So far there’s subscriptions for cruise control, adaptive beams, various navigation options, apple/google integration and my favorite, dual-zone climate.
Weird that across many industries they keep adding things consumers hate but get away with it because everyone else is doing it. How do people still believe in the premisis of capitalism when consumer choices range from ineffective to flat out impossible.
Wonder how much that ends up costing per month and how much that ends up costing over the lifetime of the vehicle.
Assuming the lifetime even matters when they decide to just cut off subscriptions at some point in the future to turn features off to drive you towards buying a new vehicle and dumping this one like a good consumer.
I wonder then the jailbreaking will start and how many fatal accidents it will cause.
I mean I know all car companies are going to do this so this is a tangential point but why the hell would you buy an audi anyways?
Their reliability scores are fucking atrocious on audis.
The only thing german engineering is actually superior at is generating ultra rightwing nationalism.
I mean. America’s isn’t doing much better on the engineering front. Ford and Chrysler issued the most recalls in 2023 apparently. GM is also in the top 10.
No doubt, though I would point to the US automakers being too busy being obsessed with annihilating worker power and unions over the last 50 years as the primary reason American cars suck. Instead of paying engineers to spend time innovating and improving their designs they paid harvard business assholes to micromanage workers and strategize how to shuffle vehicle plants around so that workers organizing for better treatment would be least likely to happen effectively.
that last sentence of yours had 284 charcters.
Super smash bros only has like 90, I am dominating.
The way I look at it (as a German car owner myself), you gotta be able to afford repairs, and you have to do maintenance. Too many people wait 10k miles to do an oil change and no car should be treated that way.
I totally agree. I’ve had my 2011 2.0 TDIe Audi A6 now for about 7 years. Never had major problems, though I specifically selected a diesel engine as the TFSI engines are crap. I also do pretty much all of.my own work so only pay for parts when something happens, which of course helps keep costs down.
If anyone is repairing or diagnosing your own vehicle in the WV group, make sure you get the VCDS software as it helps a ton! I got some cheap clone via eBay but it’s worked just fine for many years for me.
“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.
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.
Sorry what? Did I buy the internet? Is the internet in my garage?
Or you can just purchase any of those features permanently
The subscription model for features on a car is shitty for a host of reasons, but at least they’re still offering the option to buy them outright like normal. If you really value ownership then at least you can purchase the car and buy these addons up front.
I’m going to go against the grain here and say I do see why they think doing this could be attractive to customers. I’d wager to say that ownership of their vehicle isn’t a priority, just look at how many people lease their cars now vs buying outright. This is a market that will have the car and replace it within 3 years. So these type of people may purchase upfront an extra they absolutely do care about and must have, but if there’s something else they’re a bit unsure of, they could leave it off, get the subscription for a month to try it, and then decide if they want to continue on a longer plan to keep the feature.
Looking around a bit, it seems like you have a myAudi app which you register your VIN to which then lets you access the additional features.
https://www.audiusa.com/us/web/en/about-myaudi/vehicle-functions.html
Problem with that is that it implies that you are the one purchasing the features for that vehicle. If the vehicle is sold as used then you unlink the VIN from your account so that the new buyer can register the VIN to them. Then the new buyer seems to have “nothing” and has to “purchase any of those features permanently” again.
With such a system in place, I could imagine that a proper Audi dealership can be authorized to “continue a permanent subscription” to a new used car buyer (or Audi can just offer those sorts of upcharges at the point of sale).
Regardless, permanent only likely applies to your ownership and not to the vehicle itself.
The subscription model for features on a car is shitty for a host of reasons, but at least they’re still offering the option to buy them outright like normal. If you really value ownership then at least you can purchase the car and buy these addons up front.
The problem isn’t just the subscription model itself, the problem is the means by which they enforce it: by infecting your car with DRM.
When you buy a thing, you’re supposed to own that thing, which means you have every right to modify it in any way you see fit – including to “unlock” any physical capabilities of it that aren’t enabled to begin with.
What these car companies – even ones offering to unlock your property for a “one-time” fee – are doing is trying to destroy your property rights, and that ought to be entirely unacceptable to everyone.
I hear you, but the vast majority of Audi customers just won’t care about this DRM or property rights on their car. If they’re leasing then it’s irrelevant as it’s never their car in the first place. It just won’t even be something that they even consider.
What their customers will care about is the fact that they don’t have to financially commit to getting an “optional extra” up front, but instead can pick and choose when they want to use it.
Yeah, that’s why the correct solution is legislative: the DMCA needs to be repealed and the practice of hijacking people’s property with DRM needs to be outlawed instead.
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.
Thank you Audi for making my car purchase this year just that much easier.
retards buying subscription based cars need to grow the fuck up and recognize a principle for once
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.
Least stupid car brain
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
dumbest fucking timeline. A subscription for a feature that requires no infrastructure and is part of the physical thing you just paid $40k for.
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!
For real dude.WTF.
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
Or they just all decide to do it, and you have no choice.
See also: “smart” tvs
Because gullible consumers keep paying
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.
I WILL pirate car. My property, my rules, so fuck you.
YOU WOULDN’T DOWNLOAD A CAR
Don’t copy that jalopy.
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.
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
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
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…
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.
Doors this apply to Europe too?
Has this been cracked, so people using these features bypassing the paywall?
From the article:
It should be noted that this subscriptions-for-features model applies to the European-spec A3. An Audi spokesperson declined to comment on whether these in-car subscriptions will also make it to the US when the car goes on sale for 2025.
Seems like this practice is banned in the EU, yeah.
The Dutch article that they look to doesn’t say what they think it says. In Netherlands there are legal implications to change the amount of power of engine after it is sold.
The article doesn’t is solely about engine power. Not about any other subscription option to enable something.
I also wouldn’t see how a stupid subscription would be banned by some EU law. Aside from e.g. engine power.
