We start again with a strange Germany in Europe:)
Germany; don’t do this please…
Just don’t buy it
That strategy repeatedly fails, companies in the same market will see it extracting more profit and start doing it too.
Then don’t buy their products either.
Just don’t buy any car if they all do this in the future? People need a better answer, don’t find comfort in “just don’t buy it”.
How about you just stop consoooming. There will always be cars without this and if there aren’t: there are more sustainable modes of transportation anyways.
Why is this bad in a nutshell.
A) The only way to control access to this feature is to lock down and phone home. If it doesn’t phone home then when someone figures out a way around your present security its possible for someone to sell said features forever. Such DRM could hurt repeatability by accident or more likely on purpose.
B) There is no reason to fail open so even if BMW is still chugging when they stop taking your cars phone calls and retires those servers you get no more feature.
C) The amount spent over the lifespan of a car wherein people opt to take care of their valuable asset absolutely dwarfs the cost able to be extracted up front
D) This functionality opens the door to a hacker not just turning off your features but turning off your car. This includes state sponsored attackers and people who are just generally pissed off at the geopolitical actions of your country of origin. If you are in the US that is a lot of fucking people.
E) Product segmentation on average increases the amount you can extract per user. Allowing segmentation by features turn on or off in software by the month it allows far greater segmentation with no reasonable expectation that the baseline will be lower. This means the lowest end user of a model pays the same for even less. The median user pays somewhat more and the max user pays a LOT more.
F) This means wholly paid for used cars now come with a car payment to the manufacturer.
Now there are half a hundred people on the boards of these companies and 338M of us in the US. 449M in the EU. There is no reason to allow this misfeature to continue to be a thing in our markets. If automakers don’t like those restrictions any one of them can opt to most of the most valuable markets in the world and find their fortunes exclusively in China while their competitors eat their former marketshare.
C and e don’t sound like bad things
All of it is a reason for people to vote not to allow it. This can be accomplished federally or via initiatives in states. If a handful states comprising 30-50% of the pop wont allow it then it will be dead.
Seems like forcing liability would be more successful
More successful or more beneficial?
Forcing the company to be liable for the data they collect would be more likely to stop them from doing it than trying to outlaw them collecting it
No it wouldn’t because poor people can trivially be kept out of court all kinds of ways from binding arbitration to half assed enforcement. As a rule if you want someone to NOT do something you have to tell them they can’t do it!
No it wouldn’t because elected officials don’t represent poor people
But we’re talking about buying new BMWs anyway. Your logic was just too stupid to not laugh at
Forgot one that was mentioned up-thread, which was that even if you don’t pay for the fancy suspension you will still have to pay for fancy suspension parts if they break.
I can easily foresee the drm services or servers being shutdown, like the Microsoft music server…most you bought can no longer be used if moved.
Eventually they will “retire” this model and shut down servers. Making the car maybe driveable, but won’t have stuff you paid for I bet.
Plus, eventually someone will unlock this with a hacked car software patch anyway.
Insurance company’s will start testing for hacks and denying coverage.
The level of subscriptions has become insane
“We’re pivoting from serving peasants to fleecing rich dumbasses that subscribe and pay monthly fees for features built into the car.”
And they’ll make money doing it. Because there will never be a shortage of people with more money than sense.
eh, rich people car shop as well, and there is plenty of competition in that market. of course some people will still opt for BMW, we just have to hope enough go elsewhere to make them lose marketshare. but… it’s not looking good so far.
Ngl, i don’t see how bmw gets any sales when Mercedes exists. If you are actually rich a Mercedes is almost objectively the better vehicle, if you are just trying to show off the Mercedes is a better status symbol too.
If once you do not succeed, just try again next year. They tried and backtracked putting heated seats behind a paywall not even a year ago see here.
Unless laws are made to make this fundamentally illegal, they’ll just keep pushing until it sticks. And once one manufacturer succeeds, they’ll all follow.
Since 2019 you have to pay 800$ a year to have your bmw use adaptive drive, 150$ to use the app.
So you purchase ordinary suspension but get active suspension that works exactly like ordinary suspension and cost like active suspension to service…
It’s time we get legislation that gives the consumer access to all key pairs used in the product they purchased.
No, we need to legislate that you should be able to use the hardware features that come with your vehicle without a subscription. What will the average consumer do with encryption keys? Even then, you’d need to decrypt and rewrite the ECU or other system that controls this hardware to run your own version, and if that doesn’t work, you’d need to have hardware to manually intercept communications between the suspension and the system verifying your subscription, and intercept the signal to always send an ok signal.
The hardware has full functionality from day one. The limitation is in what software you are using.
Active suspension is not a hardware feature, it’s software collecting data from sensors and by analysing the data being able adjusting the suspension to “optimal performance”. Just because certain hardware can be controlled by software didn’t mean it has to be The software, “BMW Smooth Comfortable Cloud Ride Software”, is included free of charge!
BMW also offers “BMW Hyper Advanced AI Premium Sensation Masculine Active Road Experience Pro Suspension” as an optional subscription for alpha males and people with too much money in their pockets.
The outcome of what you are suggesting will be a slight change in the phrasing of the product offering at the most.
With access to the keys, the owner can subscribe to the BMW solution, unlock the features in breach of the agreement with BMW by not subscribing or get a software solution for the car from another provider.
I never disagreed with that, I asked what the purpose of having an encryption key will be, you are creating some magical step between “subscribe to the software” and “don’t pay the bill” that doesn’t require modification of anything but somehow just requires encryption keys
In my experience there always someone willing to create everything from homebrew software to software activation. Especially if there’s some money to make on it.
lol thanks for the downvote. So you’re asking the average consumer to pay the grey market to write aftermarket untested software for their vehicle that will replace the car manufacturers active suspension software on their vehicle, and can be activated as such because they now have access to the encryption keys. That was what I was trying to ask in the first place. Glad we cleared that up
Haha… connection to server cannot be established. Suspension resetting to default.
At least in the case of games, the servers are an ongoing expense that adds value to the game. I want to play against other people online and provide by that costs ongoing expenses.
Oh you think this feature will function locally… I’ll bet this goes from their app to their servers first to verify subscription and then to your car. Someone needs to pay for the subscription verification platform.
You know it’s just a matter of time before this shit starts being applied to budget cars.
…I really hope the tech crowd is working on jailbreaking this garbage.
That would be the ultimate way to stop this. Let them put the hardware in, and then not make a cent off it, because a third party enables it for the customer.
We try. We also pivot to open source to try and regain control because it’s the only way. We even share our passions with those who ask.
You folks just roll your eyes and put more money on their hands.
This “tech crowd” and “you folks” dichotomy is not helpful at all. Tell people how they can help, volunteer, donate etc, don’t wedge gaps between the same class fighting against the same ruling class. I’m a software engineer. I write open source software. I get that it’s tiring and you can see the worst in people when doing it, but we’re going to have to be better than that if we want to change things.
And for those reading like the top commenter, don’t sit on your hands and wait for “tech folks” to figure stuff out. It’s us vs. corporate greed, not “us hoping the tech folks save us from corporate greed” or “us tech folks being badgered like we should be some saviors against corporate greed.” Write your representatives to tell them this isn’t ok. Be mindful in your selection when you purchase a vehicle. Ask your tech savvy friends and family what you can do to help. You aren’t helpless in this, and as OP said, just sitting and waiting for something to be fixed or changed doesn’t help the overall goal.
I wrote it as a tongue in cheek against the OP that said “…I really hope the tech crowd is working on jailbreaking this garbage”.
Surprise surprise, that comment is sitting with 49 upvotes 1 downvote, mine that you admonish is on 27 upvotes 13 downvotes.
This kind of proves the point. The “tech crowd” doesn’t owe you anything. Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world, you don’t know how much of my personal and professional life I have spent fully on open source.
Get up your feet and talk with your family, representatitives. Legislate this shit away. Nobody accepts food products that dont have a recipe or with unknown ingredients. Nobody accepts engineering projects without plans. Demand open source and interoperability.
dismissing our warnings as some nerd turf wars for decades aint helping anyone either.
no amount of talking to normies will fix this because you would rather listen to the corporations. and this precedes any form of action.
What exactly do you propose the “normies” do? Is there some non-corporation making road-worthy cars? No? Let me guess, you want a family of 5 to bike 2 hours to the nearest school/park/grocery store in the snow on rural roads with no shoulder just to avoid paying a corporation? Take the nonexistent train?
who suggested bikes?
let me just say this: if facebook were known to be doing the shit it does today in 2002, it wouldnt have fucking flied, because normies trusted people more than they did corporations.
no need to make up that huge strawman when you could have properly read what i bothered to type out.
There are basic rules for coming up with these types of product subscriptions:
- Is it something a large number of customers can’t live without?
- Is it something that costs money to support and continue developing? Subscriptions help defray that cost and loyal users are happy to keep it going.
- Will the feature be actively used on a regular basis, going forward?
Now apply these to seat warmers, suspension adjustments, self-driving, or whatever else shows up in the future. If you don’t hit all three, head back to the drawing board.
P.S.: This isn’t limited to cars. It’s equally true for any hardware product.
So, you buy a car with all these features, but you don’t pay for them. They are disabled by default. You jailbreak your car, everything works without paying extra, but then you realize, you broke your warranty.
My warranty doesn’t cover jack shit anyways.
Should be fine on a bmw, they will start breaking after the warranty
Thanks, I gladly stick with my old non-BMW car!
In what way does the suspension require regular servicing or an online connection to a server to function? That would be the only reason to offer it as an ongoing service cost.
Otherwise, you’re just paying extra for something already in your car, not for an actual service, which would make no sense?
What next, paint ongoing service fees for having wheels? Not even for ensuring they’re regularly replaced, serviced, or repaired, just for the ability to use them at all…
Active suspension is software, just like Photoshop is. You need to pay subscription fee for Photoshop now, and BMW wants a subscription fee for their active suspension software too. Rent seeking and Enshittification.
Except that you have to have special way more expensive shocks to have adaptive suspension compared to fixed. It’s like being sold an I3 CPU for the price of an I9 cpu while being told you can pay a subscription to upgrade to the full performance
I feel like in this case it’s more like everyone gets sold i9 hardware, but can choose to pay the i3 price for it with locked out features, then decide later to pay the subscription to unlock the i7 or i9 performance. It has advantages for the manufacturer in that there are fewer options to account for at build time and additional revenue later on. I still think it’s a terrible model that should be summarily rejected by customers, but I see why they are trying it.
Nobody is giving away i9 hardware at i3 prices otherwise everyone would buy the cheapest model and part it out for massive profit.
Yeah they’re totally not charging you for the expensive suspension they’re installing in your car in the hopes that you’ll pay a subscription to use it. 100% not included in the price, clearly no one would ever do that
Btw, Intel has tried this practice before, and I believe still is doing it for some Xeons.
Intel is a unique name with unique products globally, who the fuck is BMW globally?
That’s not an excuse for Intel to be shady…
And BMW is one of the most valuable car brands out there. I don’t get why you’re pretending that BMW is some unknown entity. Unfortunately, many people will swallow BMW’s bullshit.
Id probably be angrier if this was some company making econoboxes, but if enshitification wants to target the cars of the rich, fuckin’ go for it.
The people driving those cars are probably closer to you than to the BMW CEO. They’re the same price as what trucks sell for these days and at some point they’ll reach the second-hand market and their price comes down quick.
True. I just bought a 1-year-old 330i, and it’s less than my wife’s Kia SUV (We live in Michigan, have three kids and two dogs, so it makes sense for us to have one big bus that can go off-road, else we’d have something smaller and electric). The BMW also costs far less than a pickup truck of the same age and mileage. US manufacturers have been transitioning out of the business of making sedans for years, because they’re not popular here. It is just a sea of SUVs and pickup trucks.
I do have a subscription to all kinds of “connected car” crap for the first year, but I’m going to turn all of that junk off when I make some other modifications later this year. I think the subscription is actually pretty cheap, but I just don’t want a bunch of spyware reporting back my location and speed.
Yeah, but they’re idiots
At least with Photoshop (as bad as the model is), at least they are actually running the software and storing and backing up the associated data for it.
With the car, it’s all local to the car without BMW having to incur any expense for that functionality to keep going.
We long left the era where we “own” things that we buy. As everything is a computer now it has become very simple to control stuff that remotely that was working on its own before.
So the answer to “why would <CORPORATION> do this” is simply: “Because they can”.
Every tiny decision is guided by increasing profit. No matter the side effects (short or long term ). Because with many shareholders administering pressure to maximize profits there’s only one way to go (even if it’s a dumb and shortsighted decision) maximizing profits NOW. If you are not doing that because you can see that increasing profits now will hurt profits in the future then you are hindering the project. You have to increase profits now, because if you are not then your competitor is doing it and that is a problem. If you are not going with the project you will be out of a job sooner or later. Then someone will take over that will make the decision you couldn’t do.
This is a race to the bottom. Morals, integrity, honesty, responsibility and foresight are only obstacles in this logic (because the competition is not bound by them which gains them an advantage).
It’s simply cheaper now to build everything in the car always and run an operating system that manages all these things and can control what you are doing in your car.
Cory Doctorow held a great keynote about this some ~10-ish years (?) ago with the title “The coming war on general computation” where he explained the side effects of putting DRM in every stupid appliance. The side effect here is that we cannot hack our cars to switch on the heated seats (or whatever other feature BMW is not allowing us to use for free) because of DRM. It is not “our” car, even though we bought it.
I didn’t wake up this morning with the knowledge that I’m about to move to Pennsylvania and convert to being Amish.
This is a side effect of deregulation of both corporations and the stock market. I think that we’re going to see the pendulum swing towards more regulation and consumer-friendly policies here in the US. I don’t see that lasting for the long-term, though. There are too many vulnerabilities in the political system that allow asshole billionaires to manipulate it.
it’s not the system that is the problem, it’s the lack of class consciousness, in America the rich have it, but not the working class
Well done BMW. Anything that leads to more people cycling instead of driving is a good thing in my book.
Nobody’s gonna abandon cars as a whole over this, the same they wouldn’t abandon bicycles as a whole over some other outrageously monetized luxury feature they could live without.
Sorry, your bicycle’s gear selector is locked into a single gear until you pay your subscription for the other gears.
Fucking LOL’d at this. Genuinely not sure if this is satire.
People won’t switch from driving to cycling over this. They’ll just pick one of the several dozen other car manufacturers.
until every manufacturer implements it
What if the cycling option is a really REALLY good bike?
If the bike does the biking completely for me, has hvac, reclining seats, can do 65mph down the highway and can take care of my morning wood taking into account remaining travel time, I’d be interested. That indeed would be a really good bike.
I suspect most BMW owners won’t care too much. Like they’ll find it annoying but still buy/lease the car anyway.
Now, I can “kinda” see the rationale behind optional features on a car being either enabled via software or subscription. I believe the permanent enable price should be the same as if you added the hardware to the car as an option.
As to why this might make sense for a carmaker. In my work I’ve visited car manufacturers before, and from what I could see it’s quite expensive and adds time to support the various options when building a car. You see they have the main production line, and units are pulled off the main line to fit the options at various points and then reinserted and this causes problems for efficiency and price per unit I think.
So, there’s probably a cost saving to making the base car have all the options fitted and having a completely standardized production line. However, the expense is likely going to mean if they sold the base car at the usual base car price they would either lose money, or at the very least, the profit margin wouldn’t be worthwhile.
However, if you know a certain percentage of people will want the options, and you can enable it with software later, it’s possible building the hardware into every car as standard would work out overall cheaper. They might also be able to upsell to more people by making a subscription option, perhaps with maybe a free trial for the first say 3 months of ownership. That is, they turn everything on for 6 months for free, then revert you to the package you paid for. Hoping that you liked some of the features and will pay or subscribe to keep them.
What I don’t like is when this stuff might become ONLY available as a subscription, the overall move toward subscription models for everything irks me a lot. I’d much prefer we still get to choose a package, and have the ability to upgrade later.
So I think my point is, the argument “the hardware is there anyway” doesn’t really work, because they are likely going to install the hardware at a loss, on the assumption (backed up by their own numbers) they will sell enough to make a bigger profit overall.
They also likely bake into the numbers that a very small number of people will hack the car and enable the features anyway. The vast majority will not do this, though.
How does any of this benefit the buyer?
Asking for a friend lol
Well, I would say it SHOULD bring overall prices down. If the cost to build the top of the line model comes down to say the same as the mid-range model AND more people are say buying up. It means that competition would push overall prices down.
But of course not, it benefits the companies most, and given the choice of lower prices or more profit, they’ll choose the profit every time.
If they go subscription only (because recurring revenue is the current business buzzword, so of course they will go subscription only) then overall cost for the life of the car will definitely be higher yet “feel” more affordable.
So long story short… They do it for their own benefit. So why would any self respecting paying customer care about any of these reasons?
Pretty much how it always works with business.
yes so why should end user care about any of it besides price?
You’re right that the idea has come from the mind boggling number of options in vehicles these days. The company I worked for recently had over a million different combinations, and making more physical parts standard fit saves them money.
However that saving is not passed on to the customer. The company pockets it all, and makes more money on top with the subscriptions.
