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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!
The big winners will be the people who sell crack codes on the black market for just under MSRP. Because automakers' coders are no smarter than any other industries' engineers.
.nosig
Please type in your PIN to activate anti-lock brakes.
Consumers will buy another brand without these annoyances
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.
ugh...I hate this
everywhere you look today, people want to make you pay a monthly fee for something that used to be free...or make you pay separately for something that used to be included in the main price but not lower the main price & call it 'al la carte'
it's marketing idiots who spend their work days trying to make products with **LESS** features
Thank you Dave Raggett
Or a way for the automakers to get nothing. I'd just buy older cars whose features I didn't need to rent.
This could, in theory, work out if producing a single model with all the features saves money over manufacturing every permutation of radio/seats/trim/etc. The high-end would cost less, while still allowing more spartan options for those who want to save money.
In practice, I suspect it's a way to jack up the cost of new vehicles and turn every "sale" into a rental. Not sure if this will help or hurt dealerships--if all the options are already in the car, how will the middlemen get their cut of the value-adds?
DATABASE WOW WOW
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.
For software, the marginal cost of distributing the extra features disabled is pretty close to zero. It's all just bits being copied.
For a car, the car maker is still paying for the seat heaters, still paying factory workers to install those heaters, but not always being paid back by the end-user. Makes no sense.
And as a consumer, I want a simple and reliable car. I don't want my seat heaters to have a "DRM AUTHORIZATION FAILURE" error message and refuse to work when I need them.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
If you buy the car, you OWN the car and everything in it right? if you own those heated seats, its not exactly piracy if you enable them. How would they stop that?
They make it only available on leased models, and refuse to "sell" the vehicle. Similar to how they did that with software.
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.
Want to use your over-the-air antenna? Enter special code from the internet. Why wouldn't they do it with cars too?
Well they do it with cars, when the feature is a service. Think Sirius Radio and GPS Maps and traffic updates.
But physical parts of the car are a different thing. You take title to the car. You own it.
I don't think you can sell seat warmers as a service, unless it can't exist without an outside source.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
All those people leasing cars, renting cars when traveling, zip car, whatever... They don't own their cars. That market is already big enough for manufacturers to consider this idea.
The link about MINI is suggesting they might make available DIY trim upgrades. Not trim level of the car, but the physical trim in the cabin. Think cell phones with replacable colored backplates. Absolutely nothing like TFS suggests.
Seat heaters weigh very little, and the wiring is already present in some models which feature them as an option. Some cars actually have harness changes for major trim levels, but they were in the minority, last I checked. Normally they just swap engine harnesses for different engines, and leave plugs hanging for any missing features.
In the cars of yesteryear, infotainment options were big bulky modules, but today they're more likely to be a software change. It costs a couple hundred bucks best-case to put some computer module into a car whose handheld equivalent would only cost one hundred, because of the temperature and vibration requirements. But you could get down towards the best case in more situations if you included the module in more vehicles in your range, and thus produced more of them. If having it lurking there induced more people to pay for a vehicle option, you might even come out ahead. Meanwhile, you get to claim that more of your vehicles are shipped with the feature, even when it's not used.
Anything that actually adds weight to the car will be simple enough to hack into action. You'll need some kind of alternate controller, which will probably be a few bucks on eBay. You'll disconnect it from the car and the car will throw a fault code which you will ignore, and you'll plug it into something else which will let you use it... for free.
The only exception to this is going to be engine features. You're going to lug around more engine than you use, which we already do in the USA in most cases. You'll be able to pay more to use more of the engine or for example turn up the boost, which will also reduce your service intervals... and your warranty duration, most likely. The higher-tune versions of some cars already have short warranties, so that's no stretch. This way, automakers can cut themselves down to only making a small handful of identical engines, and cut their design costs dramatically.
The positive side of this for the customer is that as tuning changes are made for later models they can be backported to earlier ones, and delivered to customers who have already paid for a higher performance level. They'll receive the updates during their normal vehicle warranty service.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
By finally securing the CANbus so that you can't
Seems to me then the whole car vanishes in a contradiction.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"...or are consumers going to just get screwed in the long run?"
I can see it now:
Me: It is cold and those heated seats would be nice now. Maybe I can just pay a monthly rate during the winter.
Car Company: I'm sorry but that option requires a 1 year contract.
I would have a sig but I am too busy updating programs and restarting my computer
With features that are cheap enough to add, this sometimes happens already. My 2010 Honda Fit base model, for instance, did not come with a remote lock/unlock feature from the factory. You can buy the "keyless entry system" from the dealer for about $150. What does it consist of? A key with the remote control features in it. That's all. The solenoids for locking and unlocking the doors are already there, they just aren't used. I was able to get it working for much less by buying a blank key from an online shop, following the directions to sync up the remote, and having it cut to fit at the local shop.
But, as others have noted, there are limits on the extent of this kind of practice. Shipping extra bits with a software package costs basically nothing, Shipping extra hardware in a car can get expensive quickly. They have to balance whether it costs less to ship all vehicles the same (economy of scale) or whether it would save money to leave a feature physically omitted from base trims. Then they have to decide whether they will get more money by including it for everyone (and thus using it as a selling point to drum up volume) or by charging it as an add-on.
If they get too greedy, then yes, buyers will just hack the car (or have someone else do it) to enable the missing features. As noted, this already happens sometimes. I wouldn't exactly call buying a key and following the official factory sync process a "hack", but it worked and it saved me some money.
"or are consumers going to just get screwed in the long run" That depends. Do the built-in dildos have a monthly fee?
Stick shift models:
LRLRUUDD
Gives you the entire deluxe package, and is hard-coded into the vehicle.
...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.
I still drive my 1932 Chevrolet, and it's still perfectly road legal. So, 82 years and counting. I just rebuilt the engine again, and she's probably good for another 15-20k before more major work. The car has far outlived its original owner (my great grandfather, who passed away before I was born), and very well may outlive me provided I find someone to care for her like my grandfather, father, and I have. Sure, I don't drive it more than once a month or so, but my daily car will be 20 this year and has 250k miles on it. Body's good, drivetrain is fine, engine isn't showing any problems, and I have a mountain of spare parts in the shed. It's not going anywhere anytime soon unless I grow tired of it.
The biggest threat is a significant shift in fuel sources, such as we suddenly embrace E85 as a primary fuel, or something like CNG or electric.
It could be a way for the automakers to get something from the millions of people who, like me, will never buy a new car.
Thats one of the things some car manufactures want to kill.
They dont want people buying an old car, they want people buying a new car at new car prices. BMW et al. dont get any money from used car sales, for them that is a problem.
A lot of features that come in new cars are either designed not to last for more than 5 years or require regular software updates, people who buy these cars don't realise it but it's killing the resale value of their cars. This is called planned obsolescence and the reason why I prefer Japanese cars is that most Japanese manufacturers dont practice it to the same level as Euro or American manufacturers (mainly because they don't have to, the Japanese government have codified it into law for them).
One of the biggest offenders in the planned obsolescence game is BMW... and I'll give you three guesses who owns Mini.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
This really isn't any different from the common practice of including satellite radio, usually bundled with other car options, and charging a monthly fee to keep it enabled.
It also makes sense in cases where the vast majority of consumers would opt to include a feature and it's cheaper to include it on all cars than manufacture different parts and add options to your assembly line just for a couple cars. Case in point: Tesla included 60KWh batteries on its 40KWh models and software limited them to 40KWh. (reference: http://www.dailytech.com/Tesla...). At a later time, consumers can pay to unlock the extra capacity.
It actually could be useful to enable features at a later time - you might move to a cold state and really wish your car had heated seats. If it really does increase costs so much, there will certainly be some car manufacturers who opt to save costs and we can buy from them instead.
This is an entry-level 50MHz dual channel DSO, that can be upgraded to 100 MHz bandwidth with a simple, widely available firmware hack.
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