A fool and his money are soon parted. From the same class of vehicles that tried to lock heated seats behind a monthly subscription.
You know what’s nice? Those cars can F right off. I won’t buy one new. And never will buy one used.
Always will be “budget” cars (Corolla, Civic, Versa, etc.) that won’t screw around with this crap because the buyers can’t afford to screw around with it.
TRY to paywall a heated seat in a Civic. I dare Honda. It won’t be more than 10 minutes before someone has it badly wired up like an aftermarket subwoofer.
Even Toyota is doing this now. They locked features like the digital tire pressure gauge behind a paywall on their app.
Isn’t a tire pressure monitoring system legally required on all cars now?
It is, but the minimum requirement is a “low pressure” notification when tire pressure drops past a certain point. So instead of a gauge you’d get a warning light.
I can see the tire pressure of my truck though the app and I don’t pay for any Toyota subscriptions. The only thing I’m aware they lock behind a paywall in the app is remote start, but you can still do that from the key fob for free too.
On the newer vehicles they do also lock the navigation behind a paywall but you can just use CarPlay or android auto for free.
Never EVER would I buy a car from any manufacturer that does this.
You might not have a choice if they all decide to do it. Companies are actually kinda good at that kind of collective actions sometimes.
In my area it would take a whole 5 seconds before people either jenk mod it or otherwise jailbreak it. Ive seen VW vans from the 50s with fucking V8 diesel engines around here, folks dont need the guts just the frame.
We said that when the Oblivion horse armor released. And look where we are now.
At some point basically everyone will do it and marketing will fo the rest.
Oblivion doesn’t cost $50k+ to buy. If these greedy fuckers think they can RENT me parts of a car I already own, they can go fuck themselves.
Neither would I, but the majority of these cars are going into corporate fleets. I’ll have one at the end of the year. I assume corporate isn’t going to pay for the optionals so I’ll be stuck with a crippled car through no choice of my own.
IT in Flanders, Belgium. Company cars are almost a given for white collar jobs and even many blue collar ones here since regular income from work is taxed to high heavens. Companies look for other ways to compensate employees without actually having to raise their base salary. Just recently this shifted to electric-only, so most company fleets now are stopping leases on diesel & gas cars and replacing them with EV’s.
Can you at least unlock it later with experience points or in-game currency?
It’s time to root cars, it looks like.
They won’t do it themselves, they’ll pay for it. People already do it with brand new ICE cars, they get a performance package from a third party.
Also in 10 years, that $150000 Benz will be a $15000 Benz and owned by someone a fair bit younger than the original owner, probably. Much more likely to get the controller flashed for additional power at that point.
I heard of a guy who tuned his already 500 hp Benz to get it over 600 (now he is under arrest in my country for street racing).
They also do this a lot with BMWs, e.g. the 318i and 320i engine is the same, so if you just change/hack some software setting on the 318i, you can get more hp out of the same car.
But these are of course the minority of people, and mostly targeting sport cars, not luxury sedans.
Welcome to the world of digital subscriptions boys. It used to be a PC only thing… not amy more.
Well… Plenty of cars are actually becoming a rideable PC where “ride” is just an option too. This is one of this things where I can’t decide, is it more sad, scary or stupid.
It’s moneeeyy. That’s all there is to it, money. They finally have an easy way to control what you can or can’t do with the things that (at least on paper) you own.
I just knew this was gonna happen… I warned about these things ever since music/movie subscriptions became a thing. You don’t own a copy of what you (allegidly) bought, thus, it’s not yours.
Now, you do own the thing… at least on paper, but you can’t do much with it unless you pay extra cash to the one who sold it to you, so it can… you know, do the things it’s supposed to do. It’s basically extortion, no matter how you slice it. It’s malware, period.
This is one of this things where I can’t decide, is it more sad, scary or stupid.
It’s criminal. Locking up capabilities of hardware you already bought and trying to extract rents for them is literally no different than a mafia protection racket. These car company execs deserve to go go prison for racketeering.
Next, your artificial heart, watch 60sec ads or it will stop ticking in the next 1 hr
