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?
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.
I think it was only free for a limited time when you buy the car, they might have changed it since then though.
Uhm, Toyota does it to a certain extent.
Yup, remote start is only free for a limited time then you have to subscribe. They make great cars but they’re no angels.
Cars and trucks are one of the best examples of how effective things like marketing can be. It’s unreal what people are willing to pay for in order to have a vehicle that fits their self-image.
Never EVER would I buy a car from any manufacturer that does this.
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.
John Deere has entered the chat
All modern problems can be traced back to Ronald Regan and Todd Howard.
not playing AAA games
sadly though micro transactions have dominated
here’s to hoping we have non bullshit car options in the future
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.
What job/country do you work in where you still get a corporate car?
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?
Is money just irl in game currency?
Six points for every pedestrian you hit? Double for cyclists.
You earn XP by using the turn signals so…. no it’s basically impossible to level up by playing
It’s time to root cars, it looks like.
deleted by creator
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.
My sides are in orbit…
We are getting closer to Mitch Hedberg’s vision of each car getting only 3 honks per month
India will have a real problem in a couple of decades… Or they will make their own models with unlimited lifetime honks.
Those new Mercs look fucking hideous too
Everything looks like an early 2000’s Honda now. :(
Honda:
Naw, worse, looks like late 00s Hyundai
I’m glad someone else noticed, modern cars make me vom!
way above my paycheck, the paywall it is, the car also, but who cares… time to stop buying cars, and use the public transport and bikes… better for the environment anyway.
Have people completely forgotten about the fucking plague we just had? I’ll take my own box to drive around in, please.
Cycling, riding scooters, and walking outdoors are still fine, though. And requiring masks while riding transit was fairly effective. We need much stronger enforcement of masking and not riding with symptoms, though, in future pandemics.
Your personal multi-ton box degrades the environment, globally and on the streets it drives through, even if pollutes less by using electricity.
Just don’t upgrade your firmware so you can jailbreak it later.
Or just don’t buy a car that needs to connect to the internet. This is beyond stupid
Virgin car ownership vs chad mass transit
Virgin car ownership
On the contrary: letting manufacturers extract rents for capabilities that the owner already paid for by virtue of having bought the physical device is the opposite of “ownership,” and that’s the problem here!
Using mass transit is great, but it does nothing to stop this attack on our property rights.
Which is all of them. All of them need to be connected, it’s how they operate now. Most of them have decency to not do shit like that, but that might change at any point
Time to pull up my big boy undies and start riding my bike. That sucker ain’t controlled by anyone but me. <middle finger to the car companies, wobbles down the road on a two-wheeler>
I doubt even all new cars require internet connection and there’s a shit ton of older models that don’t either. Definitely not “all of them”
I still own only cars from the '90s and 2000s because of this issue (along with stuff like telemetry spying on you, etc.). However, even if just driving old cars forever works for me, it’s hardly a solution for society in general simply because there aren’t enough old cars for everybody to have one, let alone all the other problems with it.
These companies are trying to destroy our property rights in order to engage in unethical and abusive rentiership. The correct solution is legislative, not just to ignore them and hope they’ll stop!
Yeah, maybe not 100% of them, you are technically correct. For example, some Chinese companies are selling very cheep cars that are basically a reskin of the older cars from 1960th.
1960th.
That made me chuckle.
I gotta put a Faraday cage around my next car if it’s going to try to connect to the internet.
Until a hacker decided to disable the brake while you speeding 100mph
Pay 2 win on a car.
Considering “faster engine” means different tune on the exact same engine nowadays: not much has changed.
Fuck morons who pay this so the corps will continue to do this. They wouldn’t even consider it if people with more money than sense didn’t pay for it. Everything is enshittified until we live in Idiocracy.What percentage of people do you suppose actually think they’re getting more by paying rather than getting less until they pay? I’m sure a large amount of it is people with enough money to not care, but surely some are just uninformed?
IOTs are pushing us towards subscription hell-scape. We must demand dumb, non-connected machines and devices.
deleted by creator
You have to buy special $3000 computer handhelds that plug into the car and let you interface with it completely. Often you can only buy those with a business account direct from the manufacturer.
You cand do a little bit with OBD II using a $10 Bluetooth dongle and free app. But that’s basically limited to reading and clearing codes.
What’s with Toyota’s TechStream? What is all that about?
deleted by creator
Everything is paywalled. I’m leasing a less than 2 years old BMW, and now everything is included (e.g. phone app, carplay, guarantee), but after a while these run out, and you have to pay for even navigation.
This is also why I think it’s not worth to buy these cars, lease/rent it at the most. If you want to own smg, buy a reliable Jap/Korean option - when looking at used cars I’ve seen Mazdas hold their value incredibly (unlike the fancy German cars).
deleted by creator
We’re getting closer to “you wouldn’t download a car” being outdated, if more cars start pushing most of their functionality from behind a paywall.
It’s not something I’m happy to see.
I have never owned or operated a car and this doesn’t really make me want to.
Hello everyone. Cars suck, we need to mostly ditch cars.
Although I enthusiastically agree, that’s a little off-topic to be the takeaway from this particular kind of article.
In this case, the issue to be outraged about is that the corporations are violating our property rights in order to engage in illegal rentiership. As owners, we have the right to modify our own property, including to unlock the full potential of the physical machine, and no amount of DRM or the DMCA anti-circumvention clause should be allowed to change that!
That doesn’t need any kind of new “right to repair” or anything either; it is inherent to the definitions of what “property” and “ownership” are! I mean sure, we should impose requirements for products to be better designed for repairability and have documentation and spare parts available, but lots of people seem to think what Mecedes etc. are doing is currently within their rights, and that’s just crazy talk. These things aren’t legitimate subscriptions; they’re a protection racket! Trying to hold capabilities hostage that the device owner already paid for (by virtue of having bought the physical device) is literally criminal and company executives ought to be going to prison for it.
Anyway, to get back to addessing your comment: even if we do fix the zoning code to make cities walkable (which we definitely should do, by the way) and cars become a niche product that only rural people and folks who have to drive around as part of their job have, it still doesn’t fix this issue because (a) it’s important to protect the rights of owners even of niche products, and even more importantly (b) cars are hardly the only product category that manufacturers are trying to pull this shit in anyway.
TL;DR: stopping the erosion of ownership and fixing car dependency are orthogonal issues, this article is concerned with the former, and your suggestion only addresses the latter.
Hear, hear. This isn’t a case of Mercedes selling an upgrade. It’s more akin to selling the car pre-booted and then demanding a monthly payment to remove it under threat of returning to re-apply it if a payment is missed. It’s absolutely a protection racket. Sure would be a shame if something happened to those fancy features we installed.
The good news is that the companies who will float this first are the ones most likely to do business with politicians, and unfortunately I’m cynical enough to believe that the best way to get regulation in place is to personally inconvenience the decision-makers. I hope that results in action.
If it doesn’t, well, the next step is self-help. If we’re changing the definition of private property, it’s only so long before people begin questioning whether there’s any point in having private property at all.
Damn ok. Yeah I get what you mean.
I don’t think the problem is the companies necessarily though, or the erosion of ownership… The problem is ownership, private property and private production. As long as we’re dependent on private companies making our means of transportation, and as long as we insist on owning them, the more they will have leverage over what we can and can’t do with them. The only solution, in my view, is to remove ownership entirely, and simply provide a product to the public, that is shared and used and “owned” by the community rather than the property of an individual. Hence public transport.
Fundamentally I suppose the fix wouldn’t be very different regardless of the perspective on the issue.
Still, companies do have a right to do this, at this time, and I think it’s dangerously delusional to deny it. It’s indeed “crazy talk”, as you put it, but that’s because capitalism is a crazy system that shouldn’t be allowed to continue! Protect the rights of the people by providing them with their rights, rather than having them buy them from Mercedes.
Still, companies do have a right to do this, at this time, and I think it’s dangerously delusional to deny it.
On the contrary: there’s a very important distinction that I’m trying to make between an entity having the “right” to do something and merely being able to “get away with” doing it. The framing of issues matters, and I believe ceding control of said framing to the neofeudalists is far more dangerous than being accused of “delusion” for pointing out the way things are supposed to be instead of accepting the corrupt status quo at face value.
Ok, I think you have a point there.
I still think it’s meaningless though. “A fine is a price”. If they can get away with it, they can do it. I don’t think there’s much of a point in relying on legislation to determine whether something should be done or not. Fundamentally, whether they have a right to it or not, they shouldn’t do it. Meaning they shouldn’t have that right, if they do.
“The way things are supposed to be” according to who? Capital? The law, written by capital?
Public transportation FTW.
But here in the US that will literally never happen.
Don’t let the opposition discourage you, get involved and get even. Your city certainly has a transit advocacy group or three. Cleveland Ohio, of all places, is investing heavily in public transit, so your city has no excuse!
My “city” has a scattered population of just over 700 people.
