A fool and his money are soon parted. From the same class of vehicles that tried to lock heated seats behind a monthly subscription.
You know what’s nice? Those cars can F right off. I won’t buy one new. And never will buy one used.
Always will be “budget” cars (Corolla, Civic, Versa, etc.) that won’t screw around with this crap because the buyers can’t afford to screw around with it.
TRY to paywall a heated seat in a Civic. I dare Honda. It won’t be more than 10 minutes before someone has it badly wired up like an aftermarket subwoofer.
Even Toyota is doing this now. They locked features like the digital tire pressure gauge behind a paywall on their app.
Isn’t a tire pressure monitoring system legally required on all cars now?
I can see the tire pressure of my truck though the app and I don’t pay for any Toyota subscriptions. The only thing I’m aware they lock behind a paywall in the app is remote start, but you can still do that from the key fob for free too.
On the newer vehicles they do also lock the navigation behind a paywall but you can just use CarPlay or android auto for free.
I think it was only free for a limited time when you buy the car, they might have changed it since then though.
Uhm, Toyota does it to a certain extent.
Yup, remote start is only free for a limited time then you have to subscribe. They make great cars but they’re no angels.
Can you at least unlock it later with experience points or in-game currency?
Is money just irl in game currency?
Six points for every pedestrian you hit? Double for cyclists.
You earn XP by using the turn signals so…. no it’s basically impossible to level up by playing
We are getting closer to Mitch Hedberg’s vision of each car getting only 3 honks per month
India will have a real problem in a couple of decades… Or they will make their own models with unlimited lifetime honks.
Just don’t upgrade your firmware so you can jailbreak it later.
Or just don’t buy a car that needs to connect to the internet. This is beyond stupid
Virgin car ownership vs chad mass transit
Virgin car ownership
On the contrary: letting manufacturers extract rents for capabilities that the owner already paid for by virtue of having bought the physical device is the opposite of “ownership,” and that’s the problem here!
Using mass transit is great, but it does nothing to stop this attack on our property rights.
I gotta put a Faraday cage around my next car if it’s going to try to connect to the internet.
Until a hacker decided to disable the brake while you speeding 100mph
Pay 2 win on a car.
Considering “faster engine” means different tune on the exact same engine nowadays: not much has changed.
Fuck morons who pay this so the corps will continue to do this. They wouldn’t even consider it if people with more money than sense didn’t pay for it. Everything is enshittified until we live in Idiocracy.What percentage of people do you suppose actually think they’re getting more by paying rather than getting less until they pay? I’m sure a large amount of it is people with enough money to not care, but surely some are just uninformed?
IOTs are pushing us towards subscription hell-scape. We must demand dumb, non-connected machines and devices.
At this point, if they can get away charging their customer each time they open and close the door, they would.
Aa, I see you are interested in both our Premium Entry and Egress packages? If you subscribe to both now for only $89.99 a month, you will get 200 entries AND exits from your vehicle for free, every month! That’s a distinct savings over the monthly cost of $49.99 for each package individually. Enjoy additional entries and exits for only $1 each, if you go over your limit.
Terms Apply*
*Applicable double penalty for door usage during peak utilization periods, weekends, and holidays. Doors left open will accrue triple penalties after the first 30 seconds, doubling every 30 seconds thereafter. Any attempts to circumvent usage rules forfeits half of remaining door credits; attempts include but not limited to: climbing out windows, busting through walls like kool-aid man, suicide, etc.
Somebody will figure out how to get past it, even if the manufacturer protests. It’s happened with Iphones, it’s happened with John Deere tractors, it will happen here
The engine comes as preinstalled DLC
Hello everyone. Cars suck, we need to mostly ditch cars.
Although I enthusiastically agree, that’s a little off-topic to be the takeaway from this particular kind of article.
In this case, the issue to be outraged about is that the corporations are violating our property rights in order to engage in illegal rentiership. As owners, we have the right to modify our own property, including to unlock the full potential of the physical machine, and no amount of DRM or the DMCA anti-circumvention clause should be allowed to change that!
That doesn’t need any kind of new “right to repair” or anything either; it is inherent to the definitions of what “property” and “ownership” are! I mean sure, we should impose requirements for products to be better designed for repairability and have documentation and spare parts available, but lots of people seem to think what Mecedes etc. are doing is currently within their rights, and that’s just crazy talk. These things aren’t legitimate subscriptions; they’re a protection racket! Trying to hold capabilities hostage that the device owner already paid for (by virtue of having bought the physical device) is literally criminal and company executives ought to be going to prison for it.
Anyway, to get back to addessing your comment: even if we do fix the zoning code to make cities walkable (which we definitely should do, by the way) and cars become a niche product that only rural people and folks who have to drive around as part of their job have, it still doesn’t fix this issue because (a) it’s important to protect the rights of owners even of niche products, and even more importantly (b) cars are hardly the only product category that manufacturers are trying to pull this shit in anyway.
TL;DR: stopping the erosion of ownership and fixing car dependency are orthogonal issues, this article is concerned with the former, and your suggestion only addresses the latter.
Hear, hear. This isn’t a case of Mercedes selling an upgrade. It’s more akin to selling the car pre-booted and then demanding a monthly payment to remove it under threat of returning to re-apply it if a payment is missed. It’s absolutely a protection racket. Sure would be a shame if something happened to those fancy features we installed.
The good news is that the companies who will float this first are the ones most likely to do business with politicians, and unfortunately I’m cynical enough to believe that the best way to get regulation in place is to personally inconvenience the decision-makers. I hope that results in action.
If it doesn’t, well, the next step is self-help. If we’re changing the definition of private property, it’s only so long before people begin questioning whether there’s any point in having private property at all.
Damn ok. Yeah I get what you mean.
I don’t think the problem is the companies necessarily though, or the erosion of ownership… The problem is ownership, private property and private production. As long as we’re dependent on private companies making our means of transportation, and as long as we insist on owning them, the more they will have leverage over what we can and can’t do with them. The only solution, in my view, is to remove ownership entirely, and simply provide a product to the public, that is shared and used and “owned” by the community rather than the property of an individual. Hence public transport.
Fundamentally I suppose the fix wouldn’t be very different regardless of the perspective on the issue.
Still, companies do have a right to do this, at this time, and I think it’s dangerously delusional to deny it. It’s indeed “crazy talk”, as you put it, but that’s because capitalism is a crazy system that shouldn’t be allowed to continue! Protect the rights of the people by providing them with their rights, rather than having them buy them from Mercedes.
Still, companies do have a right to do this, at this time, and I think it’s dangerously delusional to deny it.
On the contrary: there’s a very important distinction that I’m trying to make between an entity having the “right” to do something and merely being able to “get away with” doing it. The framing of issues matters, and I believe ceding control of said framing to the neofeudalists is far more dangerous than being accused of “delusion” for pointing out the way things are supposed to be instead of accepting the corrupt status quo at face value.
Ok, I think you have a point there.
I still think it’s meaningless though. “A fine is a price”. If they can get away with it, they can do it. I don’t think there’s much of a point in relying on legislation to determine whether something should be done or not. Fundamentally, whether they have a right to it or not, they shouldn’t do it. Meaning they shouldn’t have that right, if they do.
“The way things are supposed to be” according to who? Capital? The law, written by capital?
Public transportation FTW.
But here in the US that will literally never happen.
I guess this would open the way for some new manufacturers of “non-smart“ vehicles.
I’ve wanted this for years. A car with modern engine and safety features, but none of the other bullshit.
Isn’t that literally that Tesla’s been doing with their Ludicrous mode? I guess with them, it’s a one-time fee.
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