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.
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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.
My sides are in orbit…
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
To what extent could companies wreck my freedom in cars even more? I have heard of heated seats being pay walled, despite the technology to heat the seat being installed in the factory… Computer controlled locking systems where if my key fob breaks I can’t get into my car, or worse, the electronic control system fails and I’m up shit creek without a paddle.
As to education, how can I even learn to repair something like that? My ignorance makes me think soldering may be useful, but how can an individual have greater control on the freedom to repair and own their automobile. The generality of my question lays in my ignorance to the inner workings of most cars.
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.
I got an OBD-II device for reading and clearing codes and at least I can snatch them from my vehicle. I haven’t heard of the dongle before, does it connect to the infotainment system and then allow you access to the underlying file system? I don’t want to brick anything doing that lol
What’s with Toyota’s TechStream? What is all that about?
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).
Oh man… I grew up poor and couldn’t imagine my car’s daily functions spontaneously malfunctioning due to a stupid code you can’t control (reliably) as an end user. Having never had money to throw at solutions , I can’t imagine how horrible equity will be as time progresses with knowledge and understanding of these things.
I’ll check out Mazdas! I’m in the market for a new car, but really anything that just is a “dumb” car. I don’t want the infotainment crap and paywalled everything, just let me repair my vehicle so I can afford to live :D
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.
Somebody will figure out how to get past it, even if the manufacturer protests. It’s happened with Iphones, it’s happened with John Deere tractors, it will happen here
Voiding your car insurance in the process? That’s never going to become even slightly mainstream.
Warranty, not insurance.
No, I meant insurance. It would sure as hell be void and null if you were to “jailbreak” a car and then crash it into someone.
Are you saying insurers will look for a way to avoid payouts? I’ll believe it when I see it!!
Adding power mods to your car is very much mainstream. Its called tuning. You can literally download more power to many existing cars. Especially if they’re already turbocharged.
