The problem is that once one manufacturer starts doing this, they'll all do it, so you won't even have the option of buying a new car without a subscription.
I’m glad my current car is a 2015 Mazda. It’s recent enough to have a touch screen and Bluetooth, but not so recent that it’s got an LTE/5G radio that can phone home and let them sell my driving data to insurance companies or force subscription payments on me. When I get my next car in a decade or so, hopefully I can import a cheap Chinese EV that’s either easy to jailbreak, or doesn’t have any of that bullshit included.
I was a BMW mechanic from 2009-2012. I can't believe anyone buys them after what I've seen. The engines are all made of plastic and start to literally crumble to pieces and leak oil from absolutely everywhere after ~70k miles. We had to have customers sign disclosures on these cars because inevitably they would just crumble to pieces when we went in to replace one part and we'd end up having to replace others to reassemble it. Or we would pressure-test the cooling system to find a leak and end up creating several more.
On their V8s there's a plastic cooling tube that runs from front to back on the engine. The tube itself is like $10 but you had to disassemble the entire engine to access it so it would cost several thousand $ in labor.
We eventually started selling an aftermarket CNC aluminum one that was threaded and expanded into the hole. We would just beat the old one out with a hammer and thread the new one in in a couple hours and they'd never have that problem again. Why BMW couldn't think of that is beyond me. The people who did made buckets of money selling aluminum tubes for hundreds of dollars just because they could.
You might expect cost cutting like that from a Kia or something but not from a car that's advertised as a premium brand and sold at premium prices.
The Buick 3800 had a tube like that on top, it would crack from thermal stresses and piss out hot coolant. There was an aluminum aftermarket replacement like you describe but it was Dorman and a cheap fix. Buick also addressed the problem in later versions. I miss that engine.
I used to own a W124 series Benz (bought used for 5% of sticker price, I ain't no fauntelroy). Nearly everything on it was redundant or excessively skookum.
When systems that weren't as rugged started going down, like the vacuum controllers for doors or the 4matic computer etc, the car still worked safely with reduced convenience. A few minor design flaws like the wiring harness but that's it. Room to work under the hood, too.
It was built in '93 when the engineers still ran the company.
Current main driver is the super reliable '03 CRV.
While this is completely true, it's a bit tone-deaf. Fuck cars, but many people barely have a choice because their public transport consists of a handful of busses that come once an hour and nothing is close by.
As an aside, I spend a whopping total of about $1/day (edit Australian $, so less USD) on maintenance and electricity for my electric cargo bike. I go about 17 km each way to work and the funny thing is it's only about 10 mins longer than driving, lol
If once you do not succeed, just try again next year. They tried and backtracked putting heated seats behind a paywall not even a year ago see here.
Unless laws are made to make this fundamentally illegal, they'll just keep pushing until it sticks. And once one manufacturer succeeds, they'll all follow.
Haha.. connection to server cannot be established. Suspension resetting to default.
This is extra hilarious in the face of the crib manufacturer that just decided to subscription paywall basic functions of their crib.. or the slow cooker... And that's just this week.
Game manufacturers pulling the plug on games they sold removing the servers yanking the games.
And now people think that you can buy a product that is going to last longer and costs several orders of magnitude more.. and you can only hope that the manufacturer can be bothered to:
Keep the service safe and secure.
Have it be reliable.
Maintain it operational for the actual lifespan of the car (not some MBA's definition of economic lifespan or something).
Not fuck with you on the price. (We're not shutting down the servers, but the price will be 50 a month and 5 euros per adjustment).
But the sale case is easy.. lease car drivers. This way they can enjoy premium functions not incorporated into the sale price of the car. I hope the IRS that taxes these things sees through this ploy and taxes the vehicles for installed functions wether you pay for them or not. Saw this happen with Tesla's.. taxed based on their initial price.. and then the user added 15k of functions after a day.. and the tax was still based on the original sticker price.
At least in the case of games, the servers are an ongoing expense that adds value to the game. I want to play against other people online and provide by that costs ongoing expenses.
Oh you think this feature will function locally.. I'll bet this goes from their app to their servers first to verify subscription and then to your car. Someone needs to pay for the subscription verification platform.
EU is at least trying to do something about that. As of last year stores are required to display the cheapest price they've had for an item in the past three months when they have something on sale.
Not all stores comply, and of course they try to get around these by the usual shenanigans, like basically the same product being available from the manufacturer with two slightly different item codes.
Edit: I think I was mistaken, and it's 30 days, not 3 months
Import something old and fun! Cars from smaller countries have lower mileage and can be cheap because they aren't as valuable as a comparable car from the US. It isn't hard to find a 25 year old car with about 50,000 miles on it.
JDM cars are especially nice now because of how weak the YEN is. Look outside the popular JDM cars and there are tons of things with easy to find parts for dirt cheap.
Or hell, get a not top trim of a popular model, and you can get something cheap. Want a station wagon built on the same platform as the Nissan Skyline? The Automatic Stageas are cheaper because tuners don't want them because they're an automatic and don't have a turbo, which makes them slower, but also more reliable.
Nissan Rasheens with the 1500cc engine are easy to maintain and have an engine that was used in some American cars, get the first true AWD CUV for about $5000 plus import fees.
Another cheap option is a Toyota Caldina, get a reliable awd station wagon with a nice interior for 7 or 8 grand including import fees. (Avoid the 2000ish GTT version with a turbo, turbo manifold is prone to warping on that engine and said manifold is hard to find in the US as those engines generally didnt sell in the US)
Edit: looks like Caldinas have gone up in price recently.
One of our cars is a 2016 GM and I just unscrewed the cell antenna instead of ripping out the cell module. Tracking disabled, or at least unreliable. The subscription nav is useless and easy to ignore. I would like to figure out how to prevent the siriusxm ads built into the infotainment system, still.
I look forward to better infotainment hacks down the road.
Not necessarily. My 2015 SEAT (for folks in the North America: That's basically Volkswagen) is one of the latest cars that do not completely fuck you over. TPMS is passive, so you don't need expensive sensors. You can also update the maps on your own (OK, here they pull you over if you don't know the simple trick). Parts are also cheap.
Nobody's gonna abandon cars as a whole over this, the same they wouldn't abandon bicycles as a whole over some other outrageously monetized luxury feature they could live without.
I agree totally, but I don't think it will matter with new vehicles. They're going to track you and spay on you more than your phone. I will forever drive old stuff. I'm a mechanic so that's a super easy option for me. I won't own anything new enough to spy on me, my car will be MY car.
I've heard for years that BMW was doing shit like this. Heated seats is what it started with. Toyota did it with remote start but I think they backed down after the outrage.
Because the people who buy them have it and BMW can get more out of them. The real problem is that they’ll buy it, and other manufacturers will see “hey, it’s a successful model and additional revenue generation!”
This "tech crowd" and "you folks" dichotomy is not helpful at all. Tell people how they can help, volunteer, donate etc, don't wedge gaps between the same class fighting against the same ruling class. I'm a software engineer. I write open source software. I get that it's tiring and you can see the worst in people when doing it, but we're going to have to be better than that if we want to change things.
And for those reading like the top commenter, don't sit on your hands and wait for "tech folks" to figure stuff out. It's us vs. corporate greed, not "us hoping the tech folks save us from corporate greed" or "us tech folks being badgered like we should be some saviors against corporate greed." Write your representatives to tell them this isn't ok. Be mindful in your selection when you purchase a vehicle. Ask your tech savvy friends and family what you can do to help. You aren't helpless in this, and as OP said, just sitting and waiting for something to be fixed or changed doesn't help the overall goal.
That would be the ultimate way to stop this. Let them put the hardware in, and then not make a cent off it, because a third party enables it for the customer.
A) The only way to control access to this feature is to lock down and phone home. If it doesn't phone home then when someone figures out a way around your present security its possible for someone to sell said features forever. Such DRM could hurt repeatability by accident or more likely on purpose.
B) There is no reason to fail open so even if BMW is still chugging when they stop taking your cars phone calls and retires those servers you get no more feature.
C) The amount spent over the lifespan of a car wherein people opt to take care of their valuable asset absolutely dwarfs the cost able to be extracted up front
D) This functionality opens the door to a hacker not just turning off your features but turning off your car. This includes state sponsored attackers and people who are just generally pissed off at the geopolitical actions of your country of origin. If you are in the US that is a lot of fucking people.
E) Product segmentation on average increases the amount you can extract per user. Allowing segmentation by features turn on or off in software by the month it allows far greater segmentation with no reasonable expectation that the baseline will be lower. This means the lowest end user of a model pays the same for even less. The median user pays somewhat more and the max user pays a LOT more.
F) This means wholly paid for used cars now come with a car payment to the manufacturer.
Now there are half a hundred people on the boards of these companies and 338M of us in the US. 449M in the EU. There is no reason to allow this misfeature to continue to be a thing in our markets. If automakers don't like those restrictions any one of them can opt to most of the most valuable markets in the world and find their fortunes exclusively in China while their competitors eat their former marketshare.
Forgot one that was mentioned up-thread, which was that even if you don't pay for the fancy suspension you will still have to pay for fancy suspension parts if they break.
All of it is a reason for people to vote not to allow it. This can be accomplished federally or via initiatives in states. If a handful states comprising 30-50% of the pop wont allow it then it will be dead.
In what way does the suspension require regular servicing or an online connection to a server to function? That would be the only reason to offer it as an ongoing service cost.
Otherwise, you're just paying extra for something already in your car, not for an actual service, which would make no sense?
What next, paint ongoing service fees for having wheels? Not even for ensuring they're regularly replaced, serviced, or repaired, just for the ability to use them at all....
Active suspension is software, just like Photoshop is. You need to pay subscription fee for Photoshop now, and BMW wants a subscription fee for their active suspension software too. Rent seeking and Enshittification.
Except that you have to have special way more expensive shocks to have adaptive suspension compared to fixed. It's like being sold an I3 CPU for the price of an I9 cpu while being told you can pay a subscription to upgrade to the full performance
At least with Photoshop (as bad as the model is), at least they are actually running the software and storing and backing up the associated data for it.
With the car, it's all local to the car without BMW having to incur any expense for that functionality to keep going.
We long left the era where we "own" things that we buy. As everything is a computer now it has become very simple to control stuff that remotely that was working on its own before.
So the answer to "why would <CORPORATION> do this" is simply: "Because they can".
Every tiny decision is guided by increasing profit. No matter the side effects (short or long term ). Because with many shareholders administering pressure to maximize profits there's only one way to go (even if it's a dumb and shortsighted decision) maximizing profits NOW. If you are not doing that because you can see that increasing profits now will hurt profits in the future then you are hindering the project. You have to increase profits now, because if you are not then your competitor is doing it and that is a problem.
If you are not going with the project you will be out of a job sooner or later. Then someone will take over that will make the decision you couldn't do.
This is a race to the bottom. Morals, integrity, honesty, responsibility and foresight are only obstacles in this logic (because the competition is not bound by them which gains them an advantage).
It's simply cheaper now to build everything in the car always and run an operating system that manages all these things and can control what you are doing in your car.
Cory Doctorow held a great keynote about this some ~10-ish years (?) ago with the title "The coming war on general computation" where he explained the side effects of putting DRM in every stupid appliance.
The side effect here is that we cannot hack our cars to switch on the heated seats (or whatever other feature BMW is not allowing us to use for free) because of DRM. It is not "our" car, even though we bought it.
This is a side effect of deregulation of both corporations and the stock market. I think that we're going to see the pendulum swing towards more regulation and consumer-friendly policies here in the US. I don't see that lasting for the long-term, though. There are too many vulnerabilities in the political system that allow asshole billionaires to manipulate it.
eh, rich people car shop as well, and there is plenty of competition in that market. of course some people will still opt for BMW, we just have to hope enough go elsewhere to make them lose marketshare. but... it's not looking good so far.
Ngl, i don't see how bmw gets any sales when Mercedes exists. If you are actually rich a Mercedes is almost objectively the better vehicle, if you are just trying to show off the Mercedes is a better status symbol too.
This is why I don't mourn Western car companies getting slaughtered by Chinese EVs. They can't really provide value by nickel and diming customers with subscriptions for components already installed on their privacy-invading overpriced cars.
You do realize all car companies do scummy things? BYD along with others uses parts serialization so you can't install any parts unless BYD installs it for you an updates the software to take the new serial number.
I think you're thinking of Xiaomi, Louis Rossman did a video assuming they were doing Apple-style serialization but all it was doing was blocking installation of self-driving if the headlights weren't standard. It wasn't DRMing brake pads or preventing buying headlights from a junkyard, there was a functional reason.
One of the reasons electric cars were able to outcompete ICE-specialized companies is because they undercut on all sorts of nice to haves like buttons and pieces that they forgo by using a screen, wifi, updates, beta testing.
But they don't pass on those cost savings to you. They are even sold as luxury products. They even take the carbon credits. That's bullshit if you are serious about mainstream adoption.
I’m never buying a BMW again. I had an electric i3 which had an inverter (charger) failure. BMW wanted €12k to fix it. Thankfully an independent offered to do it for 4K. But BMW still wanted 3K just to plug it in and authenticate the new block. Nothing else, just “bless” it. Made the fix cost-prohibitive so we just had to scrap the car. The battery, which most people fear, was fine on this 8 year old car.
Luxury car dealers do that all the time. The Volvo dealership quoted me $2800 to get my car to pass inspection, about $1500 of which was just tires.
I got a set of tires from Costco for like $800, and then an independent mechanic said everything else was fine and charged me $100 for inspection and emissions.
I know, but in the past the independent dealers didn’t have to deal directly with BMW for fixes. Now with all the authentication needed you can’t just get a replacement part from anywhere any more. Similar to how Apple locked down its batteries, BMW is doing the same.
So you purchase ordinary suspension but get active suspension that works exactly like ordinary suspension and cost like active suspension to service....
It's time we get legislation that gives the consumer access to all encryption key pairs used in the product they purchased.
(For you who don't know what encryption key pairs are used for: they are used for the software to know that a change order, like "activate suspension", is legit and therefore will be executed.)
No, we need to legislate that you should be able to use the hardware features that come with your vehicle without a subscription. What will the average consumer do with encryption keys? Even then, you'd need to decrypt and rewrite the ECU or other system that controls this hardware to run your own version, and if that doesn't work, you'd need to have hardware to manually intercept communications between the suspension and the system verifying your subscription, and intercept the signal to always send an ok signal.
The hardware has full functionality from day one.
The limitation is in what software you are using.
Active suspension is not a hardware feature, it's software collecting data from sensors and by analysing the data being able adjusting the suspension to "optimal performance".
Just because certain hardware can be controlled by software doesn't mean that you will get whatever software features you like to have.
BMW would claim that "BMW Smooth Comfortable Cloud Ride Software" is included free of charge with the purchase of a BMW.
BMW would also claim that they offer "BMW Hyper Advanced AI Premium Sensation Masculine Active Road Experience Pro Suspension" as an optional subscription for alpha males and people with too much money in their pockets.
The outcome of what you are suggesting will be a slight change in the phrasing of the product offering at the most.
With access to the keys, the owner can subscribe to the BMW solution, unlock the features in breach of the agreement with BMW by not subscribing or get a software solution for the car from another provider.
Imagine suffering an accident and having to pay a plus because of a feature you can't even use on the parts you replace. I feel this is non-competitive bullshit that is following the trend Elon Musk started, although it probably started much earlier.
Elon? Dude, fuck Elon, but even Tesla's only recurring paid features are $9.99 for cell connection, which is super reasonable, and $100 for FSD which is super unnecessary unless you really want to take a nap while your car murders some kids. BMW is just insane.
So, you buy a car with all these features, but you don't pay for them. They are disabled by default. You jailbreak your car, everything works without paying extra, but then you realize, you broke your warranty.
I wish that someone sues when something breaks in the car that you didn't opt in for.
And... yet better, they get sued when something breaks that is in connection with a paid service and someone suspects that it's because they paid part caused it.
What ever happened to you buy a car and that’s it. No need for subscriptions to things like suspensions, steering wheels, running engines…. You know the things I bought.
And what happens when all the cars are like this? EAAS? (Enshittification As A Service)
BMW is always making headlines with this crap, are there any other brands doing this shit? I know Hyundai IONIQ has a free trial for you to be able to unlock your car and whatnot with an app, later they will do it subscription based.
There is no justification for "server and infrastructure" for a fucking car. No part of a car should require a single penny of server costs over the entire lifespan.
Not downvoting you, but what on earth would need a SQL server to use suspension? It would be far too slow for real-time applications, and this isn't a rolls royce engine on a jet generating 1tb of data a second when all sensors are active and logging.
This is a mall-mobile that someone will probably total in a power center parking lot in Arizona.
I really wish biking was more of an option in most of the us. Unfortunately the vast majority of cities in this country are car-centric strip mall wastelands. Nothing like having a 5 foot wide bike lane right next to a 65mph highway.
So, the car gets very expensive suspension, but to use the features you need a subscription? So if I don't want the active suspension feature, I am still stuck with the very expensive active suspension hardware...
Yeah, no, I'll stick with Subaru. Everything they make uses tech from the dinosaur age of motoring.
I actually think this is a great idea. Hear me out.
They fit the hardware that you can't touch while the Motor plan is active, but when the right to repair legislation kicks in, and we start debating whether we actually own the cars we buy, all these scumbag practices will mean that any car outside of the Motorplan should be able to run cracked OS's and everyone gets free BMW features on their cars after motorplan expires.
I vote they keep going for a bit, then they get their asses handed to them with out of maintenance plan service options and 3rd party features.
There are basic rules for coming up with these types of product subscriptions:
Is it something a large number of customers can't live without?
Is it something that costs money to support and continue developing? Subscriptions help defray that cost and loyal users are happy to keep it going.
Will the feature be actively used on a regular basis, going forward?
Now apply these to seat warmers, suspension adjustments, self-driving, or whatever else shows up in the future. If you don't hit all three, head back to the drawing board.
P.S.: This isn't limited to cars. It's equally true for any hardware product.