The New Audi A3 Is Amess With In-Car Subscriptions

absquatulate@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 454 points – The New Audi A3 Is Amess With In-Car Subscriptions [Update]
motor1.com

So far there's subscriptions for cruise control, adaptive beams, various navigation options, apple/google integration and my favorite, dual-zone climate.

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dumbest fucking timeline. A subscription for a feature that requires no infrastructure and is part of the physical thing you just paid $40k for.

If only we had people shouting from the rooftops for decades (100+ years?) to warn us about where capitalism inevitably leads... How could anyone have seen something like this coming??

There is infrastructure involved with monitoring subscription status to make sure you're not pirating heated seats. Also for taking payments to unlock your adjustable lumbar supports. They gotta pay for it somehow!

There is actually infrastructure involved.. payment infrastructure, servers, modems and cell connectivity. Sure none of those things would be needed if there weren't subscriptions, but there certainly is infrastructure used to verify your subscription and cut you off when you miss a payment.

The logic behind the concept originally made sense, they manufacture just one car with all the features as that reduces manufacturing overhead by a ton, much more than what they would save by having one with heated seats and one without (especially when multiplied by all the possible configurations), but instead of only providing the model at the price point with all of them enabled, they disable some for the cheaper models - this is possible because car prices aren't really based on how much they actually cost to manufacture.

This then lead into allowing people to pay to enable the features later if they wanted to, because why not, they are already there. Iirc Tesla was one of the first to do this with unlocking range, performance and "self-driving" stuff.

And finally it morphed into a subscription option because hey, if you only need heated seats a few months a year, why pay for the others? Only $10/month! And $15 for that, and $5 for that, and...

Same goes for this Audi, the subscription is an option if you buy the lower spec model and then later don't want to pay the full price to enable the features permanently.

The logic behind the concept originally made sense, they manufacture just one car with all the features as that reduces manufacturing overhead by a ton

Yeah, at the 'minor' cost of the fact that the method of enforcing that market segmentation relies on using DRM to infringe upon everybody's property rights.

Sure, that "make sense" -- if you're a capitalist sociopath trying to turn consumers into serfs. But we sure as Hell shouldn't let them get away with it!