So far there’s subscriptions for cruise control, adaptive beams, various navigation options, apple/google integration and my favorite, dual-zone climate.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
I WILL pirate car. My property, my rules, so fuck you.
YOU WOULDN’T DOWNLOAD A CAR
Don’t copy that jalopy.
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.
dumbest fucking timeline. A subscription for a feature that requires no infrastructure and is part of the physical thing you just paid $40k for.
If they keep doing it is because it keeps working
This title is Amess
Welcome to Lemmy.
Living in an Amess Paradise
and so the enshittification continues…
That’s not what that word…you know what, fuck it. I give up. Enshittification now just means “becoming worse” and I won’t be able to stop that.
i guess the enshittification of enshittification is part of the enshittification then?!
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Just buy the audi and come to your local electrician, he will turn on all the functions, id rather die than let this shit happen. Tesla heated seates need subscription? Heres a 20$ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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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
Least stupid car brain
“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.
