The New Audi A3 Is Amess with In-Car Subscriptions

The Chinese carmakers will obliterate the western ones, it’s insane how these companies are trying so hard to destroy any possible goodwill people might have.

I strongly believe that cars should not be running internet connected software at all. This is a violation of your privacy waiting to happen, and in drive-by-wire vehicles, a homocide waiting to happen. Any of these subscriptions will require periodic phoning home, which means both the tower operators your car maker, and whoever they've done deals with will have specific, targeted information about you including your exact wherabouts, your financial information, and probably a mic and video camera feed in and around your vehicle. This is a dystopian nightmare. Maybe if the car was leased, or was a business vehicle, this could be justified, maybe. But for a personal vehicle your interaction with the manufacturer and dealer should be strictly limited. Given widespread ignorance about these capabilities and what they are used for, I'm in favor of regulation limiting these kinds of connections and transactions in personal vehicles. Some revenue streams are too dangerous and too risky to the public good to allow to exist.

I will not purchase a car with a subscription, period. If others are doing that, please stop.

&gt; but now you&#x27;ll have to pay an in-car subscription fee for basic features like high-beam assist, dual-zone climate control, adaptive cruise control, and smartphone integration<p>My 2019 fully paid-for-life ford fusion has all these features without any subscription. Thanks Audi for making me feel good about my purchase today.

Curious how this will be enforced. The stripper kia soul was sold without cruise control. But if you simply added the correct button and changed a wire harness, voila! Similarly, the hardware is obviously on the car, so will you have the right to try to use it independent of the software subscription?<p>There are going to be some interesting cases....

Lexus ES has an optional cloud navigation subscription. I don’t think most people sign up for it, because you can use smart phone integration, but it would be frustrating if you had to have a subscription for the smart phone integration to work.<p>I can see having a subscription for features which require ongoing updates, but the reality is that manufacturers will collect the money and probably not ever do much to keep software which implements features updated.

We&#x27;re going to need some sort of knowledge graph for all the different vehicle models, imagine how vague dealers will be when your looking on the lot. Wonder how crazy this will be once they start adding in-car ads.

The car industry is really hemorrhaging money if they need to resort to nickel and diming the consumers. The consumer segment of car transportation (ie, personal vehicles) is coming to an end.<p>I have yet to see any decent innovations in the personal vehicle segment. Designs haven’t changed in a long time. Efficiency is going backwards, at least in the US, as manufacturers begin to push larger vehicles for the insecure motorist.

How much do they actually earn from these? The hardware is already paid for. All the effort to create and maintain the subscription system, and the loss of good will, all for the unknown number of people who would actually buy and keep on renewing it.<p>I think it is a net loss for all. Except the consultants who recommended this to get a monthly assured income, that will never materialise.

The market should take care of that. An easy way to differentiate your company compared to Audi.<p>I actually bought a second hand base model Kia, swapped some parts to enable auto head lights and cruise control (changed the steering wheel to the one with buttons for cruise control).<p>Swapped the shitty mp3-stereo-radio shit unit with Aliexpress Android 4gb 2Din with specially made Kia-fitting front panel and parking HD camera. And added usb port mounted tire pressure monitoring system. Now I have almost all the features of the higher trim, except folding mirrors (this would be expensive to find and retrofit because new wire harness will be needed). Total cost ~1000 EUR (mostly for the android and some wiring work).<p>Parts can be found in EU at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rrr.lt&#x2F;en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rrr.lt&#x2F;en</a>.

In my experience, the higher end of the product and more often you end up paying extra for features you take for granted. The hotel business has been this way for years with extra fees for all kinds of things that a basic, decent hotel gives you as part of the stay. Think parking, internet, breakfast. They aren&#x27;t always the best quality but they are included in your rate. You don&#x27;t have to pay extra.<p>Hell, even resort fees are a form of subscription that are typically not optional - unless you are part of some negotiated deal with the chain. It&#x27;s all about hiding the real price to make it appear lower.

Too bad they don&#x27;t know the subscription pricing for these features, the one-time purchase pricing, or whether it will apply in the US as well (just EU is known so far).<p>I don&#x27;t have high hopes that the pricing will be reasonable, but IMO as long as you can still buy it outright for a fair price (and when you sell it the next owner doesn&#x27;t have to pay again), then I don&#x27;t mind subscriptions being an option.<p>But my guess is that even if prices are fair to begin with, they&#x27;ll eventually become unreasonable-seeming as consumers get accustomed to having in-car subscriptions.

It really doesn’t make sense to lay out a lot of capital costs to outfit the cars for features, while driving the customer payments for that capital down by asking for subscriptions.<p>Or maybe you baseline the price higher so it doesn’t matter if only 50% of the customer base pays, but now you’re putting yourself at a price disadvantage vs competitors so don’t put partially utilized cost components on their cars.

I look forward to buying a cheap “base” car that requires a ton of subscriptions… and then not buying a single one, keeping it a cheap car.

My Audi from 2018 has car play for free... this is absurd....

Does the emission cheating also require a subscription now?

It is not really a new system but the type of features to put behind a paywall is. My car (also from the VW family) has some features which need an extra subscription. But either these are included for the first 3 years, which aims the whole system at second hand buyers, or include features that are not really needed. To be fair we already payed for overpriced features in the past. It was mainly assumed that they will go together with special hardware. But most of the time that wasn‘t actually the truth. „Get the media+ package for Apple car play and sat navigation“ etc. they just try to move some of these packages from the configuration within an AppStore. I still don‘t look forward to a system with monthly&#x2F;yearly subscriptions.

a mess