Slashdot Mirror
You Might Rent Features & Options On Cars In the Future
cartechboy writes "These days, you go to a car dealership and you buy a car. If you want seat heaters, you might need to option for the cold weather package from the factory. Want the high-end stereo? You'll be likely be opting for some technology package which bundles in navigation. While some options are a la carte, most are bundled, and even when they are a la carte, they aren't cheap. What if in the future you could buy a car and unlock options later? Say the car came from the factory with heated seats, but you didn't pay for them. But later on, say in the middle of the freezing winter, you suddenly want them. What if you could simply pay a monthly fee during the winter months to have those heated seats work? Whether this model would benefit the consumer, the automakers, or both is yet to be seen. But automakers such as MINI are already talking about this type of a future. Is this the right road to be headed down, or are consumers going to just get screwed in the long run?"
FUCK, THAT, SHIT!
If this happens I will be hacking the shit out of my car.
I'm sorry. Not interested. I don't want to waste fuel carrying around equipment I don't need, much of it will be reporting back on my driving habits, listening habits, and shopping habits. I deliberately picked my car to have as little cruft in it as possible with only the features I wanted. Even that was a huge pain nowadays.
Or a way for the automakers to get nothing. I'd just buy older cars whose features I didn't need to rent.
With the Tesla model S the supercharger feature is optional with the 60KWh battery and can be enabled at any time by an over-the-air update but is a $2,000 feature, presumably to help offset the cost of electricity and building out the Supercharger network. The hardware is installed in every car.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
By buying or crafting their own legislation?
The problem with some features, is that they add weight to the car. I don't want to pay for gas to truck around 20 lbs of crap I can't use. I can't imagine cruise control takes much to make it work with computerized cars (software having little mass), but something like a seat heater would. I'm already hesitant to buy a new car with all the crappy "infotainment" systems that pretty much all suck and generally aren't updated.
I don't know, but it works for me.
Absolutely not. Why? For the same reason I'll never upgrade to Adobe Creative Cloud from CS 6. I don't want to be held ransom.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
...a used car that is governed to 25 MPH and can only make left turns because basic functionality has to be enabled via $50,000 DLC that was only included with the initial purchase.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
In this particular context, it doesn't really *matter* what the MMWA literally says. For the past ~35 years, the federal agency tasked with ENFORCING the MMWA has, without fail, put the entire burden of proof on the manufacturer.
In the real world, it's very dangerous for a manufacturer to risk denying warranty coverage over customer modifications unless they're BLATANTLY responsible for the failure. Even when large corporations COULD objectively deny warranty coverage, they rarely DO, because it would cost them more to document their reasons for denying coverage to the FTC's satisfaction than to just swap it out for a remanufactured replacement item and harvest the high-value parts from the broken one to use for repairing other phones.
What a company like GM or Ford COULD do, however, is require that consumers allow them to update their firmware to the latest version prior to doing anything else... and in the process, slam the door on the vulnerability that allowed you to hack it in the first place to enable the feature. You could end up in the same unhappy position as someone with a jailbroken iPad running 7.0.4 a few months from now, then has it develop a bad solder connection in the lightning port. If you send it to Apple, they'll fix it... but they'll also reflash it to 7.0.5 (or beyond), which probably won't have a working jailbreak for god knows how long. You'll have to choose between a phone with working USB, and a phone that's crippled by Apple to make sure you can't have a 5-row keyboard.