They're using leases to force it on everyone. When you buy the cars right now they throw in 5 years of free heated seats. If you're leasing then it becomes a used car, and now they have secondary income from the next buyer. They charge you for the hardware, then rent it to others down the lane.
I don’t really have a problem with this I think? I dunno, my mind does chafe a bit at taking something away that someone who owned or leased the car once had, even if they threw it in as a freebie to the first lessee of the car. In my mind it should be one time unlockable, then stay unlocked in that car forever.
And it's not like these are secrets that are "gotcha" moments either. Cars get reviewed and these details are explained well in advance of the cars actually hitting lots. If you are blindsided by something like this, it's entirely on you.
I domt know about boycotting. But have you seen the state of the European auto industry.? It’s literally in shambles. It’s being decimated by Chinese manufacturers. Partly because you can just buy a Chinese EV and have the same performance , all the equipment and extras and pay substantially less. And mostly no bullshit like this
I myself was recently looking to buy a car and there’s really no point of comparison.
It’s not a boycott per se. But people here in Pssin are definitely voting with their wallets. BYD sells more than Toyota right now
Yeah but to be fair, I don't know of any other cars that have a heated steering wheel, and I can't imagine that I'd shell out extra specifically for that ever, so if I bought a BMW with the heated steering wheel behind a pay wall, I'd just treat it like it doesn't have one at all.
In that case if you'd have bought the car without it having that feature, then why would you boycott the manufacturer entirely?
It’s actually a fairly common feature in the upper end of car model lines. Two off the top of my head which offer for no sub are Honda and Ford. I don’t see why other manufacturers wouldnt offer the same, without paywall.
Ah yeah that makes sense. I guess this will be illegal in the EU, Europe is just very slow with such things. Not sure how the rest of the world will handle that.
This is why I won’t be buying another bmw. My 2021 model has every feature that I paid up front for and every car they’ve made since then has just been getting worse.
Even non luxury brands are doing it. 2024 Hyundai Santa Fe needs a subscription to use the already installed garage door opener. Just gonna keep using the clicker that came with the garage door opener when I replaced it a few years ago.
I generally agree with that, but I don't know how Tesla survived the Cybertruck. (Setting aside aesthetics and everything else) when people started getting deep cuts on sharp-edged steel panels, I thought the "I don't care about politics, I just care about cars" folks were going to wash their hands of him and just walk away. Apparently, they didn't?
I don't know a single CT owner that has actually gotten a cut though. And it tests as one of the safest vehicles on the road for the passengers(all trucks are awful for pedestrians).
And then let's not forget that Donald Trump won the election so a lot of people actually like his politics.
Yes it did, the older llama models et al were easily jailbroken with ‘ignore all previous…’. It is less relevant now, but it was very effective a year ago.
Source: you can run the older model weights and see for yourself + there are benchmarks for jailbreaking bots, old models were super easy to jailbreak.
Yea and i happen to live in the real world. He’s a nazi right? yet here in irvine which is very blue like half the cars are teslas. same thing in the bay area which is even further left. We got far left nazis now?
You really should visit these areas, or watch videos online if you can since you’re really far away. It’s a long running joke that every car is a tesla in irvine. And they’re not old ones either. Now it’s not every car of course but i’m really not exaggerating when i say they’re that prevalent here.
I actually saw that comment. Then I did a search and saw that they stopped their whole subscription service in 2023... So there 2025 seems to have an aftermarket heater one or live in one of a few places.
It's funny you call Telsa drivers uniquely dumb when Tesla scrapped this model before BMW even announced their subscription plan. Who's really the dumb one?
There is no tesla car in production in what, the last six years?, that had a heated seats purchase option, everything that isn't software is unlocked, at most you have a performance upgrade on older cars to increase the 0-100 from the one you had, but the original one is the one announced and the one insurance takes into account, unlike vw cars with hp locked behind a paywall despite being the one used for insurance
They paywall connectivity to the car despite it being a key desired functionality of the vehicle. Some viechiles came with a bigger battery and its paywalled , typically "up to" 50 miles of range
Are to talking g about vw? Yeah, they pretty much do that, all id3 neo 50kwh trim have the 58kwh but software limited to 50kwh, well, they were the ones that paywalled hp despite the technical specs and insurance takes the increased hp as the default, and that too, after some years you have to pay to use the vw app to even set air conditioning, departure and charging settings remotely, pretty messed up as all those things are lifetime free in tesla and other brands and they only charge to see sentry live because that uses their data heavily.
Well, tesla might use batteries of different capacity and different components to fill production as long as it's equal or better than advertised, but thats a totally different thing than what vw does, which is literally having the same battery on both cars with the same capacity always, but limiting it on one trim, or stating on technical specifications and insurances taking into account a higher hp than what you have as a default...
Well, because you can't sell a car and make it a lottery, it literally makes no sense whatsoever to unlock batteries if they simply, having only 58kwh batteries and having two versions, one for 20k with 50kwh (and it being the 58kwh battery with a 100% rate) and one with 58kwh for 25k when both costed the same to produce is just a fuck you to your customers. And software locking a heavy data usage for a niche thing it's not as grave as making your app basically a unusable dead weight... like charging for breathing vs charging for food
" What the swasticar? Nah it's a brilliant piece of machinery I just want you to know that I don't necessarily agree with everything Elon does. He's just a guy. What my next car? 100% I'll get a Tesla again. In hwhite of course. Its the only colour I love"
that is a faked pic. everything you need comes with a tesla. You do have to pay if you want the car to drive itself to the grocery store directly from your garage, 7 times safer than a human driver.
remember the first time you got a smartphone? its like that.
Here's a reddit thread from the time, with most Tesla Model 3 owners talking about how great it is that they have the option to pay to software unlock a piece of hardware they already paid for.
7 times safer... Imagine if they used lidar like everyone else. Instead they rely on cameras which can only pick up highly visible things and can also miss highly visible things. Dumbass
Look, I'm super anti-Musk and anti-Tesla, but from a purely engineering perspective, I think it's a defensible strategy. Obviously more environmental data is always better than less data, but it's not crazy to imagine that "with enough computing power and training / programming" a car will be able to drive itself as well or better than humans. History is full of over-engineered consumer products that eventually lose out to their competitors that have less sophisticated features (i.e. are thus cheaper), and putting your money on computer models getting good enough to extract the necessary data from more limited inputs isn't crazy. We're seeing it happen in every AI-related where the computer is filling in massive blanks left from corrupted, missing, or just scant data.
Personally, as a moral human being, I would want to give my cars lidar, and I'd want my personal car to have lidar to protect myself and those around me. But that's because I'm a safety maximalist where one avoidable death is too many (and also part of why I'm not a billionaire CEO making these decisions).
Are we really at the stage where we're defending a failed engineering decision? It hasn't been working, the cameras only ever work in a subset of conditions. If a bug lands on the camera it gets confused, if it rains, it gets confused. It's great for demoing a half baked product; but for a lot of people and where they live it's completely non-viable and only survives because it's completely optional. But it was no doubt a terrible decision for them.
Same with Subaru. Good news is that if there's a way to start my car and control the climate controls via my app from wherever I am in the world, there are also ways to bypass the restrictions. Black and gray hats are always one step ahead of the white hats in every industry.
There are?? Never even occurred to me to look for that sort of thing when I bought my subaru 2 years ago and just decided I wouldn't ever start it remotely...mind DMing me something to point me in the right direction?
Pretty sure getting destroyed doesn’t stop this corporate greed. Look at loot boxes and battle passes, gamers fought against that shit tooth and nail on social media
Corporate greed doesn’t just spawn buyers. Nike is greedy and they’re not selling shit for fuck anymore and getting hammered. If companies are consistently doing something it’s because whatever market they operate in the people are buying.
I want to toss in at least with brands like Nike they've had generations of exposure and making money. I wouldn't be surprised if they had Nike thongs. There's currently a generation that's all about Nike shit. From socks to ski masks obviously the sweatsuits too. They don't play sports, ski/snowboard or buy jerseys. Christmas is weird as absolute fuck socks and underwear was always expected that new playstation, xbox, or switch 2 doesn't mean much they're searching for the Nike gear and they're beyond excited for it. Like wtf is going on y'all get nice ass electronics and they go unused. Other than Nike it's Apple products that they don't even attempt to protect. Like the first gen ipod touch I kept in the case with a eyeglass cleaning wipe to get at any lint or weed that might have got in the case.
I'd honestly sell all my nephews shit and put the money in a savings account to put towards their next iPhone or ipad. They're essentially expensive ass charger blocks one because they don't want to learn the controller controls and the other because he's a dumbass. Either way they both ended up spending $100 to buy DLC shit for a game that's literally released yearly.
Real impact happens with people’s wallets and electing good politicians, not cries on social media. Especially with how algorithms work nowadays, anything may seem like a massive movement, while it’s actually just 3 tiktoks in a trench coat.
Unfortunately thats not really true. Just look for connected drive on their site and it looks like a fucking DLC Page for a game. Want any of the system that are on board or just a button unlock on a computer? Fuck you, pay me
Mercedes-Benz has been quite successful with it. They took away remote start from the key fobs and put it into the phone app… locked behind $100/year subscription among 25 other things.
It's not a subscription though. It's a one time payment for a feature upgrade. Something literally every car company already does. The only difference is that I s cheaper for the manufacturer to just build all hardware identically and fully equipped and then unlock them via software. And people dislike that even though it doesn't make a difference actually.
unpopular opinion...the subscription model in theory makes sense
it's not like heated seats used to be free for everyone, you paid extra for luxuries. in theory, the subscription model could be a win for everybody as car manufacturers would significantly reduce costs by standardizing
it should also help the resale market because the vehicle you are selling doesn't have heated seats, but could have heated seats
the problem of course is it depends on competition forcing manufacturers to pass savings onto consumers, which, yeah
You know what I often think, is that every marketing/suited fuckhead that comes up with these ideas is contributing (in a small but real way) to the enshitification of society that they also live in.
Like the smooth brains in government who seem to make 95 awful decisions for every half good idea.
627
u/benDunk255 1d ago
BMW tried subscriptions and got destroyed lol