I am not in the market for a car, but I don't think I'd ever want to buy a vehicle I don't fully own. Cars last for decades. That's a lot longer than short-lived technologies and standards, and especially online services.<p>Fortunately, this trend hasn't quite reached the motorcycle world yet, but I know KTM charges you to enable "rally mode" on your motorcycle.<p>I sometimes wonder what we will really own in 10 years. The operating system on my phone and laptop are already taking worrying liberties.
Everyone loves recurring revenue. They’ll find as many ways to make it happen as possible. From club memberships to entertainment and sports to software and and now durable goods.<p>On the other hand it means you can have partial ownership of things for a slice of time. As in housing rental, it offers flexibility (the alternative for people who can’t afford to build an average house is to build a shanty...
Who comes up with these ideas? I swear, there is a class of people (seemingly in charge of every decision at big companies now) who just sit there and try to come up with ways of extracting money from customers without adding value to the equation what-so-ever. I'm sure the guy who came up with this brilliant idea was paid a huge bonus -- while the engineers actually trying to make a better car get nothing.<p>It's so tiring to see this happen again and again everywhere. It seems actually doing things -- anything at all -- doesn't really matter to companies any more. Who teaches people that this is OK?
I used to think stuff like this was crazy and destined to fail but I've really become aware of how far my preferences are from the norm over the last 5 years.<p>I think people on average are very open to integrating many subscription services into their lives.
This is something that I’m warily watching as we move towards a predominantly BEV fleet. I don’t like the idea of subscriptions in software, and I really don’t like it when it comes to vehicles. It will be interesting to see how automakers deal with users who take matters into their own hands and start tinkering with code in order to access features that would otherwise be locked away if you don’t have a subscription. There’s already lots of experience in the ICE world of tuning the ECU, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them have a “secret menu” if subscriptions become rampant across vehicles.
The way the automotive industry thinks about market segmentation and now subscriptions is beyond frustrating. They want the same car to sell at 3 different price points, but because there is nearly zero marginal costs for most features the companies typically just build the top features in all the cars and then turn them off in the cheap ones. I see why BMW is doing this, but It still makes me angry.
> Say you buy a model with heated seats. You could pay for that feature only during the cold months of the year.<p>If I bought a model with heated seats, why would I pay to access the feature that I already paid for? As everyone else will point out, this is clearly a way to extract more money from customers. I can't see any alternative.
Sell a >$40k car, and bill ‘owners’ $10-20/mo for the entire life of the car for convenience features is an easy way to squeeze a few $1000s more from consumers.<p>It’s also a great way to get consumers to hate it after being nickel-and-dimed.