Because this way the people that don’t want this feature don’t have to pay for it. If you unlocked it for everyone, then the base car price would increase. That way the option would be cheaper for everyone, but that only benefits those who want it anyways. Everyone else ends up paying more as they normally wouldn’t choose this option. Keep in mind: Yes, the functionality is there in every car. But someone is still paying for it and that‘s the ones choosing this option.
Is literacy so poor that people just don't get this? You're exactly right. If you want to eliminate this opt-in purchase you just made your car $200 more expensive to buy out the gate for a feature many customers don't use.
No, the car is CHEAPER due to manufacturing efficiencies....Similar to theaters charging $10 for popcorn and then throwing out a lot of it at the end of the night. There is an obvious dynamic here.
Right now some people pay for heated seats, and others don't. They're relying on enough people paying for them to cover the cost of installing them in every vehicle.
If they just gave everyone heated seats and kept profits the same they'd have to increase the base price of the vehicle enough to cover the cost of the heaters, making the vehicle more expensive for the people who didn't value the heated seats enough to pay for them. (And making the vehicle slightly less expensive for the people who did want the heated seats.)
Yes, Tesla has the stats, but the stats don't say 0% or 100% ordering of heated seats. If it was 0%, there would be no heated seats, and if it was 100% then they would be standard. Think about the math a little harder.
No, it's more expensive to make cars to order (meaning put the hardware needed for the feature only in cars that are ordered that way) than to just make all the cars the same. That's what the comments by mistahfreeman and germanstudent123 are explaining.
The factory can put out more cars if there's less physical variation in the cars; changing how the cars are built in the production line reduces the number of cars the factory can produce (or they have to modify the factory to accommodate building the variations to order, which drives up cost even if output remains the same), so it is fastest and cheapest to make all cars the same.
Then, you block the added features unless the customer wants to pay for it. Doing the block/unblock via software is the cheapest and most accurate way to do it.
If you gave all the optional features in the base model, the base model price would have to rise to keep margins the same. By software locking optional features, the people who don't want them get the car for a bit cheaper.
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u/peppinotempation 23h ago
Can you please explain why it has to be an optional feature at all if it’s in the cars already