Typically higher prices are associated with higher Cost-Of-Goods-Sold, plus some margin. For internet-based services like Netflix (or Spotify or Youtube or who

Typically higher prices are associated with higher Cost-Of-Goods-Sold, plus some margin. For internet-based services like Netflix (or Spotify or Youtube or whomever), more stuff (streams, bitrate, resolution, etc) has higher costs for them: bandwidth, storage, licensing. They don't provide a physical good necessarily, but that doesn't mean there's zero cost to providing a higher-grade experience to their customers. (LTT has a whole video about the cost of serving 4k and 60fps video from their independent video platform that's a pretty good primer on this space, IMhO.) In the car scenario, the cost is already sunk: the hardware is in the car, the capability to go-fast is already there and it costs nothing further to the manufacturer to allow the customer to use it. Putting a cost on it is the literal definition of rent-seeking: they're not creating anything new, which might justify the cost, they're just charging you to access a thing that already exists. Especially since it's an ongoing cost for a thing you already own. Imagine if this extended to every other product: You buy an ipad with 1tb of storage in hardware, but you have to pay Apple $15/month to use it all. You buy a 4k monitor, but you have to pay Dell $5/month to use it at resolutions above 1080p. This doesn't make sense, and it's plain corporate greed. Mapping physical goods into the "As a service" world is absolutely nuts to me.