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
And BMW is one of the most valuable car brands out there. I don’t get why you’re pretending that BMW is some unknown entity. Unfortunately, many people will swallow BMW’s bullshit.
I feel like in this case it’s more like everyone gets sold i9 hardware, but can choose to pay the i3 price for it with locked out features, then decide later to pay the subscription to unlock the i7 or i9 performance. It has advantages for the manufacturer in that there are fewer options to account for at build time and additional revenue later on. I still think it’s a terrible model that should be summarily rejected by customers, but I see why they are trying it.
Yeah they’re totally not charging you for the expensive suspension they’re installing in your car in the hopes that you’ll pay a subscription to use it. 100% not included in the price, clearly no one would ever do that
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.
If the bike does the biking completely for me, has hvac, reclining seats, can do 65mph down the highway and can take care of my morning wood taking into account remaining travel time, I’d be interested. That indeed would be a really good bike.
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.
Now, I can "kinda" see the rationale behind optional features on a car being either enabled via software or subscription. I believe the permanent enable price should be the same as if you added the hardware to the car as an option.
As to why this might make sense for a carmaker. In my work I've visited car manufacturers before, and from what I could see it's quite expensive and adds time to support the various options when building a car. You see they have the main production line, and units are pulled off the main line to fit the options at various points and then reinserted and this causes problems for efficiency and price per unit I think.
So, there's probably a cost saving to making the base car have all the options fitted and having a completely standardized production line. However, the expense is likely going to mean if they sold the base car at the usual base car price they would either lose money, or at the very least, the profit margin wouldn't be worthwhile.
However, if you know a certain percentage of people will want the options, and you can enable it with software later, it's possible building the hardware into every car as standard would work out overall cheaper. They might also be able to upsell to more people by making a subscription option, perhaps with maybe a free trial for the first say 3 months of ownership. That is, they turn everything on for 6 months for free, then revert you to the package you paid for. Hoping that you liked some of the features and will pay or subscribe to keep them.
What I don't like is when this stuff might become ONLY available as a subscription, the overall move toward subscription models for everything irks me a lot. I'd much prefer we still get to choose a package, and have the ability to upgrade later.
So I think my point is, the argument "the hardware is there anyway" doesn't really work, because they are likely going to install the hardware at a loss, on the assumption (backed up by their own numbers) they will sell enough to make a bigger profit overall.
They also likely bake into the numbers that a very small number of people will hack the car and enable the features anyway. The vast majority will not do this, though.
Well, I would say it SHOULD bring overall prices down. If the cost to build the top of the line model comes down to say the same as the mid-range model AND more people are say buying up. It means that competition would push overall prices down.
But of course not, it benefits the companies most, and given the choice of lower prices or more profit, they'll choose the profit every time.
If they go subscription only (because recurring revenue is the current business buzzword, so of course they will go subscription only) then overall cost for the life of the car will definitely be higher yet "feel" more affordable.
You’re right that the idea has come from the mind boggling number of options in vehicles these days. The company I worked for recently had over a million different combinations, and making more physical parts standard fit saves them money.
However that saving is not passed on to the customer. The company pockets it all, and makes more money on top with the subscriptions.
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!”
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.
People act like subscriptions are a new thing for cars, and somehow mentally gloss over the fact that they have to physically go in to renew their energy subscription weekly, not to mention the quarterly, and bi-annual subscriptions for oil and various maintenance respectively.
Everything has always been a subscription, you’re just a frog that’s well done.
The key differences is utilities you’re paying for the generation & maintenance of key resources - without gas, water and electricity we wouldn’t be able to survive. Road tax you’re helping to pay for the renewal and upkeep of the road surface (among other local services)… Left alone the road will degrade & will become unusable.
Suspension as a Service is milking what should be a perpetual cost when purchasing the vehicle. If the hardware is already installed, it should be available for the owner to use. They’re not paying for the upkeep of the vehicle, or even ensuring the suspension remains functional… All they’ve done is placed the function behind a pay wall. They can argue they’re maintaining the software, but it’s utter bullshit and I hate the fact this has become a norm within B2B (for example network appliances)
At least with luxury subscriptions such as Spotify, Netflix, NYT, etc you’re getting access to their content, which they renew. Here you get access to something you should have had access to from day 1.
Gas oil need money to drill and refind from sources and car suspension does not, it maybe need to get a check up or replace once in a long while and not every months
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.
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.
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 the world famous RB25 engine.
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.
Carfromjapan.com has the best search features I’ve found, once you know what you’re looking for www.goo-net-exchange.com is also nice because they translate the car condition sheets.
Parts availability depends on the car. For the Rasheen for example most of the engine parts can be found at any parts store for the 1500 and 2000 cc engine versions cause those engines were also in American cars though the 2000cc engine is far more common. I’ve also found English websites that are easy to order just about any parts you want for a Rasheen including body panels.
Amazon is also nice for finding parts, I was able to find parts for a SR18DE engine on Amazon and that engine was never sold in America. So you can just buy the parts yourself then take the car to a local mechanic for the work.
Once you find something that interests you just Google that car name parts and you can usually find someone talking online about how owning that car has been for them.
The best listings also have video of the car running so you can hear if something is off with it.
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.
My wife used to drive an electric Smart Car for her work. It had a range of 60 miles (less in the winter), and she called it a glorified golf cart. But it was perfect for the 20 or so miles she’d drive each day.
The Bolt is ok. It has a screen and Android Auto and stuff, but I only use it for Android Auto navigation and energy stats when I’m curious. For pretty much everything else, there are good ol’ fashioned buttons.
Oh, it does have OnStar and some stuff associated with that, but GM discontinued the worst of it after a class action lawsuit.
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.
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.
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.
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