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> The problem is it does work, a lot, and not enough people push back to hurt their sales All the evidence in the car industry to date I've seen appears to sho

by giobox 2y ago

> The problem is it does work, a lot, and not enough people push back to hurt their sales All the evidence in the car industry to date I've seen appears to show charging subscriptions for hardware functions that were previously free or included from factory with no ongoing cost tends to back fire - BMW famously first tried a few years ago to make heated seats subscription based, and has fully backtracked etc. > https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/bmw-will-not-charge-extra-activate-existing-functions-cars https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/bmw-will-not-cha... "We thought that we would provide an extra service to the customer by offering the chance to activate that later, but the user acceptance isn’t that high. People feel that they paid double – which was actually not true, but perception is reality, I always say. So that was the reason we stopped that." Remote start, widely available as a free to use feature in many Mazda models to date, falls in the same bucket really. If BMW can't make it work at the premium ends of the market, difficult to see Mazda doing it either.

beepboopboop 2y ago
> People feel that they paid double – which was actually not true, but perception is reality, I always say. Do you have any ideas on why the double cost is not true? Maybe manufacturing efficiencies make it cheaper to install the parts despite whether the customer paid for the upgrade?
- ProfessorLayton 2y ago
  It's likely just economies of scale, similar to how almost all cars, even the cheapest ones, have electric windows. It's cheaper to include them in all model tiers than to keep a separate SKU for roll-ups that'll barely sell anyway, because they exist so they can say "Starting at [lower $]" than what dealers actually keep in stock. This kind of stuff happens in tech all the time, like lower tier CPUs that are actually manufactured as higher tier ones, but with CPU/GPU cores disabled even if they weren't defective.
ranger_danger 2y ago
Maybe if they didn't gatekeep the feature behind an app in the first place, a lot more people would use it.

by giobox 2y ago

beepboopboop 2y ago

> People feel that they paid double – which was actually not true, but perception is reality, I always say. Do you have any ideas on why the double cost is not true? Maybe manufacturing efficiencies make it cheaper to install the parts despite whether the customer paid for the upgrade?

ProfessorLayton 2y ago
It's likely just economies of scale, similar to how almost all cars, even the cheapest ones, have electric windows. It's cheaper to include them in all model tiers than to keep a separate SKU for roll-ups that'll barely sell anyway, because they exist so they can say "Starting at [lower $]" than what dealers actually keep in stock. This kind of stuff happens in tech all the time, like lower tier CPUs that are actually manufactured as higher tier ones, but with CPU/GPU cores disabled even if they weren't defective.

ranger_danger 2y ago

Maybe if they didn't gatekeep the feature behind an app in the first place, a lot more people would use it.