6 ms·

This is less to do with blackmail than to do with optimising manufacturing. It is cheaper for manufacurers to produce all the cars with the same heated seats, b

• jen20 4y ago
  > You should forget about what the car "has" and consider if the price makes sense for the features you get access to. Absolutely not: manufacturers should forget about having their cake and eating it too.
  • omniglottal 4y ago
    The price of $0 for powering up existing hardware in a car I purchased for $X makes sense. Anything over $0 does not. Seems pretty clear.
• MAGZine 4y ago
  maybe this is supposed to make me feel better, but installing features that will never be used (e.g. heating elements in the seats) just makes me mad re: waste. 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.
  • kkirsche 4y ago
    This bothers me because those raw materials and byproducts of manufacturing still get either used or produced. So this seems like a net negative for the planet when there have been pushes to reform the impact this industry in particular has on the environment.
  • Loughla 4y ago
    And, at the very least, they add to the weight or energy consumption of the car, thereby decreasing my fuel economy and adding costs to my budget.
  • tessierashpool 4y ago
    yeah, the grandparent comment is utterly absurd. if it's cheaper for them to make, then they're making it an upsell even though it could be a standard feature. and if that's happening, but no competitor is coming along to take advantage of this cost situation and standardize the upsell, then there's something wrong with the market. this subscription approach is just rent-seeking behavior, which is another sign that there's something wrong with the market.
  • vasco 4y ago
    I agree there is waste, but if you buy into the whole capitalist schpiel, if the cost of production is lower, it's still better. This obviously externalizes environmental impacts which the current trend of eco-politics is trying to address with many ideas around taxing carbon output and other ways of accounting for the external effects comes into play. I assume if the world is able to correctly implement such a system we'd get rid of these aberrations where sometimes chucking a bunch of useless stuff into a product, or producing it in the other side of the world ends up "making sense" - because it only "makes sense" if you don't account for all the trash you leave behind you. 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.
• adverbly 4y ago
  > This is for example how CPUs and GPUs are sold, and many other products. 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.
• kgermino 4y ago
  > This is less to do with blackmail than to do with optimising manufacturing. It is cheaper for manufacurers to produce all the cars with the same heated seats, but not allow you to use them if you don't pay the recurring charge (as long as enough % of customers opt-in), than to manufacture two versions of the car, one with the seats and one without, just so that you can feel like you aren't being blackmailed. 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.
  • chrisseaton 4y ago
    > But there's no connection between adding it to every car and charging a subscription to use it. 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.
    • kgermino 4y ago
      No, again you can charge people a one time cost to enable it. Whether that happens at initial purchase or years later (in app purchase style) doesn’t affect whether it’s a one time or recurring cost.
      • chrisseaton 4y ago
        Just multiply the monthly cost by how many months you intend to use the car. Are you happy with that cost? Then what's the issue? Why does the monthly-ness wind everyone up so much?
        • horsawlarway 4y ago
          I own my cars forever (until death do us part - either me or the car). 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.
• the_other 4y ago
  This is dumb and a sign that the system we have created to operate in is broken. Another sign. Programmers talk about code smells. This is a code smell about our resource extraction and sharing, and money systems. 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.
  • whearyou 4y ago
    “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” This is the crux, and I totally and completely agree
  • api 4y ago
    I like the general idea of societal "code smells." I think a full list of these would end up getting very long.
  • DoughnutHole 4y ago
    You're overselling the "true cost" of maritime shipping - it's far and away the most efficient form of freight we have. Ocean freight has carbon emissions of 7g of CO2 per tonne-kilometre. Road freight by comparison has emissions of 137 gCO2/tkm - nearly 20 times the ocean emissions. 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.
• cerol 4y ago
  It's interesting how plausible conclusions are always so boring. No wonder consensus usually converges to cynical/doomsday conclusions. It's where the emotions are.
  • dataflow 4y ago
    > It's interesting how plausible conclusions are always so boring. 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).
• pbuzbee 4y ago
  Okay, then why gate it behind a recurring fee instead of a one-time unlock cost?
• josephcsible 4y ago
  It's one thing when two cores of an 8-core CPU fail QA, so it gets sold as a 6-core one instead (since the alternative would be throwing it away entirely). It's another to disable perfectly good equipment purely out of greed.
• em-bee 4y ago
  i have no problem with optimizing manufacturing. you want to turn off a feature if i pay less, sure. but that doesn't explain the need for a recurring monthly charge. because there is no need for that at all.
• horsawlarway 4y ago
  > This is for example how CPUs and GPUs are sold 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.
  • mikewave 4y ago
    > 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. 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.
  • vasco 4y ago
    > This is not true. They are binned by capability, and sold at different price points. 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.
    • 4y ago
• AlexandrB 4y ago
  But CPU and GPU capabilities aren't sold on a subscription basis (though I know Intel tried something in this direction), and their features don't vanish if/when they are resold. 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.
• googlryas 4y ago
  Huh? The logic makes sense, except for the "recurring payment" part. This has been done for years in manufacturing, but there is no necessity for it to be a recurring payment. It could just as easily be a one time payment to upgrade your car to have heated seats(really, just the dealership flipping a bit in some config somewhere, or the manufacturer hardcoding the bit one way or the other as it rolls off the assembly line).
• isitmadeofglass 4y ago
  > This is for example how CPUs and GPUs are sold, and many other products. What on earth kind of CPU or GPU have you bought where basic features require a reoccurring subscription?!
• LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
  But wouldn't that be dead weight I'm carrying around, and using more fuel at the end of the day/year/time of use? No matter how small.
• _nalply 4y ago
  I would say it's a way of price segmentation. One example are loyalty cards with rebates and bonuses. Customer A pays less for the same product than customer B. Of course there's the difference that customer B has seat heating enabled, but from the producers' perspective this doesn't matter a lot, because they have the same production process for everybody, somewhat similar to CPU binning. 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.
• taylodl 4y ago
  This is okay too - it's cheaper to put heated seats in all the cars, than to put it in some cars! Enable it via the purchase of an options package. But a recurring cost for the feature? That grinds my gears. 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.