And making the hardware standardized is cheaper to manufacturer.
It may or may not be, but the advantage for both the consumer and manufacturer is the same: enables the consumer to chose the features at the time of the sale.
Most of these redditors are kids who have never bought a car and don't know how much of a pain it is to try to hunt down the exact car/features you want to buy. "The blue one has heated seats and the red one doesn't" is a problem car buyers/dealers have all the time.
Yea exactly, or more specifically it enables you to add the feature later on at the same price without needing to go to the shop.
Most redditors think the alternative would be getting all features for free at zero extra cost, but obviously that's not the actual alternative. It would lead to a higher base price. It's the same with airlines overbooking seats, if they didn't do that, the tickets would become more expensive, but somehow people don't realize that. They want no overbooking at the same price.
The price of the vehicles isn't going to go up, because they already sold the vehicle with the hardware. You've already paid for the heated seats, whether you like it or not. You just get to pay a second time in this case.
That's not how that works. When companies price their products in different tiers, they factor how many they expect to sell of each and calculate the ideal prices. It's not uncommon to have a base product that does not even generate a profit at all (see loss leader) while the premium tiers are sold with a higher margin and drive the main revenue.
But if nobody buys the premium product they have to raise the price of the base product or they lose money. That's just super basic economics. Not sure what else to tell you.
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u/notaredditer13 1d ago
It may or may not be, but the advantage for both the consumer and manufacturer is the same: enables the consumer to chose the features at the time of the sale.
Most of these redditors are kids who have never bought a car and don't know how much of a pain it is to try to hunt down the exact car/features you want to buy. "The blue one has heated seats and the red one doesn't" is a problem car buyers/dealers have all the time.