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.
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.
Absolutely not. Immediately trade that shit in. Uh uh. No. Fuck off. Keep fucking off. Fuck off some more. Fuck off until you’ve circumnavigated the globe then fuck off again.
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.
As someone who owned a 1993, a 2000, and a 2008 BMW in succession, I cannot believe anyone would buy the pieces of crap they have turned into.
I stopped buying them when they started piping in fake engine noise into the cabin and dropped all pretense that the cars would last beyond the lease period (I don’t buy new cars).
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.
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.
I never disagreed with that, I asked what the purpose of having an encryption key will be, you are creating some magical step between “subscribe to the software” and “don’t pay the bill” that doesn’t require modification of anything but somehow just requires encryption keys
In my experience there always someone willing to create everything from homebrew software to software activation. Especially if there’s some money to make on it.
lol thanks for the downvote. So you’re asking the average consumer to pay the grey market to write aftermarket untested software for their vehicle that will replace the car manufacturers active suspension software on their vehicle, and can be activated as such because they now have access to the encryption keys. That was what I was trying to ask in the first place. Glad we cleared that up
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.
What exactly do you propose the “normies” do? Is there some non-corporation making road-worthy cars? No? Let me guess, you want a family of 5 to bike 2 hours to the nearest school/park/grocery store in the snow on rural roads with no shoulder just to avoid paying a corporation? Take the nonexistent train?
let me just say this: if facebook were known to be doing the shit it does today in 2002, it wouldnt have fucking flied, because normies trusted people more than they did corporations.
no need to make up that huge strawman when you could have properly read what i bothered to type out.
I wrote it as a tongue in cheek against the OP that said “…I really hope the tech crowd is working on jailbreaking this garbage”.
Surprise surprise, that comment is sitting with 49 upvotes 1 downvote, mine that you admonish is on 27 upvotes 13 downvotes.
This kind of proves the point. The “tech crowd” doesn’t owe you anything. [email protected], you don’t know how much of my personal and professional life I have spent fully on open source.
Get up your feet and talk with your family, representatitives. Legislate this shit away. Nobody accepts food products that dont have a recipe or with unknown ingredients. Nobody accepts engineering projects without plans. Demand open source and interoperability.
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.
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.
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.
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.
bmwblog.com
Hot