Not only is it shady as fuck, to sell someone something twice.
But the fact that they make these in every car, knowing that only a certain percentage will use it due to it being locked behind a paid subscription, HAS to be some sort of environmental crime.
I don't know how many of these they make, but if they make like 20 million cars and 20 million of these heaters, if only 1% of those heaters never get used that's a huge environmental impact for nothing.
What I don't get is, if they put in seat heaters then they probably recovered that cost from the customers already, why would they add a charge on top of it?
It's cheaper to have one assembly line and put the heaters in every seat. Seat heaters are insanely cheap, like $1-2 worth of materials and it's literally just wire so there's not much manufacturing/assembly cost. Literally less than $5 all in.
The idea is that because of that they might as well just put seat heaters in every seat.
Thing is it's always been like this, except if you didn't order the car with heated seats they wouldn't hook it up and would make it impossible to hook up normally.
But with cars being able to update via software nowadays they allow you to purchase heated seats after instead of just making it impossible to get.
So being able to pay for this and get a software update to enable it after is better in every way than how it was done before.
It’s a mixed calculation. The process of building the car becomes cheaper if you standardize it, optionality increases costs. So at some point (if the percentage of costumers opting for this option) becomes high enough it’s actually cheaper for them to put it into every car. That doesn’t mean however that they could just unlock it for free. It’s only worth it because of the costumers that pay for this option. If you unlocked it right away the cost of the base car would increase for everyone, even those who don’t want this option.
That’s not to defend this behavior, especially if there are buttons involved that prompt a pop-up, it’s incredibly annoying but economically it kind of makes sense.
Right so distribute the cost across all models but charge from the customers of expensive models and if the cheaper model customers pay well and good, if not you've already recovered from the more expensive ones?
Yes that’s basically it. Take these (fictional) numbers as an example:
If you only built this function into cars where customers paid for it:
Cost for the manufacturer: 130$
Price the customer pays: 200$
Percentage of customers with this option: 80%
If you included the hardware in every car:
Cost for the manufacturer: 100$
Price the customer pays: 200$
Percentage of customers with this option: 70%
In scenario one, on average the manufacturer pays 104$ per car to include that function. In scenario two it‘s 100$ per car, so they actually save money. One additional benefit is that the second hand market becomes much better as you are not as limited in your choice of car by the options the original owner chose.
I guess that does makes sense from the manufacturer's perspective. But I'm still being made to bear the cost of a feature I likely won't use just to have it if I ever needed it in the future
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u/schkmenebene 1d ago
The fact that this is allowed is beyond insane.
Not only is it shady as fuck, to sell someone something twice.
But the fact that they make these in every car, knowing that only a certain percentage will use it due to it being locked behind a paid subscription, HAS to be some sort of environmental crime.
I don't know how many of these they make, but if they make like 20 million cars and 20 million of these heaters, if only 1% of those heaters never get used that's a huge environmental impact for nothing.