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The New Audi A3 Is Amess With In-Car Subscriptions (www.motor1.com)

submitted 8 months ago by absquatulate@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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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[–] JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz -2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

The logic behind the concept originally made sense, they manufacture just one car with all the features as that reduces manufacturing overhead by a ton, much more than what they would save by having one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.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The logic behind the concept originally made sense, they manufacture just one car with all the features as that reduces manufacturing overhead by a ton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