13 ms·

Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

186 points by t0bia_s 1y ago

HK-NC 1y ago
Do they realise that their intentions for this company are officially now worse than those under the oversight of Adolf Hitler
m101 1y ago
I wonder if part of this is increased warranty claim expectations
rvz 1y ago
Now you are seeing the great electric car scam - Selling you an under-powered electric car and to increase its power you must pay for a subscription to unlock it's full power capabilities. The best part is, many won't care (when they should). But these days, it is okay to get scammed isn't it? BMW tried selling a subscription on heated seats, but that failed. [0], So lets see how long this will last. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421730
- mdp2021 1y ago
  > The best part is, many won't care (when they should). This is generally valid for current societies, not just specifically. Conformism has infiltrated economics, so now the supply-demand mechanism is broken: the demand agents are not "informed and rational", as classical theory wanted, so the supply is degraded - spawning "shrinkflation" and "viliflation".
- tjwebbnorfolk 1y ago
  Who are you to tell other people what they should care about? Each person can decide for themselves what is important, and what is not. Minding one's own business is an underrated virtue.
  - cindyllm 1y ago
    [dead]
- _aavaa_ 1y ago
  > Now you are seeing the great electric car scam Keep your anti-EV hatred in check for a second and note that nothing in here is EV only. They could just as well do this with a gasoline car, that engine is also electronically controlled.
  - lodovic 1y ago
    But you can replace the ECU in a gasoline powered car, or the entire engine if you want. You may have to recode some of the parts such as the headlights and the airbags. Often you can use parts from other brands. But replacing anything in an EV is a nightmare: all the parts, motor management, battery management, charging controller are tightly integrated, signed, coded to the car etc.
    - _aavaa_ 1y ago
      But that’s not because the car is an EV, that’s because the manufacturer is greedy. The door handles, infotainment, tire pressure gauges, gas cap, etc. all could have a digital locks on them to bless them with DMCA protection.
      - lodovic 1y ago
        Fair enough, but it seems to be more prevalent with EVs because electric power is a given in such a car, where a diesel or gasoline car usually has fallbacks for most electric systems except the lights and the dashboard, and the alternator can keep the engine running if the battery suddenly dies.
        _aavaa_ 1y ago
        I absolutely agree. I think the only reason they don’t do it for all gasoline cars is because of the cost. If everything is done in software for the EV you have to write that software anyway. Might as well write it to pull more money from your customer. This will require legislative changes to stop, right to repair laws (looking at you John Deere) are a good first step.
- abcd_f 1y ago
  BMW still sells a subscription to advanced headlight functions, live traffic info in their navigation and few other things. It's just now a packaged deal and they also opt you in by default into a three month trial. The car is also all but unusable without an online account, so there's that. Regrettably, despite of all the brouhaha with the heated seats, all this b/s never really went away.
  - rkomorn 1y ago
    At least the heated seats are "free"! [0] (commented with the utmost sarcasm) 0- https://www.thedrive.com/news/bmw-is-giving-up-on-heated-seat-subscriptions-because-people-hated-them https://www.thedrive.com/news/bmw-is-giving-up-on-heated-sea...
  - mdp2021 1y ago
    > The car is also all but unusable without an online account Please explain. What would make it almost unusable?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
dv_dt 1y ago
"As the car is registered at 228bhp from the factory, owners won’t need to inform their insurance company, either way." So does this imply that if insurance companies charge higher rates for higher hp, that non subscribers incur higher costs for a feature that they don't get the benefit of?
- raphinou 1y ago
  This is how I understand it. Which might be the reason why consumers could react against this.
- giarc 1y ago
  The base is 201 and with the subscription it goes to 228. I doubt an insurance company would change premium for that increase, but I'm also not an insurance rep.
  - dv_dt 1y ago
    The last thing I want from a car purchase is subscription nonsense that also brings extra worry or work to make sure the car doesn't cross some annoyance policy threshold in insurance or operating registration etc. I think I'd turn around and walk away from a purchase if I discover the car has subscriptions built into the fundamental car operation.
- pmontra 1y ago
  Worse than that. My country's car ownership tax is based on the kW of the engine.
smitty1e 1y ago
If capitalism were a thing, could someone market a newly made chip-free vehicle?
- amelius 1y ago
  Capitalism does not necessarily act in the interest of consumers, if that is what you were thinking.
  - tjwebbnorfolk 1y ago
    If no one buys this car, making more of them will lose money until they stop. If consumers buy the car, then it will live on. In other words, CONSUMERS do not necessarily act in the interest of consumers.
    - mdp2021 1y ago
      > consumers do not necessarily act in the interest of consumers That's what I am saying with "broken market, broken supply-demand system, non-rational and non-informed economic agents". Bad products that sell are a reality since a long time.
      - tjwebbnorfolk 1y ago
        Broken for whom? "Bad" according to whom? What would your goal be, then? Only "good" products are able to be sold -- according to whom will this definition of "good" be decided? I'm mainly playing devil's advocate here, but my point is that bringing value judgement into other people's decisions is not something I would regard as rational. People have their own reasons for doing things that I don't need to understand.
        mdp2021 1y ago
        > whom? Rational agents. That quality is an abater of relativism. > What would your goal be, then Livability. That requires working systems, so that choice is still possible. In the current situation, there is in many vast territories no choice, in many areas (not just cars), and greatly suboptimal, very thin livability.
user3939382 1y ago
Thanks for the crystal clear signaling on what type of people are running the company so I can be sure to never consider buying a VW.
- leobg 1y ago
  “I bought this car before Adolf became problematic.”
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    Funny, but not fair.
- IAmGraydon 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - rvz 1y ago
    > I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that a company founded by Adolf Hitler behaves in this way. A leopard never and cannot change its spots.
  - abcd_f 1y ago
    > On top of all that, they’re awful cars. They certainly aren't.
    - protimewaster 1y ago
      It depends on what you want in a car. If you're expecting reliability like VW was known for years ago, you may well feel like the newer ones are awful.
  - slt2021 1y ago
    >I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that a company founded by Adolf Hitler behaves in this way. this is pure anti-German hatred and bigotry, Uncle H has been dead for many decades, and there is nothing to suggest that the current VW is still somehow connected to the Third Reich, while ignoring all the alt-right/nazi undercurrent brewing inside the United States among the so called "foundational americans"
simmerup 1y ago
Guess I won't be getting a 2all when it comes out after all.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
CoastalCoder 1y ago
I recently bought a Honda, and yesterday they emailed me a survey focused on what subscription services I'd find useful at various price points. Unfortunately the survey gave me no opportunity to explain how much the basic concept of them continuing to be up my business post-purchase pisses me off.
- stego-tech 1y ago
  Cars already have a recurring “subscription” in the form of fuel, maintenance, repairs, insurance, and cleaning. Unless more companies are pulling a Volvo and offering a comprehensive maintenance subscription that covers all the above via a monthly fee, then they can collectively FOAD. EDIT: I am keenly aware how cars work and don’t need eSplaining on them. I articulate my point better in a comment deeper in the thread. Apologies for my snark and vitriol over unnecessary and exploitative subscriptions coming off as somehow condoning VW-formulated petrol or Tesla-approved electricity.
  - Zigurd 1y ago
    That's part of the motivation for them to come up with cockamamie subscription ideas: the car companies and the dealers rely on maintenance revenue, which is significantly reduced in EVs. Tire shops are the only ones happy about EVs.
  - afarah1 1y ago
    Poor comparison, none of these are attached to the manufacturer, you can and usually do get these services from other companies of your choice. You don't need VW-Gas(TM) from VW-Station(TM) in your tank for the car to run.
    - ndriscoll 1y ago
      Also you can do maintenance/repairs yourself for the cost of parts, self-insure, and, obviously, clean it yourself. For EVs and hybrids, you can provide the fuel yourself (solar). The manufacturer intentionally making things like repairs difficult would be the only reason you "need" to pay for regular services, though that also doesn't really fit into a subscription model either since it's going to depend on how much you've driven.
benji-york 1y ago
This makes sense to me. (Not that I would personally ever buy a car with that mechanism baked in.) They could either make two models (incurring the costs associated with having two different SKUs) and let people pay more for the one with more power or make one with intrinsically more power and let the people that don't want it pay less with it nerfed. I would have thought that people (like me) that have spent our lives making a zero marginal cost product would understand the economics at work here.
- _aavaa_ 1y ago
  People do understand the economics: tomorrow the subscription costs 3x more, or they chose to stop supporting it when a new model comes out, or etc. The analogy to software is great though; nobody paying for software owns it, or even has the option to own it. This is not fully the case for physical things, and people are rightly angry about “owning” things without owning them.
  - slt2021 1y ago
    just multiply the monthly payment by 12*6 (avg time to own a car) and imagine giving the full amount upfront to the dealer for the full horsepower. I dont understand why people balk at car subscription for some feature, but perfectly fine with leasing a car => which is basically a car subscription driven to its logical end? does it matter if you have to pay $700 to your bank for lease and separately $20 to VW for some feature? would it matter if you had to pay $720 to your bank instead for full features???
    - degamad 1y ago
      The difference is that the bank can't suddenly decide that you owe them $800 each month instead of $720, but VW can decide that your subscription costs $100 instead of $20.
      - ceejayoz 1y ago
        And at some point the bank says “You’re done! Loan paid in full!”
jmclnx 1y ago
Well VW just made my list of cars to avoid. Boy, that list is getting huge. I will probably be in my 2007 toyota for a long time to come.
- DougN7 1y ago
  Yeah, it breaks my heart because I love my 2012 Passat, but no way will I buy a car with a subscription like this, or for heated seats. Idiots.
- jillesvangurp 1y ago
  So, you are not the type that buys new cars. Nothing wrong with that of course. I don't own a car at all. And I don't see the logic of spending non trivial amounts of my income on a new one. But why should VW concern themselves with what you or I want considering that we are apparently not in the market anyway? Especially not for a high performance/high status type car. Because, no offense, your choice of car marks you as "definitely does not care about that sort of thing". And good for you. I might at some point buy a second hand one. And VW has a lot of pretty decent EVs in the market that are trickling down to the second hand market at increasingly more attractive prices. Probably not my dream second hand car (I think they are kind of ugly) but they aren't horrible vehicles. I don't think I'll ever want to hand over cash to the oil industry voluntarily. I have driven rental petrol and diesel cars in the past. But it just feels a bit stupid to fill up a car for 50+ euros. A few years worth of money saved on not buying fuel easily adds up to a pretty nice budget for a modest second hand EV these days.
  - mathiaspoint 1y ago
    If Toyota made an EV version of my 2007 highlander I'd buy it.
jaffa2 1y ago
Tesla already does this. Why no kickback there?
- kotaKat 1y ago
  The stranger thing here is it's... a whole 27 brake horsepower. I don't even think there's a different part at play at all here, they just decided to figure out how to play with their throttle mappings and stuff and wanted to scrape an extra couple bucks out of the bottom of the barrel. At least Tesla was using some sense of the "ship one battery and restrict it in software" for an actual tangible hardware good versus some software shenanigans in the VW camp (again).
  - rikafurude21 1y ago
    In both cases hardware is throttled by software. Theres is no difference, its all software shenanigans.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
  This is a reason also not to purchase a Tesla. Tesla's software subscriptions additionally have the problem that they don't work as advertised.
- plqbfbv 1y ago
  I guess I'm way more comfortable with a one-time purchase unlock (kind of SW "license" upgrade) rather than a subscription for hardware that I have 100% of the time. Example: Acceleration Boost is a 2k one-time upgrade. Once you purchase it, you get it forever. EAP and FSD are the same: pay once, get for life. Those who purchased FSD before HW3 also got/get included driving computer upgrade. Of course this was done from Tesla to avoid backslash, but at the same time it was done without back-and-forth: they understood the situation and simply rolled it out. FSD subscription makes sense because you purchase more "features", maybe for a limited time, for a much lower price. If your daily driving is 20mi, you probably are fine with AP, and won't justify spending 4k on EAP, 8k on FSD or 100$/mo on the FSD subscription. But maybe if you trip for holidays for a few weeks, you can purchase the subscription for a couple months. If you're daily driving 50+mi, or drive in very busy cities, I can see the 8k purchase offering some value if you want to keep the car more than 6 years (8k/100$ - 80 months, ~6.5y), and you can still try it out via subscription beforehand and decide to not pay the full price upfront. Basically Tesla's model is mostly one-time license fee, except for FSD subscription to ease the access to software-powered features. What VW is doing is selling you hardware, and then asking you to pay every month if you want to unlock its full potential. Honestly this should be illegal, a one-time fee should be the only way allowed. And I recognize they have the option of a one-time fee, but of course they're banking on people opting for the low-cost option and forget they have it active. EDIT: this is also the test bed for more subscription stuff, they want to see how people react to it. If there's no big backslash, expect more subscriptions to come.
DrNosferatu 1y ago
Unless they undercut the Chinese (same class) car prices in Europe, people will run from such products like the plague. And we all know which way this is gonna go ;) PS: Morally worse, only privatized water that used to be public free access, Nestlé-style. These people sure know how to win the public opinion.
buran77 1y ago
I'm sure that by having fewer parts in the logistics chain they can build a car cheaper. They then define models via software almost for free. And that would be great if the saving was passed to the consumer. Instead every saving is definitely captured by the manufacturer and the consumer gets to buy a car that definitely does everything but "computer says no". But the situation is objectively worse than today because it doesn't just involve a "software defined car" but a "subscription defined car". Today you buy your specs and own them, you're not at the manufacturer's mercy on the monthly price. I'm afraid it's just a matter of time until everyone does it. It only takes one company to go first and take the heat to make it mainstream, the rest will follow.
- spicyusername 1y ago
  And then all we'll need is a federal government that's friendly to free trade and all of the domestic auto manufacturers will go out of business because they can't compete. It might not happen this year, it might not happen this decade, but it will eventually happen. Organizing your business in such an anti-consumer way is a huge liability, but executives who will have extracted all the wealth anyways will probably be long gone by then.
  - ExoticPearTree 1y ago
    Or cry foul when the chinese EV manufacturares give you more bang for the buck because they don’t play silly games like this.
- hinkley 1y ago
  So apparently we will download a car.
  - mdp2021 1y ago
    And (again) possess it but not own it.
    - hinkley 1y ago
stego-tech 1y ago
There’s already a growing market for companies that just sell you a quality good without ongoing service fees or data harvesting/surveillance; cars only recently really joined that list, which frustrates me. On the one hand, I appreciate the potential such data collection allows: proactive maintenance reminders, repair scheduling, TCO reductions, and even factory-line improvements by identifying flaws before they turn into class actions. On the other hand, none of that is what they’re actually doing. It’s all about juicing revenue instead of reducing costs, and treating paying customers like loot pinatas to be clubbed repeatedly for dosh. I’d like to believe there’s a market for smaller, simpler, EV-based “retro-inspired” cars that aren’t jam-packed with modems and sensors to phone home. Maybe someday I’ll be proven right.
- Zigurd 1y ago
  Adobe might be an example of how optimizing revenue can eventually bite you in the ass. Adobe is a profit machine. They have the best (in terms of making money) subscription model in the technology business. But the stock price indicates that investors don't think they can keep it up. VW is still in the FA stage of this revenue experiment.
  - FredPret 1y ago
    Adobe stock has been heading up and down but there can be many reasons for that. Revenue and profit has gone absolutely nuts since subscriptions started and is clearly the way forward for them. This model makes a lot of sense for software but none for hardware. Adobe customers are indeed pissed off but they should fix that with lower prices and better terms, not going back to the old model that had them losing money.
    - Zigurd 1y ago
      After I wrote that, I almost immediately regretted that I hadn't used price earnings ratio rather than stock price as the indication that investors don't have confidence that Adobe can continue to extract rent, even though I wouldn't bet against Adobe, I wouldn't short them. Kind of remarkable how low the price earnings ratio is compared to magnificent seven stocks. Only Google gets stuck with a similarly pedestrian price earnings ratio.
jqpabc123 1y ago
Forget Netflix Better idea --- forget Volkswagen. This is just one example of anti-consumer antics bordering on extortion that have been building for a very long time. The overall idea is simple --- reduce the sticker price to a competitive level and try to increase profits with prepaid maintenance, insurance, data collection and other "subscription" services. In VW's case, this appears to be an act of desperation. Consumers don't have to "subscribe" to this sort of gamesmanship. There are alternatives --- as evidenced by VW earnings --- down almost 40% over the past year.
- JFingleton 1y ago
  I never trusted VW after the emissions scandal : https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn5r9rgg6yno https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn5r9rgg6yno Now I trust them even less, if that's even possible .
  - mk89 1y ago
    The emission scandal is something that VW paid while literally everyone else didn't - they got caught because they installed cheating software and deinstalled it after the test lab, while the others did pretty much the same in the same software which was more sophisticated, as it could somehow recognize the car wasn't being driven in real use cases, which reduced the emissions, to drastically increase once it was driven outside. So yeah, Ford, Nissan, etc., also did their cheating, but due to some loopholes they are all good :)
    - jqpabc123 1y ago
      So yeah, Ford, Nissan, etc., also did their cheating, but due to some loopholes they are all good :) Just provide your proof of this to one of the millions of greedy lawyers out there and you can easily become rich.
      - netsharc 1y ago
        I guess grandfather isn't that accurate: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltaylor/2021/07/08/germanys-biggest-automakers-fined-875-million-for-emissions-collusion/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltaylor/2021/07/08/german... https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/10/nissan_admits_falsifying_emission_data/ https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/10/nissan_admits_falsify... The difference is, some people say "VW, never again!", meanwhile they don't notice that all car manufacturers are probably guilty. There is an old news article that said UK, French and German authorities argued to keep lax emissions testing (e.g. "they should be done while the car is going downhill!"), no doubt due to their car industry lobbyists, but since search engines suck now I can't find it anymore
Hilift 1y ago
The US has guaranteed this will become the norm with increased auto tariffs. An auto manufacturer can produce a car with significantly lower value for import to another country, and "features and services" can be enabled later for a fee.
- slt2021 1y ago
  This is called transfer pricing. VW can make cars in the US, but barely make any profit, thus minimizing taxes paid to the US. The subscription payments however can flow freely to the Switzerland directly, where royalty payments are taxed at the lowest possible rate. This is how pharma works: pharma entities in the US dont make any profit, because they send royalty to the IP holder entity in Switzerland, where these royalty payments are taxes at the lowest rate possible and profits are sheltered that way from the US and EU taxation https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/deadly-prices-pharma-firms-stash-profits-in-europes-tax-havens-as-patients-struggle-with-drug-prices https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/deadly-prices-pharma...
  - m_mueller 1y ago
    Why would it flow to Switzerland? I believe VW headquarters are still in Germany.
    - ExoticPearTree 1y ago
      Hypotethetically speaking, there could be a design office in Switzerland for these features that charges a crazy amount in IP rights for every car sold by VW anywhere in the world.
  - simonh 1y ago
    This is also how US companies operate in Europe, e.g. Starbucks in Europe paying enormous royalty fees to the US for the name.
    - ciupicri 1y ago
      Though Starbucks is a francise, so it's expected.
kkfx 1y ago
Another automaker looking to takes it's own life quickly...
slt2021 1y ago
Great feature, this creates incentive among car enthusiasts to delve into IoT/embedded to hack these type of systems and unlock these subscriptions without paying. Car hacking will be normalized even more
- mdp2021 1y ago
  > Car hacking will be normalized even more We should be concerned of the increased possibility of malicious third-party hacking of other people's property. And, I should not hack into my desk to open my drawers.
jug 1y ago
I’m always disappointed in journalism like this when they don’t ask the obvious questions, like in this case where the added cost for VW lies to not offer it part of the vehicle.
reactordev 1y ago
If this (along with Tesla Acceleration boost) is the future of automobiles, count me out. I'd rather build an electric go kart with acrylic body panels.
jmpman 1y ago
I already have the option to pay for more HP on my Tesla model 3. Yes it’s not a subscription, but the capability already exists. It’s a software unlock. I’d prefer if I had the option to pay my the month. My wife already thinks the Model 3 accelerates too fast, but I’d want to try it for a month. No way is she going to support $2k, but she won’t notice $100 for a month.
reorder9695 1y ago
Seriously people selling a product at a fair price and that being that is a centuries old thing, why does everything need to be a subscription now just because it's possible?
- goobert 1y ago
  Because a project manager somewhere can make a metric go up and get a promotion by doing it
  - gloomyday 1y ago
    Because some assholes manage to convince everybody that being only motivated by money benefits everyone.
- t0bia_s 1y ago
  Because consumers willing to pay anyway.
- mk89 1y ago
  I wouldn't mind boosting my car when we need to go for a road trip and bring it back to a cheaper/smaller engine for everyday drive. Of course, if you have a car 2.0+cc and 150HPs why would you care. But the opposite can be useful.
  - margalabargala 1y ago
    That is fine. Your car has the ability to do that, great. Why should you have to pay money each time you want to move that slider?
- _2d30 1y ago
  There is a lifetime “subscription” option which is a lump sum payment and stays with the car even after being sold. Still something distasteful about it but not quite as vampiric
  - 1y ago
ZiiS 1y ago
Whilst I hate subscriptions, I am not imediatly offended by a £650 reduction in the cost of a car to lock out the last 10% of power that I would expect to have a disproportionate cost to the warrenty.
t_tsonev 1y ago
This seems to be an UK thing, possibly to keep the sticker price below the 40k GBP tax limit. The option for a lifetime purchase supports this. So it's an extra that you can try with a subscription and buy once, if desired. Seems fair to me.
Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
The really offensive part of this kind of thing is that you already paid for it. Like if you wanted to buy a regular car and you could get the engine with turbo then those are two different cars. The latter costing more because it has more/better stuff in it. This is all fine and good. In this case, all the cars have turbo and you pay to have it turned on or not. The cost of the turbo is in the cost of the normal car because the company would not sell it at a loss. You already paid for it, but aren't allow to use it. So you are driving around with this perfectly good and usable turbo that you paid for and can't use unless you paid some extra extortion money. This is abusive, wasteful, and should be illegal in my opinion. You should only be charged extra if it is in fact extra. Not something that is already there and withheld.
- mk89 1y ago
  As I said in other comments, this is already happening since years (and I mentioned Ford, but literally everyone else does it). Car manufacturers already give you the same powerful engine that you can't afford/don't want to buy and "shrink" it with SW. If you jailbreak it, you lose the warranty and bye bye insurance. You should not think that you're paying more for getting less. You should think that finally you can now enable more in your engine if you want to. Until today, you couldn't. You just had to know that your car is more powerful than the papers say and live with that.
  - AshamedCaptain 1y ago
    That is not true, and even TFA points at why that can't be true: to your insurance, to vehicle taxes, etc. you declare the power _of the installed engine_, not of whatever software interlocks you, your tax advisor, or the manufacturer have decided to install on it. TFA already says the car is registered at the maximum power level regardless of the actual software cap. So you are _quite literally_ paying for it, at least in terms of increased insurance and taxes.
    - tgaj 1y ago
      It is true, the performance of the engine depends on the version of the software - manufacturer declares that this engine with this software can achieve this maximum performance and the software can't be legally nad officially tuned or changed. Btw in my country tax depends on engine displacement so it doesn't really change anything.
more_corn 1y ago
Don’t ever buy a car from a company that locks features behind a subscription. That’s how they turn us all into techno future peasants.
billfor 1y ago
No different than Tesla track/performance mode which is also a software switch.
- josephcsible 1y ago
  Tesla performance trims are physically different, and the Track Mode switch they have can be freely turned on and off at will, so that's not equivalent to what Volkswagen is doing here.
  - eurleif 1y ago
    Tesla sells a $2000 Acceleration Boost package for certain non-Performance trims, which increases performance purely by toggling a software switch. You can buy it like DLC from the Tesla app. Also, Track Mode isn't available outside of the Performance trim, despite presumably being pure software. Elon has even talked about making it part of the Acceleration Boost package, though I don't think that has materialized yet: https://www.notateslaapp.com/software-updates/upcoming-features/id/707/tesla-track-mode-coming-to-non-performance-models https://www.notateslaapp.com/software-updates/upcoming-featu...
  - abetancort 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - tomhow 1y ago
      We've banned this account for continually posting unsubstantive, abusive comments and ignoring our requests to stop.
    - josephcsible 1y ago
      Which part of my post are you disagreeing with?
lurk2 1y ago
BMW tried doing the same thing two years ago with heated seats.
buyucu 1y ago
I have one rule I follow very strictly: I don't subscribe. If you have something to sell, I can buy it. But I won't pay for subscriptions.
charliebwrites 1y ago
If it’s behind a software lock, then a resourceful cracker can find a way to get around it Welcome to the era of jailbreaking cars
- aemoron 1y ago
  After which VW will deny any warranty claims or won't do any repairs. Or even worse, brick the car remotely. It will be akin to unlocking bootloaders on phones or Nintendo bricking consoles.
lentil_soup 1y ago
What's going on with so many people defending this as if it's actually better for the consumer? It's not, it's enshittification of the car industry, it's wanting to extract more money from you even after you already bought the car. Doesn't matter that other companies do similar, it sucks and it's worse for everyone because you lose control over the damn car. The argument that you'd save money because you'd get a discount by not unlocking the extra power makes no sense, just buy a cheaper less powerful car
- rich_sasha 1y ago
  The suggestion of your post is that it's a heinous ripoff. I don't like it, and would find it annoying as a car owner, but I don't think it's quite that bad. It does make it, to me, a bad product. Maybe an analogy is thus: I find often sports kit that is black or otherwise drab coloured is cheaper. I find this annoying, as I like my kit to be colorful - and I feel like I'm being made to pay extra for color pigment, which surely cost at most pennies more per item. On the flip side, if I go for the black item, it's kind of subsidised by the color-buyers (the comparator is one where black and colorful items cost the same average amount). The fact that the hardware here is identical but software isn't is IMO an implementation detail.
FollowingTheDao 1y ago
This all makes me so glad I still own a 2001 Dodge Grand Caravan that I have been sinking money into for years and just grabbing cheap parts from junk yards. But it is not only automobile DRM locks that keep me away from new cars, the costs of replacing the "modules", like for a headlight, are ridiculous. All this is just pure profit seeking but people keep buying the cars and other devices so it will never stop.
voytec 1y ago
With Netflix you pay for licenses and ongoing costs like bandwidth and maintenance. A better analogy here is having to pay Microsoft for unlocking Windows NT/Server's ability to use more CPUs. Paid-for OS is already capable of it but this ability is "paywalled" due to greed.
yonatan8070 1y ago
I'm curious how this car would react to being offline? Like what if I pay for a month, then disconnect the cellular antenna. Will it just drop its max power after a certain date? What if I'm driving during that cutoff time? The solution this issue is - of course - to not buy a car with a power subscription.
pmontra 1y ago
> Volkswagen says that while selecting the performance upgrade increases net power by 27bhp and the maximum torque from 265Nm to 310Nm, it does not affect range. Energy from thin air or "you won't push that pedal hard enough to use those extra HPs," except maybe a couple of demo runs, "so you're paying a subscription to please your ego but not to go any faster"?
higeorge13 1y ago
I don’t trust vag for anything after the diesel scandal. I prefer any other brand than this.
sowbug 1y ago
People have been buying subscription cars for years. Buy a car on credit. Stop paying the installments, and the car goes away, just like a subscription. The analogy isn't perfect. But the way the money moves, and the effect of not paying, are identical.
uyzstvqs 1y ago
Yeah, I think I'm just going to buy some old Lada from some local Russian or Ukrainian guy. I know that they're not the most reliable cars, but at least anyone can make aftermarket parts for them — and they're easy to repair as well. I might buy an EV someday if someone makes one which: Does not connect to the internet, is user-serviceable, it's possible to create aftermarket parts for without reverse engineering firmware, uses Na-ion batteries, is not ridiculously overpriced, is preferably made in Europe/North America/Japan, and is not extremely ugly like 9/10 cars released in 2025 (VW ID Buzz... eww). I'm not getting anywhere close to this DRM-ridden driving IoT-device crap. Clippy says no.
- sigmoid10 1y ago
  I don't think any western car manufacturer will ever want to deal with the potential liability issues when it comes to having users screw around in a high voltage electric drive system. This is not like a normal 12V car battery that will not even hurt you if you directly touch the poles with your hands. These EV batteries contain more than enough juice to zap you out of existence if you don't have relevant training.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
footlong2 1y ago
[flagged]
jasonsb 1y ago
Coming soon: Get more trunk space for just $10 a month. Unlock more trunk space with our innovative retractable metal bar! Volkswagen, das arschloch.
mizzao 1y ago
I think Volvo already does this with their "Polestar" engine upgrade which is entirely software based and increases horsepower by 15 or so (and torque by a bit more). That costs $1200 retail as a one time fee. Is the main uproar here then just the subscription?
Grimeton 1y ago
Because everybody is fighting over legal/illegal tuning: When you just change your software and you gain 50bhp that DOES NOT make your car faster. The gears still have the same ratio and the maximum speed doesn't change because the engine went up to max rpm at 200bhp and now goes up to max rpm at 250bhp. Even raising the max rpm won't get you anywhere because to go from let's say 6500rpm to 8000rpm requires so much power and modifications that you won't achieve that with software alone. So as long as only the software is changed the maximum operating parameters of the car are NOT changed.
privatelypublic 1y ago
Let me guess: emissions standards don't apply if its a mod, and a subscription counts as a mod.
linotype 1y ago
I wonder if the German government will let them go out of business. The only way they could do something this stupid and petty is if they think they have an incredible backstop.
- mr90210 1y ago
  They shouldn’t, but each bailout should be accompanied by consequences for the execs and partial nationalisation of the company. Companies that big should see the German government as the devil they never want rely on. That’s my view - which I stole from N. N. Taleb - on how to deal with too-big-to-fail companies.
EverydayBalloon 1y ago
[dead]
almostbasic 1y ago
This is absurd. I would never buy a vehicle like that.
clickety_clack 1y ago
What I want is some seats with a roll cage, on a chassis with a power plant connected to wheels that have brakes. I should be able to buy and own these things without weird add ons.
OhMeadhbh 1y ago
Seems they're trying as hard as they can to get rid of their user base.
AugSun 1y ago
These idiots are already losing market share to Chinese cars. Younger generations hesitate buying cars, especially in EU. These "creative sales strategies" will "drive" them to oblivion. No subscription is necessary ...
egorfine 1y ago
I love software subscriptions. Photoshop license was $750 and I had to save for months to purchase one - all in a country where no one ever purchases software. Then Adobe introduced subscription model which made Photoshop available for me at $10/m. So yeah, I'm all in on subscriptions. Having said that, I feel like I will never ever give a single cent for a purely hardware switch subscription. This doesn't look fair from any perspective.

186 points by t0bia_s 1y ago

Do they realise that their intentions for this company are officially now worse than those under the oversight of Adolf Hitler

m101 1y ago

I wonder if part of this is increased warranty claim expectations

rvz 1y ago

Now you are seeing the great electric car scam - Selling you an under-powered electric car and to increase its power you must pay for a subscription to unlock it's full power capabilities. The best part is, many won't care (when they should). But these days, it is okay to get scammed isn't it? BMW tried selling a subscription on heated seats, but that failed. [0], So lets see how long this will last. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421730

mdp2021 1y ago
> The best part is, many won't care (when they should). This is generally valid for current societies, not just specifically. Conformism has infiltrated economics, so now the supply-demand mechanism is broken: the demand agents are not "informed and rational", as classical theory wanted, so the supply is degraded - spawning "shrinkflation" and "viliflation".
tjwebbnorfolk 1y ago
Who are you to tell other people what they should care about? Each person can decide for themselves what is important, and what is not. Minding one's own business is an underrated virtue.
- cindyllm 1y ago
  [dead]
_aavaa_ 1y ago
> Now you are seeing the great electric car scam Keep your anti-EV hatred in check for a second and note that nothing in here is EV only. They could just as well do this with a gasoline car, that engine is also electronically controlled.
- lodovic 1y ago
  But you can replace the ECU in a gasoline powered car, or the entire engine if you want. You may have to recode some of the parts such as the headlights and the airbags. Often you can use parts from other brands. But replacing anything in an EV is a nightmare: all the parts, motor management, battery management, charging controller are tightly integrated, signed, coded to the car etc.
  - _aavaa_ 1y ago
    But that’s not because the car is an EV, that’s because the manufacturer is greedy. The door handles, infotainment, tire pressure gauges, gas cap, etc. all could have a digital locks on them to bless them with DMCA protection.
    - lodovic 1y ago
      Fair enough, but it seems to be more prevalent with EVs because electric power is a given in such a car, where a diesel or gasoline car usually has fallbacks for most electric systems except the lights and the dashboard, and the alternator can keep the engine running if the battery suddenly dies.
      - _aavaa_ 1y ago
        I absolutely agree. I think the only reason they don’t do it for all gasoline cars is because of the cost. If everything is done in software for the EV you have to write that software anyway. Might as well write it to pull more money from your customer. This will require legislative changes to stop, right to repair laws (looking at you John Deere) are a good first step.
abcd_f 1y ago
BMW still sells a subscription to advanced headlight functions, live traffic info in their navigation and few other things. It's just now a packaged deal and they also opt you in by default into a three month trial. The car is also all but unusable without an online account, so there's that. Regrettably, despite of all the brouhaha with the heated seats, all this b/s never really went away.
- rkomorn 1y ago
  At least the heated seats are "free"! [0] (commented with the utmost sarcasm) 0- https://www.thedrive.com/news/bmw-is-giving-up-on-heated-seat-subscriptions-because-people-hated-them https://www.thedrive.com/news/bmw-is-giving-up-on-heated-sea...
- mdp2021 1y ago
  > The car is also all but unusable without an online account Please explain. What would make it almost unusable?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

dv_dt 1y ago

"As the car is registered at 228bhp from the factory, owners won’t need to inform their insurance company, either way." So does this imply that if insurance companies charge higher rates for higher hp, that non subscribers incur higher costs for a feature that they don't get the benefit of?

raphinou 1y ago
This is how I understand it. Which might be the reason why consumers could react against this.
giarc 1y ago
The base is 201 and with the subscription it goes to 228. I doubt an insurance company would change premium for that increase, but I'm also not an insurance rep.
- dv_dt 1y ago
  The last thing I want from a car purchase is subscription nonsense that also brings extra worry or work to make sure the car doesn't cross some annoyance policy threshold in insurance or operating registration etc. I think I'd turn around and walk away from a purchase if I discover the car has subscriptions built into the fundamental car operation.
pmontra 1y ago
Worse than that. My country's car ownership tax is based on the kW of the engine.

smitty1e 1y ago

If capitalism were a thing, could someone market a newly made chip-free vehicle?

amelius 1y ago
Capitalism does not necessarily act in the interest of consumers, if that is what you were thinking.
- tjwebbnorfolk 1y ago
  If no one buys this car, making more of them will lose money until they stop. If consumers buy the car, then it will live on. In other words, CONSUMERS do not necessarily act in the interest of consumers.
  - mdp2021 1y ago
    > consumers do not necessarily act in the interest of consumers That's what I am saying with "broken market, broken supply-demand system, non-rational and non-informed economic agents". Bad products that sell are a reality since a long time.
    - tjwebbnorfolk 1y ago
      Broken for whom? "Bad" according to whom? What would your goal be, then? Only "good" products are able to be sold -- according to whom will this definition of "good" be decided? I'm mainly playing devil's advocate here, but my point is that bringing value judgement into other people's decisions is not something I would regard as rational. People have their own reasons for doing things that I don't need to understand.
      - mdp2021 1y ago
        > whom? Rational agents. That quality is an abater of relativism. > What would your goal be, then Livability. That requires working systems, so that choice is still possible. In the current situation, there is in many vast territories no choice, in many areas (not just cars), and greatly suboptimal, very thin livability.

user3939382 1y ago

Thanks for the crystal clear signaling on what type of people are running the company so I can be sure to never consider buying a VW.

leobg 1y ago
“I bought this car before Adolf became problematic.”
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Funny, but not fair.
IAmGraydon 1y ago
[flagged]
- rvz 1y ago
  > I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that a company founded by Adolf Hitler behaves in this way. A leopard never and cannot change its spots.
- abcd_f 1y ago
  > On top of all that, they’re awful cars. They certainly aren't.
  - protimewaster 1y ago
    It depends on what you want in a car. If you're expecting reliability like VW was known for years ago, you may well feel like the newer ones are awful.
- slt2021 1y ago
  >I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that a company founded by Adolf Hitler behaves in this way. this is pure anti-German hatred and bigotry, Uncle H has been dead for many decades, and there is nothing to suggest that the current VW is still somehow connected to the Third Reich, while ignoring all the alt-right/nazi undercurrent brewing inside the United States among the so called "foundational americans"

simmerup 1y ago

Guess I won't be getting a 2all when it comes out after all.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

CoastalCoder 1y ago

I recently bought a Honda, and yesterday they emailed me a survey focused on what subscription services I'd find useful at various price points. Unfortunately the survey gave me no opportunity to explain how much the basic concept of them continuing to be up my business post-purchase pisses me off.

stego-tech 1y ago
Cars already have a recurring “subscription” in the form of fuel, maintenance, repairs, insurance, and cleaning. Unless more companies are pulling a Volvo and offering a comprehensive maintenance subscription that covers all the above via a monthly fee, then they can collectively FOAD. EDIT: I am keenly aware how cars work and don’t need eSplaining on them. I articulate my point better in a comment deeper in the thread. Apologies for my snark and vitriol over unnecessary and exploitative subscriptions coming off as somehow condoning VW-formulated petrol or Tesla-approved electricity.
- Zigurd 1y ago
  That's part of the motivation for them to come up with cockamamie subscription ideas: the car companies and the dealers rely on maintenance revenue, which is significantly reduced in EVs. Tire shops are the only ones happy about EVs.
- afarah1 1y ago
  Poor comparison, none of these are attached to the manufacturer, you can and usually do get these services from other companies of your choice. You don't need VW-Gas(TM) from VW-Station(TM) in your tank for the car to run.
  - ndriscoll 1y ago
    Also you can do maintenance/repairs yourself for the cost of parts, self-insure, and, obviously, clean it yourself. For EVs and hybrids, you can provide the fuel yourself (solar). The manufacturer intentionally making things like repairs difficult would be the only reason you "need" to pay for regular services, though that also doesn't really fit into a subscription model either since it's going to depend on how much you've driven.

benji-york 1y ago

This makes sense to me. (Not that I would personally ever buy a car with that mechanism baked in.) They could either make two models (incurring the costs associated with having two different SKUs) and let people pay more for the one with more power or make one with intrinsically more power and let the people that don't want it pay less with it nerfed. I would have thought that people (like me) that have spent our lives making a zero marginal cost product would understand the economics at work here.

_aavaa_ 1y ago
People do understand the economics: tomorrow the subscription costs 3x more, or they chose to stop supporting it when a new model comes out, or etc. The analogy to software is great though; nobody paying for software owns it, or even has the option to own it. This is not fully the case for physical things, and people are rightly angry about “owning” things without owning them.
- slt2021 1y ago
  just multiply the monthly payment by 12*6 (avg time to own a car) and imagine giving the full amount upfront to the dealer for the full horsepower. I dont understand why people balk at car subscription for some feature, but perfectly fine with leasing a car => which is basically a car subscription driven to its logical end? does it matter if you have to pay $700 to your bank for lease and separately $20 to VW for some feature? would it matter if you had to pay $720 to your bank instead for full features???
  - degamad 1y ago
    The difference is that the bank can't suddenly decide that you owe them $800 each month instead of $720, but VW can decide that your subscription costs $100 instead of $20.
    - ceejayoz 1y ago
      And at some point the bank says “You’re done! Loan paid in full!”

jmclnx 1y ago

Well VW just made my list of cars to avoid. Boy, that list is getting huge. I will probably be in my 2007 toyota for a long time to come.

DougN7 1y ago
Yeah, it breaks my heart because I love my 2012 Passat, but no way will I buy a car with a subscription like this, or for heated seats. Idiots.
jillesvangurp 1y ago
So, you are not the type that buys new cars. Nothing wrong with that of course. I don't own a car at all. And I don't see the logic of spending non trivial amounts of my income on a new one. But why should VW concern themselves with what you or I want considering that we are apparently not in the market anyway? Especially not for a high performance/high status type car. Because, no offense, your choice of car marks you as "definitely does not care about that sort of thing". And good for you. I might at some point buy a second hand one. And VW has a lot of pretty decent EVs in the market that are trickling down to the second hand market at increasingly more attractive prices. Probably not my dream second hand car (I think they are kind of ugly) but they aren't horrible vehicles. I don't think I'll ever want to hand over cash to the oil industry voluntarily. I have driven rental petrol and diesel cars in the past. But it just feels a bit stupid to fill up a car for 50+ euros. A few years worth of money saved on not buying fuel easily adds up to a pretty nice budget for a modest second hand EV these days.
- mathiaspoint 1y ago
  If Toyota made an EV version of my 2007 highlander I'd buy it.

jaffa2 1y ago

Tesla already does this. Why no kickback there?

kotaKat 1y ago
The stranger thing here is it's... a whole 27 brake horsepower. I don't even think there's a different part at play at all here, they just decided to figure out how to play with their throttle mappings and stuff and wanted to scrape an extra couple bucks out of the bottom of the barrel. At least Tesla was using some sense of the "ship one battery and restrict it in software" for an actual tangible hardware good versus some software shenanigans in the VW camp (again).
- rikafurude21 1y ago
  In both cases hardware is throttled by software. Theres is no difference, its all software shenanigans.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
This is a reason also not to purchase a Tesla. Tesla's software subscriptions additionally have the problem that they don't work as advertised.
plqbfbv 1y ago
I guess I'm way more comfortable with a one-time purchase unlock (kind of SW "license" upgrade) rather than a subscription for hardware that I have 100% of the time. Example: Acceleration Boost is a 2k one-time upgrade. Once you purchase it, you get it forever. EAP and FSD are the same: pay once, get for life. Those who purchased FSD before HW3 also got/get included driving computer upgrade. Of course this was done from Tesla to avoid backslash, but at the same time it was done without back-and-forth: they understood the situation and simply rolled it out. FSD subscription makes sense because you purchase more "features", maybe for a limited time, for a much lower price. If your daily driving is 20mi, you probably are fine with AP, and won't justify spending 4k on EAP, 8k on FSD or 100$/mo on the FSD subscription. But maybe if you trip for holidays for a few weeks, you can purchase the subscription for a couple months. If you're daily driving 50+mi, or drive in very busy cities, I can see the 8k purchase offering some value if you want to keep the car more than 6 years (8k/100$ - 80 months, ~6.5y), and you can still try it out via subscription beforehand and decide to not pay the full price upfront. Basically Tesla's model is mostly one-time license fee, except for FSD subscription to ease the access to software-powered features. What VW is doing is selling you hardware, and then asking you to pay every month if you want to unlock its full potential. Honestly this should be illegal, a one-time fee should be the only way allowed. And I recognize they have the option of a one-time fee, but of course they're banking on people opting for the low-cost option and forget they have it active. EDIT: this is also the test bed for more subscription stuff, they want to see how people react to it. If there's no big backslash, expect more subscriptions to come.

DrNosferatu 1y ago

Unless they undercut the Chinese (same class) car prices in Europe, people will run from such products like the plague. And we all know which way this is gonna go ;) PS: Morally worse, only privatized water that used to be public free access, Nestlé-style. These people sure know how to win the public opinion.

buran77 1y ago

I'm sure that by having fewer parts in the logistics chain they can build a car cheaper. They then define models via software almost for free. And that would be great if the saving was passed to the consumer. Instead every saving is definitely captured by the manufacturer and the consumer gets to buy a car that definitely does everything but "computer says no". But the situation is objectively worse than today because it doesn't just involve a "software defined car" but a "subscription defined car". Today you buy your specs and own them, you're not at the manufacturer's mercy on the monthly price. I'm afraid it's just a matter of time until everyone does it. It only takes one company to go first and take the heat to make it mainstream, the rest will follow.

spicyusername 1y ago
And then all we'll need is a federal government that's friendly to free trade and all of the domestic auto manufacturers will go out of business because they can't compete. It might not happen this year, it might not happen this decade, but it will eventually happen. Organizing your business in such an anti-consumer way is a huge liability, but executives who will have extracted all the wealth anyways will probably be long gone by then.
- ExoticPearTree 1y ago
  Or cry foul when the chinese EV manufacturares give you more bang for the buck because they don’t play silly games like this.
hinkley 1y ago
So apparently we will download a car.
- mdp2021 1y ago
  And (again) possess it but not own it.
  - hinkley 1y ago

stego-tech 1y ago

There’s already a growing market for companies that just sell you a quality good without ongoing service fees or data harvesting/surveillance; cars only recently really joined that list, which frustrates me. On the one hand, I appreciate the potential such data collection allows: proactive maintenance reminders, repair scheduling, TCO reductions, and even factory-line improvements by identifying flaws before they turn into class actions. On the other hand, none of that is what they’re actually doing. It’s all about juicing revenue instead of reducing costs, and treating paying customers like loot pinatas to be clubbed repeatedly for dosh. I’d like to believe there’s a market for smaller, simpler, EV-based “retro-inspired” cars that aren’t jam-packed with modems and sensors to phone home. Maybe someday I’ll be proven right.

Zigurd 1y ago
Adobe might be an example of how optimizing revenue can eventually bite you in the ass. Adobe is a profit machine. They have the best (in terms of making money) subscription model in the technology business. But the stock price indicates that investors don't think they can keep it up. VW is still in the FA stage of this revenue experiment.
- FredPret 1y ago
  Adobe stock has been heading up and down but there can be many reasons for that. Revenue and profit has gone absolutely nuts since subscriptions started and is clearly the way forward for them. This model makes a lot of sense for software but none for hardware. Adobe customers are indeed pissed off but they should fix that with lower prices and better terms, not going back to the old model that had them losing money.
  - Zigurd 1y ago
    After I wrote that, I almost immediately regretted that I hadn't used price earnings ratio rather than stock price as the indication that investors don't have confidence that Adobe can continue to extract rent, even though I wouldn't bet against Adobe, I wouldn't short them. Kind of remarkable how low the price earnings ratio is compared to magnificent seven stocks. Only Google gets stuck with a similarly pedestrian price earnings ratio.

jqpabc123 1y ago

Forget Netflix Better idea --- forget Volkswagen. This is just one example of anti-consumer antics bordering on extortion that have been building for a very long time. The overall idea is simple --- reduce the sticker price to a competitive level and try to increase profits with prepaid maintenance, insurance, data collection and other "subscription" services. In VW's case, this appears to be an act of desperation. Consumers don't have to "subscribe" to this sort of gamesmanship. There are alternatives --- as evidenced by VW earnings --- down almost 40% over the past year.

JFingleton 1y ago
I never trusted VW after the emissions scandal : https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn5r9rgg6yno https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn5r9rgg6yno Now I trust them even less, if that's even possible .
- mk89 1y ago
  The emission scandal is something that VW paid while literally everyone else didn't - they got caught because they installed cheating software and deinstalled it after the test lab, while the others did pretty much the same in the same software which was more sophisticated, as it could somehow recognize the car wasn't being driven in real use cases, which reduced the emissions, to drastically increase once it was driven outside. So yeah, Ford, Nissan, etc., also did their cheating, but due to some loopholes they are all good :)
  - jqpabc123 1y ago
    So yeah, Ford, Nissan, etc., also did their cheating, but due to some loopholes they are all good :) Just provide your proof of this to one of the millions of greedy lawyers out there and you can easily become rich.
    - netsharc 1y ago
      I guess grandfather isn't that accurate: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltaylor/2021/07/08/germanys-biggest-automakers-fined-875-million-for-emissions-collusion/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltaylor/2021/07/08/german... https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/10/nissan_admits_falsifying_emission_data/ https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/10/nissan_admits_falsify... The difference is, some people say "VW, never again!", meanwhile they don't notice that all car manufacturers are probably guilty. There is an old news article that said UK, French and German authorities argued to keep lax emissions testing (e.g. "they should be done while the car is going downhill!"), no doubt due to their car industry lobbyists, but since search engines suck now I can't find it anymore

Hilift 1y ago

The US has guaranteed this will become the norm with increased auto tariffs. An auto manufacturer can produce a car with significantly lower value for import to another country, and "features and services" can be enabled later for a fee.

slt2021 1y ago
This is called transfer pricing. VW can make cars in the US, but barely make any profit, thus minimizing taxes paid to the US. The subscription payments however can flow freely to the Switzerland directly, where royalty payments are taxed at the lowest possible rate. This is how pharma works: pharma entities in the US dont make any profit, because they send royalty to the IP holder entity in Switzerland, where these royalty payments are taxes at the lowest rate possible and profits are sheltered that way from the US and EU taxation https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/deadly-prices-pharma-firms-stash-profits-in-europes-tax-havens-as-patients-struggle-with-drug-prices https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/deadly-prices-pharma...
- m_mueller 1y ago
  Why would it flow to Switzerland? I believe VW headquarters are still in Germany.
  - ExoticPearTree 1y ago
    Hypotethetically speaking, there could be a design office in Switzerland for these features that charges a crazy amount in IP rights for every car sold by VW anywhere in the world.
- simonh 1y ago
  This is also how US companies operate in Europe, e.g. Starbucks in Europe paying enormous royalty fees to the US for the name.
  - ciupicri 1y ago
    Though Starbucks is a francise, so it's expected.

kkfx 1y ago

Another automaker looking to takes it's own life quickly...

slt2021 1y ago

Great feature, this creates incentive among car enthusiasts to delve into IoT/embedded to hack these type of systems and unlock these subscriptions without paying. Car hacking will be normalized even more

mdp2021 1y ago
> Car hacking will be normalized even more We should be concerned of the increased possibility of malicious third-party hacking of other people's property. And, I should not hack into my desk to open my drawers.

jug 1y ago

I’m always disappointed in journalism like this when they don’t ask the obvious questions, like in this case where the added cost for VW lies to not offer it part of the vehicle.

reactordev 1y ago

If this (along with Tesla Acceleration boost) is the future of automobiles, count me out. I'd rather build an electric go kart with acrylic body panels.

jmpman 1y ago

I already have the option to pay for more HP on my Tesla model 3. Yes it’s not a subscription, but the capability already exists. It’s a software unlock. I’d prefer if I had the option to pay my the month. My wife already thinks the Model 3 accelerates too fast, but I’d want to try it for a month. No way is she going to support $2k, but she won’t notice $100 for a month.

reorder9695 1y ago

Seriously people selling a product at a fair price and that being that is a centuries old thing, why does everything need to be a subscription now just because it's possible?

goobert 1y ago
Because a project manager somewhere can make a metric go up and get a promotion by doing it
- gloomyday 1y ago
  Because some assholes manage to convince everybody that being only motivated by money benefits everyone.
t0bia_s 1y ago
Because consumers willing to pay anyway.
mk89 1y ago
I wouldn't mind boosting my car when we need to go for a road trip and bring it back to a cheaper/smaller engine for everyday drive. Of course, if you have a car 2.0+cc and 150HPs why would you care. But the opposite can be useful.
- margalabargala 1y ago
  That is fine. Your car has the ability to do that, great. Why should you have to pay money each time you want to move that slider?
_2d30 1y ago
There is a lifetime “subscription” option which is a lump sum payment and stays with the car even after being sold. Still something distasteful about it but not quite as vampiric
- 1y ago

ZiiS 1y ago

Whilst I hate subscriptions, I am not imediatly offended by a £650 reduction in the cost of a car to lock out the last 10% of power that I would expect to have a disproportionate cost to the warrenty.

t_tsonev 1y ago

This seems to be an UK thing, possibly to keep the sticker price below the 40k GBP tax limit. The option for a lifetime purchase supports this. So it's an extra that you can try with a subscription and buy once, if desired. Seems fair to me.

Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago

The really offensive part of this kind of thing is that you already paid for it. Like if you wanted to buy a regular car and you could get the engine with turbo then those are two different cars. The latter costing more because it has more/better stuff in it. This is all fine and good. In this case, all the cars have turbo and you pay to have it turned on or not. The cost of the turbo is in the cost of the normal car because the company would not sell it at a loss. You already paid for it, but aren't allow to use it. So you are driving around with this perfectly good and usable turbo that you paid for and can't use unless you paid some extra extortion money. This is abusive, wasteful, and should be illegal in my opinion. You should only be charged extra if it is in fact extra. Not something that is already there and withheld.

mk89 1y ago
As I said in other comments, this is already happening since years (and I mentioned Ford, but literally everyone else does it). Car manufacturers already give you the same powerful engine that you can't afford/don't want to buy and "shrink" it with SW. If you jailbreak it, you lose the warranty and bye bye insurance. You should not think that you're paying more for getting less. You should think that finally you can now enable more in your engine if you want to. Until today, you couldn't. You just had to know that your car is more powerful than the papers say and live with that.
- AshamedCaptain 1y ago
  That is not true, and even TFA points at why that can't be true: to your insurance, to vehicle taxes, etc. you declare the power _of the installed engine_, not of whatever software interlocks you, your tax advisor, or the manufacturer have decided to install on it. TFA already says the car is registered at the maximum power level regardless of the actual software cap. So you are _quite literally_ paying for it, at least in terms of increased insurance and taxes.
  - tgaj 1y ago
    It is true, the performance of the engine depends on the version of the software - manufacturer declares that this engine with this software can achieve this maximum performance and the software can't be legally nad officially tuned or changed. Btw in my country tax depends on engine displacement so it doesn't really change anything.

more_corn 1y ago

Don’t ever buy a car from a company that locks features behind a subscription. That’s how they turn us all into techno future peasants.

billfor 1y ago

No different than Tesla track/performance mode which is also a software switch.

josephcsible 1y ago
Tesla performance trims are physically different, and the Track Mode switch they have can be freely turned on and off at will, so that's not equivalent to what Volkswagen is doing here.
- eurleif 1y ago
  Tesla sells a $2000 Acceleration Boost package for certain non-Performance trims, which increases performance purely by toggling a software switch. You can buy it like DLC from the Tesla app. Also, Track Mode isn't available outside of the Performance trim, despite presumably being pure software. Elon has even talked about making it part of the Acceleration Boost package, though I don't think that has materialized yet: https://www.notateslaapp.com/software-updates/upcoming-features/id/707/tesla-track-mode-coming-to-non-performance-models https://www.notateslaapp.com/software-updates/upcoming-featu...
- abetancort 1y ago
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  - tomhow 1y ago
    We've banned this account for continually posting unsubstantive, abusive comments and ignoring our requests to stop.
  - josephcsible 1y ago
    Which part of my post are you disagreeing with?

lurk2 1y ago

BMW tried doing the same thing two years ago with heated seats.

buyucu 1y ago

I have one rule I follow very strictly: I don't subscribe. If you have something to sell, I can buy it. But I won't pay for subscriptions.

charliebwrites 1y ago

If it’s behind a software lock, then a resourceful cracker can find a way to get around it Welcome to the era of jailbreaking cars

aemoron 1y ago
After which VW will deny any warranty claims or won't do any repairs. Or even worse, brick the car remotely. It will be akin to unlocking bootloaders on phones or Nintendo bricking consoles.

lentil_soup 1y ago

What's going on with so many people defending this as if it's actually better for the consumer? It's not, it's enshittification of the car industry, it's wanting to extract more money from you even after you already bought the car. Doesn't matter that other companies do similar, it sucks and it's worse for everyone because you lose control over the damn car. The argument that you'd save money because you'd get a discount by not unlocking the extra power makes no sense, just buy a cheaper less powerful car

rich_sasha 1y ago
The suggestion of your post is that it's a heinous ripoff. I don't like it, and would find it annoying as a car owner, but I don't think it's quite that bad. It does make it, to me, a bad product. Maybe an analogy is thus: I find often sports kit that is black or otherwise drab coloured is cheaper. I find this annoying, as I like my kit to be colorful - and I feel like I'm being made to pay extra for color pigment, which surely cost at most pennies more per item. On the flip side, if I go for the black item, it's kind of subsidised by the color-buyers (the comparator is one where black and colorful items cost the same average amount). The fact that the hardware here is identical but software isn't is IMO an implementation detail.

FollowingTheDao 1y ago

This all makes me so glad I still own a 2001 Dodge Grand Caravan that I have been sinking money into for years and just grabbing cheap parts from junk yards. But it is not only automobile DRM locks that keep me away from new cars, the costs of replacing the "modules", like for a headlight, are ridiculous. All this is just pure profit seeking but people keep buying the cars and other devices so it will never stop.

voytec 1y ago

With Netflix you pay for licenses and ongoing costs like bandwidth and maintenance. A better analogy here is having to pay Microsoft for unlocking Windows NT/Server's ability to use more CPUs. Paid-for OS is already capable of it but this ability is "paywalled" due to greed.

yonatan8070 1y ago

I'm curious how this car would react to being offline? Like what if I pay for a month, then disconnect the cellular antenna. Will it just drop its max power after a certain date? What if I'm driving during that cutoff time? The solution this issue is - of course - to not buy a car with a power subscription.

pmontra 1y ago

> Volkswagen says that while selecting the performance upgrade increases net power by 27bhp and the maximum torque from 265Nm to 310Nm, it does not affect range. Energy from thin air or "you won't push that pedal hard enough to use those extra HPs," except maybe a couple of demo runs, "so you're paying a subscription to please your ego but not to go any faster"?

higeorge13 1y ago

I don’t trust vag for anything after the diesel scandal. I prefer any other brand than this.

sowbug 1y ago

People have been buying subscription cars for years. Buy a car on credit. Stop paying the installments, and the car goes away, just like a subscription. The analogy isn't perfect. But the way the money moves, and the effect of not paying, are identical.

uyzstvqs 1y ago

Yeah, I think I'm just going to buy some old Lada from some local Russian or Ukrainian guy. I know that they're not the most reliable cars, but at least anyone can make aftermarket parts for them — and they're easy to repair as well. I might buy an EV someday if someone makes one which: Does not connect to the internet, is user-serviceable, it's possible to create aftermarket parts for without reverse engineering firmware, uses Na-ion batteries, is not ridiculously overpriced, is preferably made in Europe/North America/Japan, and is not extremely ugly like 9/10 cars released in 2025 (VW ID Buzz... eww). I'm not getting anywhere close to this DRM-ridden driving IoT-device crap. Clippy says no.

sigmoid10 1y ago
I don't think any western car manufacturer will ever want to deal with the potential liability issues when it comes to having users screw around in a high voltage electric drive system. This is not like a normal 12V car battery that will not even hurt you if you directly touch the poles with your hands. These EV batteries contain more than enough juice to zap you out of existence if you don't have relevant training.
- deleted 1y ago
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footlong2 1y ago

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jasonsb 1y ago

Coming soon: Get more trunk space for just $10 a month. Unlock more trunk space with our innovative retractable metal bar! Volkswagen, das arschloch.

mizzao 1y ago

I think Volvo already does this with their "Polestar" engine upgrade which is entirely software based and increases horsepower by 15 or so (and torque by a bit more). That costs $1200 retail as a one time fee. Is the main uproar here then just the subscription?

Grimeton 1y ago

Because everybody is fighting over legal/illegal tuning: When you just change your software and you gain 50bhp that DOES NOT make your car faster. The gears still have the same ratio and the maximum speed doesn't change because the engine went up to max rpm at 200bhp and now goes up to max rpm at 250bhp. Even raising the max rpm won't get you anywhere because to go from let's say 6500rpm to 8000rpm requires so much power and modifications that you won't achieve that with software alone. So as long as only the software is changed the maximum operating parameters of the car are NOT changed.

privatelypublic 1y ago

Let me guess: emissions standards don't apply if its a mod, and a subscription counts as a mod.

linotype 1y ago

I wonder if the German government will let them go out of business. The only way they could do something this stupid and petty is if they think they have an incredible backstop.

mr90210 1y ago
They shouldn’t, but each bailout should be accompanied by consequences for the execs and partial nationalisation of the company. Companies that big should see the German government as the devil they never want rely on. That’s my view - which I stole from N. N. Taleb - on how to deal with too-big-to-fail companies.

EverydayBalloon 1y ago

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almostbasic 1y ago

This is absurd. I would never buy a vehicle like that.

clickety_clack 1y ago

What I want is some seats with a roll cage, on a chassis with a power plant connected to wheels that have brakes. I should be able to buy and own these things without weird add ons.

OhMeadhbh 1y ago

Seems they're trying as hard as they can to get rid of their user base.

AugSun 1y ago

These idiots are already losing market share to Chinese cars. Younger generations hesitate buying cars, especially in EU. These "creative sales strategies" will "drive" them to oblivion. No subscription is necessary ...

egorfine 1y ago

I love software subscriptions. Photoshop license was $750 and I had to save for months to purchase one - all in a country where no one ever purchases software. Then Adobe introduced subscription model which made Photoshop available for me at $10/m. So yeah, I'm all in on subscriptions. Having said that, I feel like I will never ever give a single cent for a purely hardware switch subscription. This doesn't look fair from any perspective.