So far there’s subscriptions for cruise control, adaptive beams, various navigation options, apple/google integration and my favorite, dual-zone climate.
Can’t wait to start pirating cars.
Those ads in the early 2000s were prophetic. The answer is yes, by the way. Yes I would.
indeed, yes you should. civil disobedience is the best term for fighting uncivilized barbarian bullshit like this in the first place.
This shit should be illegal. When you buy a device, you own all the hardware and have every right to use it to the full extent of its physical capabilities. Audi has no right to hold your property hostage!
How else am I, a humble car artisan (cartisan, if you’re feeling naughty), supposed to continue to generate obscene levels of wealth for my shareholders if I can’t continue to milk customers?
That’s the neat part: you’re not!
Nope.
If you are leasing subscriptions it makes sense. Or for certain features.
I couldn’t care less as long as the option to buy remains. I’d almost certainly end up subbing though on my next lease.
Why do you hate property rights?
Mans dad is the regional manager at Audi of Greater Akron
Assistant to the regional manager.
Yeah, that’s what he said. Assistant regional manager.
I WILL pirate car. My property, my rules, so fuck you.
YOU WOULDN’T DOWNLOAD A CAR
Don’t copy that jalopy.
Goodbye warranty then. Many manufacturers have already been doing that with chip tuning, which is also just a software modification. When you take your car in for service they read out the ECU to detect chip tuning, and your VIN gets flagged in their system if it has been modified. So if at some point in the future you make a warranty claim, you are SOL.
Then there’s also the technical barriers they’re putting up, locking them down so unauthorized software can’t be flashed to them (much like Apple’s iphone and ipad crap).
Why would anyone sign up for that? Now you have your car payment AND the fucking subscription? Makes no damn sense. What happens when they inevitably shut down their cloud servers that keep your access to the features in the car turned on? You never own the thing.
Ah yes, the moment you to have to break the law to own the stuff you bought. Audi A3 jailbreak
What law do you break? I know it won’t be plausible for the general public because of warranties and all that.
And some copyright things or something else will prevent repair shops from jailbreaking it for you.
But what would prevent you legally from jailbreaking your own car?
Nothing. And if they tried, you could sue.
>But what would prevent you legally from jailbreaking your own car?
the digital millenium copyright act of 1999
That doesn’t protect corps from you doing it privately.
it makes bypassing drm a felony
If that was true, in the courts, then every jail broken iPhone user is a felon. Maybe that’s true, maybe not, it doesn’t matter because it’s unenforceable and the govt doesn’t give a fuck.
No one would sign up for that, but I bet that car maufacturers will make it the only model available. As for the shutting down of servers: something something small print
“Or you can just purchase any of those features permanently”
This fact, hidden somewhere in the middle, makes the entire article pointless.
It still sucks that features are physically present in the car, but you have to pay to unlock them.
Just like a movie is already available for download on the Internet but you must still pay to download it. Unless yarrr not a fan of artificial scarcity.
Sorry what? Did I buy the internet? Is the internet in my garage?
But the movie is not on the computer in your house.
This would be closer to buying a house, and a washer/fridge are both installed, just turned off, until you pay extra to switch them on.
The hardware and software are already in the car, and you would have already paid for both when buying it. Adding a subscription to enable them after is just skimming off the top.
It might be a different story, if the price included them installing the relevant hardware onto the car separately, but not in this case.
We already built the expensive Internet infrastructure that allows any digital media, including movies, to be delivered to your computer for virtually $0 extra cost. However, even though the infrastructure was built you are “not allowed” to access the digital media unless you pay some arbitrary price.
In your example, having a washer/fridge installed in the house is not that different from having an Internet router installed in your house. In both cases the infrastructure is readily available and costs nothing to use but you cannot access the services for artificial reasons.
I’m obviously not defending Audi as I think it’s a ridiculous concept but this is already happening at a large scale.
However, the sole function of the internet infrastructure of your house is not exclusively for movie distribution. You can use it for other things, and do, so the example doesn’t quite line up.
Your example might be closer when it comes to rate limiting for ISP services. The network bandwidth that you could get from the actual hardware is often greater than what you paid for, and you only get extra if you pay the ISP more.
But even then, that analogy falls apart a bit, since there is a scaling cost to the ISP associated with you using the internet more. It actually costs them more to do that, since it puts extra load on their servers/network, which would both put wear on hardware, and require them to purchase more powerful hardware to account for the capacity.
Not so for Audi. The hardware and software are already in the car. They have no ongoing costs to pay associated with many of those systems, since they’re local to the car itself. Smartphone integration, I could see a case for, if they do it by routing the connection through their own servers, but not a lot of the other things, like the adaptive cruise control, or Carplay/Auto.
That exactly the house white goods in Cory Doctorow’s “Unauthorized Bread”.
dumbest fucking timeline. A subscription for a feature that requires no infrastructure and is part of the physical thing you just paid $40k for.
There is infrastructure involved with monitoring subscription status to make sure you’re not pirating heated seats. Also for taking payments to unlock your adjustable lumbar supports. They gotta pay for it somehow!
There is actually infrastructure involved… payment infrastructure, servers, modems and cell connectivity. Sure none of those things would be needed if there weren’t subscriptions, but there certainly is infrastructure used to verify your subscription and cut you off when you miss a payment.
If only we had people shouting from the rooftops for decades (100+ years?) to warn us about where capitalism inevitably leads… How could anyone have seen something like this coming??
If they keep doing it is because it keeps working
Because gullible consumers keep paying
Or they just all decide to do it, and you have no choice.
See also: “smart” tvs
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.
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!
This is what happens when cars are basically a necessity to live.
Oh, you’ve got some other magical way of transporting goods across huge physical distances?
Horse and buggy ain’t gonna cut it.
Yeah, I wonder what could transport me across ‘huge physical distances’ at a much greater speeds than cars, at a faction of the cost, and unimaginably smaller destruction to local & global habitats. I swear we had this tech at some point before strategic lobbying against it & ultimately defunding it (with no competition car industry profit margins soared, which is the issue og post focuses on). Unless you meant ‘huge psychic distances’, then lsd has desired speed.
But also short distances are a problem - cars are often a necessity within cities as well (especially with American mandated suburban zoning hellscape). Which is just stupid.
What makes financial sense does not necessarily make intrinsic sense.
As solution I am ofc referring to naked seagull riding. It’s fun, it’s aggressive towards other riders, no blinkers to use, many get killed in mid air collisions or as bystanders hit by cloaca bombs (since there are now no cars for birds to shit on & seagulls became giant). And they are fueled exclusively by fast food (to make them faster, duh).
Like pigeons from Korgoth
Blast from the past, haven’t thought of korgoth in years
Yeah, I don’t know what’s with my brainhole lately, I don’t know where it got that from in relation to a car post.
Im still mad about Korgoth not getting a series tho.
Least stupid car brain
retards buying subscription based cars need to grow the fuck up and recognize a principle for once
Dealerships love to sell cars by monthly payment. Subscriptions fit right into that model. Heated seats are just another $5 a month! So with <huge list of features> that monthly payment is only $330 a month….on a 9 year car loan. People will absolutely do this.
Absolutely insane to me that you’d pay $35k for a car, and then pay a subscription for basics like cruise control and phone connectivity. The free market free marketing again. Legislate against this now.
A fifth of users in the US rent the car itself via lease mechanisms. You aren’t the target.
Assuming there are discounts the folks leasing will use these options.
Why are you all over this thread shilling for a predatory subscription model by a multibillion dollar corporation? Very strange behavior.
Because this thread is an echo chamber. I know pointing out the target use case is very problematic and odd. I’ll be quite and you all can continue to ignore that a fifth of buyers rent the entire vehicle for 3 years and haven’t been doing it for 50.
I’m not even saying you’re wrong necessarily, but it’s just very weird behavior to take this aggressive of a pro-corporate stance on something I think everyone should agree is a shitty, unnecessary practice. Regardless of the use case, locking features behind a paywall is always a shitty thing for a multibillion dollar company to do.
People like the option. It’s not weird at all to believe that having different options for owning, leading, and renting allows more access to the vehicle and products. The original comment is about limiting how I pay for a car. Leasing+ subscription works for many customers.
A leased car with those options 5 years ago didn’t cost you a subscription, and now they will. You want the option to what? Pay more for something that you didn’t have to before?
Again, on both the Toyota and BMW, it was less expensive than purchasing the options. You did pay for them before. They were never free.
People like the option to have already installed equipment just not work if they don’t pay the subscription? Like the car already has the features and the company is saying “we included this equipment in the price of your lease/purchase already but if you’d like to use it you have to keep paying more.”
Even in the case of a lease, this is just anti-consumer bullshit
With BMW and Toyota it was cheaper to sub for 3 years than purchase outright. Yes, that’s an attractive option.
A fifth
Surely their target would be the four fifths, then?
Have they excluded that audience? As far as I know you can still purchase the vehicle or feature instead of lease.
Only by upgrading to the MMI navigation system do you get access to the app store. From there, Audi forces you into add-ons like adaptive cruise control or Apple CarPlay and Android Auto for a one-month, six-month, one-year, or three-year subscription. Or you can just purchase any of those features permanently—although Audi doesn’t say for how much.
Sounds like you’re right, but people are still right to be wary of this scheme, as the additional market segmentation will likely push up the cost of buying the feature outright. Audi is incentivized to push as many people toward the subscription model as possible to decrease the value of used vehicles.
I will worry when it happens. The car market is very competitive and vehicle reliability, safety, and feature set has improved significantly in the last 15 years.
You’re worth blocking
I’m so fucking sorry I pointed out the reality of people purchasing these cars. I’ll promise to never point out any data to you again if you just don’t block me!
You haven’t provided any data, just you talking.
Oh here, let me go find that very available data with a 2.5 second Google search since you don’t understand the car market, have probably never in your life purchased a new vehicle, and just want to argue.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/453122/share-of-new-vehicles-on-lease-usa/
This is trash I have to register and by the looks of it pay just to view the “statistics”.
You think they are lying? Jesus dude look on any dealership website and count the number of 3 year old cpo’s. This isn’t some exotic loan. It’s extremely common and you can find lease offers at literally every brand and dealership.
Edit : you might be viewing it via your lemmy client and so it’s triggering a login. I had no issues getting to it but I see what you mean.
No why would I need to buy a new car when my current one is fine
Then as stated, you are not the fucking customer here. Not sure why that’s so hard to accept.
Why? Who is going to buy it?
You when the only other option is to use public transport in a country with the worst public transportation of any western nation because instead of calling on the government to do something you said “it doesn’t effect me so why should I care?”
Bold to assume anyone has the money for an audi
If it’s profitable and they get away with it you know every other car company will do the same.
I come back to my question. Who is going to buy it?
I wish they had a remind me bot here because I think that this comment will age like milk over the next 5 years.
The answer is: enough people to make it profitable.
Lol. Bold prediction.
I predict you won’t come back to admit you were wrong.
But that’s not the only other option. So why would anyone buy it? No reason to create laws for a non-issue.
Can the EU please do something here? This is BS.
Not if German/French/Italian car manufacturers can make a profit on it
Update: Audi issued a statement noting that the upcoming 2025 A3 in the US will have “the same offer structure for Function on Demand as the previous 2024 model year.” That means only enhanced navigation with Audi’s Virtual Cockpit and adaptive cruise control will be offered as subscriptions. Dual-zone climate control and high-beam assist won’t be offered as subscriptions in the US. Specifics will be available closer to the A3’s launch in the US.
I can see the enhanced navigation being a subscription service, since it sounds like something that requires an external service to function. Adaptive cruise on the other hand…
Thank you Audi for making my car purchase this year just that much easier.
Just buy the audi and come to your local electrician, he will turn on all the functions, id rather die than let this shit happen. Tesla heated seates need subscription? Heres a 20$ dongle to turn it on forever. Hyundai remote start subscription? Here take this 80$ remote to start it forever. Bmw fake exhaust sound onley comes with M sports pack and costs over a thousand? Give me 10$ and ill turn that on and turn on everything else that is hidden.
Or don’t buy it and support the brand?
Every shred of evidence is that enough idiots will buy it and it won’t really matter. Then they’ll all do it.
That remote start actually relies on an external service, so paying for it makes sense. Evetything else though? Yeah, fuck em.
Remote start trough an app is not possible to crack, but if you add a remote control like you have for a garage than it just sends a signal to start the car and doesnt use any services.
I mean you could, the real problem is it’s probably not legal for someone to make kits to replace what you would need to.
100% legal, you can loose your keys and go to a lockpicker and he would make you new keys and add them to your car. Its not legal id you do this to another car in the night and drive away with the car to sell it 😂
Perhaps, but that’s still a little different than selling a kit that replaces the factory equipment to replace the app and would depend on how exactly it was accomplished, after all those infotainment systems have license agreements, while I may be allowed to modify the software for my own head unit, providing it to others probably isn’t allowed, especially if I’m making a profit. So while it’s the kind of thing that should be legal, I’m guessing if anyone started selling kits to replace the dealer app with a third party one they’d be going to court.
Your talking like you cant buy a third party HU and put it in your car with a third party app. Nobody gives a fuck unless you want to have a service guarantee, but those now last 1-2 years and basicly doesnt repair anything.
As much as I’d love for people to do this, there’s probably a ton of software safeguards to prevent this. Even if you’d get around it, those greedy fuckers will undoubtedly void your warranty. And somehow that’s legal too.
Maybe? With my Mazda, activating the navigation system was a matter of spending $10 on an SD card with everything preloaded onto it. Disabling infotainment warnings, reenabling the touchscreen even when the car’s moving, and even adding CarPlay to a car that didn’t support it was just a matter of a USB stick that tweaked all those things.
Yes there is a lot of safeguards, like safeguards so people wouldnt steal cars, but guess what, cars get stolen. Plus its easier to turn on functions that you want than steal a car, for audi MLB platform just reflash the MMI to an older version, unlock the hidden menu and turn on all the stuff you need. For this new audi I give half a year and there will be a version to unlcok everything like every year for the pas 20 years.
Just buy the audi and come to your local electrician, he will turn on all the functions, id rather die than let this shit happen.
And then Audi gets the government to prosecute you for
exercising your property rights“violating the DMCA by circumventing DRM.”The concept here is “ownership for me, serfdom for thee.”
Nope, they have no power to do this, than they would prosecute the people who create tools to do diagnostics, add keys, program modules. They have zero ground on this.
I guess you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t noticed the persecutions of folks making video game console modchips, John Deere fighting with farmers over who’s allowed to repair tractors (including an MOU that the media claims is “kind of” a win for famers, but nevertheless asserts that “modification of Embedded Software” is “illegal infringement” of John Deere’s intellectual property [sic]), etc.
Sure, nobody’s gone to prison for “jailbreaking” (which is already an absurdity that should never have become necessary in the first place) a car yet, but the DMCA Anti-Circumvention Clause is still the law of the land and unless that changes, it’s only a matter of time.
Because automotive industry is so big and wanted to do the same thing like other industrys, this law had to be passed RIGHT TO REPAIR. After this some xompanys like Jaguar, Ford, Peugeot put theyr programs for free online for everyone to use to repair their cars. Other made them payed but it was not a big sum. Now going in to 2015 when subscription stuff was picking up, we onley have Jaguar free. Others not onley made them more expensive but now you have to provide information about who you are and what you work, some even made you pay 15$ for 24h to let you connect to one vin number and just delete faults. But still you could and still can do anything you want to your car, Ive never heard anyone who got in trouble for moding theyr car. Expet when making changes to the odometer or the exhaust system/ eco system but thats another league. There are also standarts that dont let you change any light outside your vehicle but thats about safety. But talking about seat heating, remote start or other comfort functions, unless you want to have a gusrantee from your shop, nobody GIVES A FUCK what you do to your car.
Hard pass. I’m not going to own a car that spies on me or requires a subscription for something that’s already in the fucking car. Eat shit.
