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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.
brigade 5y ago
It's actually the high-end cars that are on the forefront of moving features to subscriptions, starting with BMW's CarPlay subscription (well they changed their mind), to remote start (Mercedes charges a subscription that Toyota was blasted hard enough for to reverse), to Audi's built-in navigation...

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.

brigade 5y ago

It's actually the high-end cars that are on the forefront of moving features to subscriptions, starting with BMW's CarPlay subscription (well they changed their mind), to remote start (Mercedes charges a subscription that Toyota was blasted hard enough for to reverse), to Audi's built-in navigation...