.thedrive.com/tech/41826/tesla-owner-billed-over-14000-for-accidental-full-self-driving-purchase https://www.thedrive.com/tech/41826/tesla-owner-billed-over-...
nerdawson 5y ago
I used to own a Merc with a phone button on the infotainment system. When you went to press the button, it’d inform you that the telephone module wasn’t installed. That car was manufactured 17 years ago. The only difference seems to be in the language used in the message. It’s a poor UX but I don’t necessarily think it’s anything new.
- theWreckluse 5y ago
  It’s snoozing UX but profitable nonetheless.
- adwww 5y ago
  My 2017 VW does this with the Voice button. I'd love it to just activate Siri / Google Assistant on my paired smartphone, but actually they'd like to charge me £200 to use their own dubious voice control.
  - EthicalSimilar 5y ago
    If you're using CarPlay / Android Auto, try holding it rather than just clicking. It should then activate Siri / Google Assistant.
    - adwww 5y ago
      CarPlay / Android is a separate £200 upgrade.
      - EspadaV9 5y ago
        We have a Golf 2016 model that supports CarPlay and Android Auto, have you tried connecting to it? Or not interested in the feature in general (which is fine, just curious)?
        adwww 5y ago
        Bluetooth audio works fine, but definetly no CarPlay functionality. Some buttons on the head unit say 'talk to your dealer to purchase this'.
kkfx 5y ago
Personally if I ever see something like that on a car I bough I simply came back to the seller "here your fraud-car's keys, I'll wait 24h for a FULL refund, otherwise you'll be contacted NOT by my lawyer directly but by local attorney on duty for commercial fraud and attempted extortion, copy of the complaint we be sent to the press". Simple as that, AND with the needed trial following not just to obtain a ful refund + expenses BUT also to escalate to a laws that forbid selling things with plugged-in services. Dear co-Citizens beware: being in a Democracy does not means that anything will go well by nature, we need to enforce democracy every days with common democratic instruments or we will discover that democracy have quickly change for a dictatorship.
- abenga 5y ago
  Why though, it's a feature they did not pay for. It is horrible UX to show the button for disabled features of course, but if you've been told from the get go that you need to pay for feature X, why would you be pissed that feature X doesn't work when you didn't?
  - kkfx 5y ago
    Because it's in the vehicle and the vehicle it's mine. I can not pay for A/C then receive a vehicle with no A/C at all, not one with a present but disabled feature. And not only for this particular case but in general it should be forbidden and hurt really much anyone who try to sell something deliberately bound to services/secondary payments after the formal buying and selling. Similar things apply for software licenses: if I accept something as I pay that's ok, if at home I'm asked to accept something after the payment that's MUST BE illegal because once formally bought something that's mine, at all. Some cases like that already passed court trials like famous Windows reimbursement fee for computers, I see no differences for cars. Such practices must be annihilated with so much force that no ones for many years to come would try pushing them again. Similarly ads from a device, not a third party service like ads built-in in SmartTVs or modern Windows desktop must be illegal and societies who try to push them sanctioned so badly that no one else for many year to come would not try the same again. The meaning of private property need to be reinforced and extended to the "digital"/"hybrid" world before the infamous and criminal "in 2030 you'll own nothing".
bArray 5y ago
> 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable Pulled up an archive here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220404040127/https://www.thedrive.com/news/44967/audi-owner-finds-basic-hvac-function-paywalled-after-pressing-the-button-for-it https://web.archive.org/web/20220404040127/https://www.thedr...
torginus 5y ago
This is just my opinion, but I have literally dozens of buttons on my car dash that I haven't pressed since forever. If they were blanks they would constantly remind me of being cheap whenever I looked at the dash.
eimrine 5y ago
I would like to have more buttons like this. For example, a half-cost version of the car which can be started only once a day, why not?
pieter_mj 5y ago
These type of messages usually go away when you press harder, hold press hard or use a hammer. Me talking to the car : "No car, plausible deniability won't work with me."
TYPE_FASTER 5y ago
If cars were licensed like enterprise software, they would detect how many seats were in use for the trip, and we'd have to pay per seat. (shhhhh don't give them any ideas) I've had a satellite radio button in my cars for years, but never subscribed. The hardware is there to receive the satellite radio, so it's a content (and software) license I'm missing. Do people not complain about that because satellite radio is not seen as a feature intrinsic to the car?
- fatnoah 5y ago
  >If cars were licensed like enterprise software, they would detect how many seats were in use for the trip, and we'd have to pay per seat. There already is a sensor to detect a passenger in most (all?) airbag enabled cars sold in the US, so we're already on our way!
  - TYPE_FASTER 5y ago
    With the weight sensors added to some of the new electric vehicles to adjust forecast range based on the weight of the current cargo, the equivalent of paying for checked bags a la flying will follow. "Four bags of groceries detected" It will be amusing if car licensing pushes people towards other forms of transportation, like bicycles.
- marklyon 5y ago
  Take a moment and imagine how Oracle would handle such an opportunity.
  - TYPE_FASTER 5y ago
    "I see the vehicle you are running our software on has four wheels. Since we license our software per wheel at $10k a wheel, that will be $40k for the vehicle. Let us know if you want to add the support and/or upgrade packages, which are an additional cost. There is a discount that starts at five wheels."

112 points by walrus01 5y ago

0des 5y ago

Don't cry, we bought and paid for this future.

I think this has been misreported. This message is actually reporting that the car lacks the required AC hardware for that function. It's not a software feature. Although I agree that if the car isn't capable of a function, it shouldn't have a button for it, that is a very different story. It's not a paywall any more than any other hardware addition is a "paywall".

modeless 5y ago
Yeah it's funny that this is making the rounds as some kind of outrage when the hardware actually isn't present. There are plenty of real cases where the hardware is installed but disabled. Tesla has done it several times (battery capacity, rear heated seats, "acceleration boost").
- TheDong 5y ago
  > Tesla has actually installed hardware in cars and locked it behind software paywalls, multiple times (battery capacity, rear heated seats, "acceleration boost", maybe more I'm unaware of). The most vaunted feature of teslas, "Full-Self-Driving" (note, not actually full self driving) is also a clear example of this. It's $10k, and it's a 100% software update for all modern teslas. The FSD stuff, as I understand it, is all on-car (i.e. no remote tesla-run service involved), so you really are just paying to unlock use of hardware already there.
  - grp000 5y ago
    I don't have a Tesla, but the hardware side of things is probably not close to $10k, and probably already being used in a multipurpose fashion. What I'm saying is, aren't you paying the $10k to use the self-driving model?
  - modeless 5y ago
    This is equivalent to saying that Microsoft shouldn't charge for Office because "you really are just paying to unlock use of hardware" to do word processing. It's not immoral to charge for software. There's a difference between charging money to add a toggle button for already existing heated seats on the touchscreen vs. charging money to license the most advanced driver assist software available to the public, still under development.
    - salawat 5y ago
      See, your statement of "charging for software not being immoral" is still a hotly ongoing topic of debate. It's just that the economic architecture that carried us out of a world primarily constrained by material scarcity is being naively applied to an area of one which does not. Introducing scarcity dynamics where none exist, is to me, one of the most immoral of willful actions to undertake.
      - disillusioned 5y ago
        Isn't the scarcity dynamic simply... shifted left? Your point is that it's trivial to duplicate software and distribute it and there's no (or extremely low) incremental cost in doing so, but we both know the cost of software comes from, you know, people who have spent time to learn how to write software and then dedicating their waking hours to do so for years on end. There's scarcity in the number of developers available to perform that job. Now, a situation where I agree with the core thesis of "to introduce scarcity dynamics where none exist" is around, say, virtual real estate, or the most obvious one of them all: NFTs.
      - modeless 5y ago
        I am actually sympathetic to this view somewhat. Copyright is not an inalienable right, it's something that we decided as a society to grant to people because we think the benefits outweigh the costs, and that may not be true. Personally I would be in favor of radical changes to copyright such as reducing the duration to something like 5 years. Artificial scarcity is useful but life+70 years of artificial scarcity is far beyond reasonable.
    - 5y ago
  - ceeplusplus 5y ago
    The difference there is that Tesla still gets value out of putting FSD hardware in cars that don't buy it because they can collect data. You can't say the same about an air conditioner.
  - disillusioned 5y ago
    Oh buddy, it's _$12k_ now. And yeah, the calculus here was to outfit every vehicle with the hardware, whether purchased or not, because the cost of the hardware is made up for not merely in potential future conversions/purchases, but in the ability to collect reams of data from a fleet of vehicles constantly annotating and sending back information to their model. To wit, the FSD stuff is indeed all on-car, but the FSD-as-a-work-in-progress-constantly-evolving requires significant tesla-run services: they ML work is being done centrally, and then updated models are pushed down to the cars to, hopefully not run down innocent pedestrians in the street.
- mongol 5y ago
  If the hardware is not present, why is the button present?
  - t0mas88 5y ago
    To have only one version of the control unit, saves money on logistics.
  - xeromal 5y ago
    Probably an accident, but assembly lines are often optimized. I know that my old Isuzu trooper had wiring for heated seats. I just had to install a button to activate it and get a seat from the junkyard to hook in. It really depends on how a manufacturer does it but in some cases, it's cheaper to install the part and just deactivate it if the user doesn't purchase it instead of tooling two different lines in the factory
seszett 5y ago
> Although I agree that if the car isn't capable of a function, it shouldn't have a button for it, that is a very different story Maybe I misunderstood something but isn't that the whole problem discussed here? The important quote is this one: "Blank buttons aren’t rude," wrote the owner. "This one is reminding me that I’m cheap.". Obviously nobody expects to have functions when they haven't been paid for, but having a hardware button for it plus a message telling you you haven't purchased what was attached to this button is pretty bad.
henriks 5y ago
Are you sure? I have a VAG group car with the same sync button and it simply ensures that the set temperature is the same on both sides of the car. As this car already looks like it has automatic AC that shouldn’t require additional hardware, unless this is some fancier ”sync” than mine..
- t0mas88 5y ago
  This car apparently doesn't have the separate temperature per area. So the button should just do nothing.
  - eps 5y ago
    This button shouldn't be there. That's how it is in older Audis. You don't order a feature - you get a plug for a button. If you retrofit it later, they add a button. What they did here is absolutely 100% tacky, shame on them. All of it, but especially the wording of the message. I sure hope they learn from this and never do it again. Saying as a die-hard Audi fan.
    - netsharc 5y ago
      Why tacky? I get it, from their point of view, it saves costs of manufacturing and logistics ("Customer wants car with button that does feature X, dealer only has cars without this button, now customer has to wait for a different car to be shipped or the button to be shipped and installed by the dealer, which will cost a few hours of the service department's time"). Of course they should've had a "Customer experience" department who would've told them how this improvement of their workflow would annoy the customer and look bad for them.
      - seszett 5y ago
        Well, it makes sense for them to save cost, but it doesn't make having a useless button with a condescending message any less tacky.
brigade 5y ago
Ehh.... Audi's functions on demand does explicitly say that "the hardware for the functions that can be activated subsequently is installed in all vehicles at the factory" to reduce production costs [1], and the e-tron is one of the vehicles they're pushing this hard in. According to the reddit poster, the Denmark e-tron doesn't come with multizone climate standard, unlike most of Europe. And the function on demand store doesn't appear to have rolled out to Denmark yet, and climate zones doesn't appear to be one of the functions you can buy elsewhere (because it's standard outside of Denmark?) So it is literally true that it's not a post-sale option/paywall right now. But I strongly suspect that whatever hardware is needed is actually there and that this specific car will get the option to purchase the usage of it in the future once the store is rolled out to Denmark. [1] https://www.audi.com/en/company/sustainability/core-topics/products-and-services/audi-functions-on-demand.html https://www.audi.com/en/company/sustainability/core-topics/p...
- Linosaurus 5y ago
  That sounds plausible. So if they want to upsell this feature in the future, the actual cost of installing the physical button (five minutes in a workshop) would dwarf the cost to install the hardware (0, already there). And so they decided to apply asshole interface design towards these customers. That's not a great solution.
  - sandermvanvliet 5y ago
    “Someone spent time to make it shit” It, unfortunately, applies to a ton of situations where instead of doing the simple, not asshole kind of thing, they chose to make the thing annoying and/or hostile
mdmglr 5y ago
Most cars (and I would expect this in a luxury car) have at minimum dual zone. The article mentions the car does not have the tri-zone option. So the sync button should set the same temperature on two zones and if they already are the same do nothing. I don’t understand why this message is necessary at all.

tommica 5y ago

Crazy to think that "micro" transactions are coming to cars - all the features are there, just need to switch a flag

jsemrau 5y ago
Coming to a Web3 near you : Drive to earn. The better you drive the more you earn.
RedShift1 5y ago
This is not the case here. For that sync button to work additional hardware is required which is not present on the car.
Rebelgecko 5y ago
Different trims have different features isn't a particularly new phenomenon. I think the main novelty here is that Audi decided it's easier to leave the original button instead of replacing it with a nonfunctional unlabeled button (which is how most cars do it)
PennRobotics 5y ago
Make sure when buying a cheap electric VW to budget a weekly 2 Euros (or 4 Dollars, for the Volkswagen Audi Group In North America models). This will be the subscription cost to tell your car to start charging at night, when electric prices are lowest.
nerdawson 5y ago
I seem to recall that BMW were going to put Apple CarPlay behind a subscription. Even if you can get behind paying for what is purely a software feature in a car, introducing SaaS is beyond the pale.

RedShift1 5y ago

The reporter didn't reach out to Audi for comments... Maybe that sync button wasn't supposed to be there to begin with, with this car or level of trim?

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robertoandred 5y ago

You can tell the people up in arms about this have never had anything but the highest end of cars. You’ve always had to pay extra for extra features.

youeseh 5y ago
This is different. Generally, if you buy a base model car, it is missing buttons that would be available in a higher trim. In this case, the button is clearly there - it was cheaper to leave the button there and to lock the owner out using software.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  The software to do the climate zone sync is probably there too, just disabled by a feature flag. Edit: or maybe not, other comments indicate there is additional hardware required as well.
- black_puppydog 5y ago
  It seems quaint now since we all got so used to it, but this is called an anti-feature. Someone spent engineering time (and every customer is paying for that) to make this thing less useful. I used to be up in arms about this after watching Benjamin Mako Hill's talk in 2010: https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/antifeatures-talk https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/antifeatures-talk In Hindsight, this was one of the first times during my university days that I thought "maybe tech isn't going the right way."
pertymcpert 5y ago
You can tell the people who didn’t read the article.
blululu 5y ago
This comes off more like name calling than dialog to me. Personally I drive an old Toyota Corolla that is about as close to the base model as one could get (windows doors and transmission are manual). There is nothing extraneous in that machine as far as I can tell. I know perfectly well that my car is the cheap model and I would need to pay extra for some automatic windows, but I would be annoyed if I had a dead switch on the side that does nothing. From the article it sounds like the manufacturer removed the hardware but left the button and didn’t do a great job patching the gap with good UX. This is just bad UX design and people have a right to be annoyed about these kinds of things.

slim 5y ago

If I was Audi, I would remove all the physical buttons and replace them with a touch screen. That would spare me all the drama in the future.

bcraven 5y ago
Audi have explicitly said they won't do that.[0] “Audi was – and still is, but was maybe more so in the past – known for this joy of use, the haptic sensation when you push and toggle buttons. This is exactly what we wanted to bring back in the car, but combining it with the touch-less [gesture control] interaction with the car. We believe… this is like an expensive watch, which you can really use often, and even show off to your friends. For sure we will have [physical controls in the future], yeah.” [0] https://www.carscoops.com/2021/09/audi-will-keep-physical-buttons-and-dials-in-future-models-interiors/ https://www.carscoops.com/2021/09/audi-will-keep-physical-bu...
disgu 5y ago
Oh I hope not. Audis are by far the best when it comes to what should and shouldn't be a button and their UI and its options are the best I've ever seen. Use a touchscreen where it makes sense and is _better_ than having a button. Use buttons for everything else.
tirpen 5y ago
So you would recklessly endanger the lives all users of your products just to stop them from venting off steam on a forum? I guess it's good you are not Audi then.
- wewtyflakes 5y ago
  What about that seems reckless to you? There are examples of cars today that use this approach. It sounds like you are eagerly labeling it as being reckless, then assigning blame to the person you replied to as if they intended to be reckless. I do not have that same impression.
Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
That would only make a different problem of having a only a touch screen and no physical buttons, which most people hate. Turns out knobs and buttons are really good UI for most functions. I don't ever want a car that doesn't have a volume knob, preferably one that doubles as the on/off for the audio.

WaxedChewbacca 5y ago

People will be abused to the extent they allow. I'm never going to buy this stuff. No wifi in my oven, either. No cameras in my TV. Manufacturers, know that if you put inappropriate computers in the product, I'm not going to buy it. Keep it simple and minimal and you will get my money.

randunel 5y ago
It's not the 0.1% money they're after, it's the rest. Keep your money (or don't, you may cave under your family's pressure). There's too few of us to have an impact.

dd444fgdfg 5y ago

"feature owner didn't pay for tells owner he didn't pay for it"

t0mas88 5y ago
But that's not nearly clickbait enough
ls15 5y ago
"Audi car keeps nagging car owners who decided against premium features when they bought their car." Would be appropriate too, I think. It is one thing to just not include a certain feature, but it is another thing to still include a button that only has the function to remind you of a possible paid upgrade. People thought that they bought a car, but they also bought a relation with a company. Like people who buy a smart TV and think they bought just a TV set. Actually they bought a TV set and a relationship with a TV producer who now keeps sucking up their data and shows ads on top of the programs that they intended to watch. How should I call this? Smartphoneification of everything? Is this a good thing?
stingraycharles 5y ago
Yeah, the way I read the title was that something suddenly became paywalled after pressing a wrong button. The actual story is much less interesting.
izacus 5y ago
Why are you defending corporations why they abuse their customers? What do you gain here?
- alex_sf 5y ago
  Why do you consider giving someone what they paid for 'abuse'?
  - RealityVoid 5y ago
    Why should I pay for something that has zero marginal production cost to the producer? This is induced scarcity and I hate everything about it.

jimmont 5y ago

Has anyone priced the map updates? A friend told me how he updated firmware to change various things, learning in the process it's possible to adjust the turn signal (interval, etc). Fairly entertaining stuff.

pseingatl 5y ago

What about the GDPR? If this is a pure software function that can be purchased, it is linked to the purchaser. Subsequent owners? Other drivers? Will the service be turned off when the driver sells the car? What if the owner simply stores his vehicle and doesn't drive it? In the interim, Audi (as Google is known to do) end of lifes the service? Then what? Let me point out that this particular service isn't the only one. :) Which services are essential? A/C in Texas? Certainly. What about in Norway? Maybe not. What might be essential for you may not be to another customer. Interesting that no one mentioned IoT or baked-in Sims.

raverbashing 5y ago
GDPR doesn't apply here. The info is stored on the car in NVM probably. > If this is a pure software function that can be purchased, it is linked to the purchaser. Yes? Lots of things you buy are associated with your name on the vendor side. No issues there. As the article say, if you buy a car without a feature it might come with a blank button. And that's the equivalent of it here
- pseingatl 5y ago
  If it crosses international borders, the GDPR is involved. Audi stores your information. So the GDPR is very much involved.

i1856511 5y ago

We are first familiar with this concept of payment activation in software where all product units are identical and the cost to produce an additional unit is 0. To implement this same concept in a machine is a little funnier. If this means the car units can be produced identically, at a lower cost of production per unit, I understand why companies do this. But it is also a natural human reaction to be frustrated by this concept implemented mechanically where the cost to produce is >0. Both sides have a point.

oliwarner 5y ago
Pay-walling software features —like this— means you also have to stop the user from modifying or maintaining the software running on the thing I own. Slightly reductive but if I can't do what I like with something I buy, is it really mine? If it's not, why am I expected to pay full price? Hopefully consumer rights will catch up, and make nonsense features like this go away. But I expect manufacturers to resist this as much as they can, probably tying it into certified safety systems and playing a "think of the children" argument.
- gruez 5y ago
  >Slightly reductive but if I can't do what I like with something I buy, is it really mine? Software is almost always licensed, not sold/owned. >If it's not, why am I expected to pay full price? This isn't really a good argument. For one, it implies that if it's on sale for black friday or whatever, that it's magically fine because you're no longer paying "full price". Moreover, the concept of a "full price" is nebulous at best. Suppose the "full price" of a product is $999,999,999, and the discounted price (with locked down hardware) is $1,000. I doubt that would alleviate your concerns.
  - Tostino 5y ago
    Okay, and you are talking around the point GP was making entirely. The minutiae of if software is generally licensed or sold really doesn't matter to their argument, and you acting like it does is strange.
  - 5y ago

outsidein 5y ago

It seems some people may prefer it the tesla way to get automatically charged with potentially astronomical prices on your credit card, see https://www.thedrive.com/tech/41826/tesla-owner-billed-over-14000-for-accidental-full-self-driving-purchase https://www.thedrive.com/tech/41826/tesla-owner-billed-over-...

nerdawson 5y ago

I used to own a Merc with a phone button on the infotainment system. When you went to press the button, it’d inform you that the telephone module wasn’t installed. That car was manufactured 17 years ago. The only difference seems to be in the language used in the message. It’s a poor UX but I don’t necessarily think it’s anything new.

theWreckluse 5y ago
It’s snoozing UX but profitable nonetheless.
adwww 5y ago
My 2017 VW does this with the Voice button. I'd love it to just activate Siri / Google Assistant on my paired smartphone, but actually they'd like to charge me £200 to use their own dubious voice control.
- EthicalSimilar 5y ago
  If you're using CarPlay / Android Auto, try holding it rather than just clicking. It should then activate Siri / Google Assistant.
  - adwww 5y ago
    CarPlay / Android is a separate £200 upgrade.
    - EspadaV9 5y ago
      We have a Golf 2016 model that supports CarPlay and Android Auto, have you tried connecting to it? Or not interested in the feature in general (which is fine, just curious)?
      - adwww 5y ago
        Bluetooth audio works fine, but definetly no CarPlay functionality. Some buttons on the head unit say 'talk to your dealer to purchase this'.

kkfx 5y ago

Personally if I ever see something like that on a car I bough I simply came back to the seller "here your fraud-car's keys, I'll wait 24h for a FULL refund, otherwise you'll be contacted NOT by my lawyer directly but by local attorney on duty for commercial fraud and attempted extortion, copy of the complaint we be sent to the press". Simple as that, AND with the needed trial following not just to obtain a ful refund + expenses BUT also to escalate to a laws that forbid selling things with plugged-in services. Dear co-Citizens beware: being in a Democracy does not means that anything will go well by nature, we need to enforce democracy every days with common democratic instruments or we will discover that democracy have quickly change for a dictatorship.

abenga 5y ago
Why though, it's a feature they did not pay for. It is horrible UX to show the button for disabled features of course, but if you've been told from the get go that you need to pay for feature X, why would you be pissed that feature X doesn't work when you didn't?
- kkfx 5y ago
  Because it's in the vehicle and the vehicle it's mine. I can not pay for A/C then receive a vehicle with no A/C at all, not one with a present but disabled feature. And not only for this particular case but in general it should be forbidden and hurt really much anyone who try to sell something deliberately bound to services/secondary payments after the formal buying and selling. Similar things apply for software licenses: if I accept something as I pay that's ok, if at home I'm asked to accept something after the payment that's MUST BE illegal because once formally bought something that's mine, at all. Some cases like that already passed court trials like famous Windows reimbursement fee for computers, I see no differences for cars. Such practices must be annihilated with so much force that no ones for many years to come would try pushing them again. Similarly ads from a device, not a third party service like ads built-in in SmartTVs or modern Windows desktop must be illegal and societies who try to push them sanctioned so badly that no one else for many year to come would not try the same again. The meaning of private property need to be reinforced and extended to the "digital"/"hybrid" world before the infamous and criminal "in 2030 you'll own nothing".

bArray 5y ago

> 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable Pulled up an archive here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220404040127/https://www.thedrive.com/news/44967/audi-owner-finds-basic-hvac-function-paywalled-after-pressing-the-button-for-it https://web.archive.org/web/20220404040127/https://www.thedr...

torginus 5y ago

This is just my opinion, but I have literally dozens of buttons on my car dash that I haven't pressed since forever. If they were blanks they would constantly remind me of being cheap whenever I looked at the dash.

eimrine 5y ago

I would like to have more buttons like this. For example, a half-cost version of the car which can be started only once a day, why not?

pieter_mj 5y ago

These type of messages usually go away when you press harder, hold press hard or use a hammer. Me talking to the car : "No car, plausible deniability won't work with me."

TYPE_FASTER 5y ago

If cars were licensed like enterprise software, they would detect how many seats were in use for the trip, and we'd have to pay per seat. (shhhhh don't give them any ideas) I've had a satellite radio button in my cars for years, but never subscribed. The hardware is there to receive the satellite radio, so it's a content (and software) license I'm missing. Do people not complain about that because satellite radio is not seen as a feature intrinsic to the car?

fatnoah 5y ago
>If cars were licensed like enterprise software, they would detect how many seats were in use for the trip, and we'd have to pay per seat. There already is a sensor to detect a passenger in most (all?) airbag enabled cars sold in the US, so we're already on our way!
- TYPE_FASTER 5y ago
  With the weight sensors added to some of the new electric vehicles to adjust forecast range based on the weight of the current cargo, the equivalent of paying for checked bags a la flying will follow. "Four bags of groceries detected" It will be amusing if car licensing pushes people towards other forms of transportation, like bicycles.
marklyon 5y ago
Take a moment and imagine how Oracle would handle such an opportunity.
- TYPE_FASTER 5y ago
  "I see the vehicle you are running our software on has four wheels. Since we license our software per wheel at $10k a wheel, that will be $40k for the vehicle. Let us know if you want to add the support and/or upgrade packages, which are an additional cost. There is a discount that starts at five wheels."