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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!
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.
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.'"
...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.