this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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I'm amazed that it's legal for a car company to sell you something, and then after you own it, remotely disable xyz aspects of the functionality unless you pay them more. How can that be legal? I own the car, it's MINE now, how can I not use every single thing that's in it?
Same reason it's legal for HP to brick your printer if you use third party ink. You violated their shitty TOS that none of us read because it's 80 pages of legalese, but you agreed to it.
hmmm yes I suppose that's true. Okay so let me rephrase: I'm amazed it's legal for a car manufacturer to even HAVE a TOS like that when you purchase a car. It shouldn't be legal to write language like "you are purchasing this but agreeing that you can't use it" ... wtf?
I agree that it's wrong, but I don't think, at least in the U.S., that there's any law against it. Like I said, HP does the exact same thing with their printers. I certainly would like for it to be illegal.
In Germany, BMW and VW both offer subscriptions for functionality already built into the car. BMW is notorious for their heated seat subscription here and the Mk8 Golf I leased for a while had a bunch of minor stuff pay-walled like automatic high beams, changing color of the interior ambient lighting, etc.
You can still outright buy those features but it’s totally insane to pay for something that’s already physically inside the car. And it’s not like these are budget brands that need to upsell a bunch of stuff to be profitable. A base Golf starts at €31k…
As for Tesla, at least where I am in the EU, there is only one feature offered as a subscription: a mobile network connection for the car. Keeping its SIM card active basically. That one makes sense, I'd say.
Then there are three "features" that you can buy outright after the fact: an "acceleration boost", that one is dodgy, and two levels of their auto-pilot/self-driving. The latter two currently do effectively nothing (especially in Europe that is also true for enhanced autopilot), so they are more or less an option to say "here have some money for future development" if you have too much...
No heating subscription or anything like that. I was going to say that I think the local laws seem to have at least discouraged them a bit, but BMW and VW are trying it too, so I don't know.
So I’ve been in discussions like this for equipment on trains. It functionally goes:
You paid for X. The hardware we plan to use for faster build supports X+Y. You can either:
I actually agree with the options prevented above. I just think that, as the owner, you should still have the right to reverse item 2 if you can figure out how. Especially if it’s out of warranty.
Don't like it? Don't buy it. Simple.
“Don’t like it? Move”
That’s the same dangerous logic. Heaven forbid people try to make things better.
First they enshittified Tesla and I didn't care cuz I didn't buy Tesla
Then they enshittified GM and I didn't care cuz I didn't like GM
Then they enshittified Toyota and I didn't care cuz I didn't buy Toyota
....
Then they'd enshittified everything, and since they also cut all corporate taxes and subsidized the oil companies my town has no public transit and I walk by the side of the road.
Lets be fair
TOSs you need two lawyers and an ai chatbot to explain to you, shouldnt be legal vs regular citizens.
They cannot expect anyone to read all TOS they get thrown in their face throughout a lifetime. Let alone understand them. Its often not written super clearly and not all users can even read the language very well to begin with.
I don't disagree. I'm just saying how things are, not how they should be.
I really wonder if there's a way to use LLMs just to point out every concerning thing in a EULA/TOS
To what end? Probably every eula/tos you click through has concerning shit that is against your best interest. Either you use the product or you don't.
Yeah but I want to know just how fucked I am when I sign it
TLDR If you're the consumer, you're always the fucked party of a TOS.
That’s why EULAs or other contracts are not necessarily legally binding if they contain specific parts that could be considered “unfair”; at least in the European Union.
You can give this a try
https://www.tosdr.org/
Probably not ChatGPT because who knows what was in its EULA and we couldn't use it to summarize it before agreeing to it.
Bet you could but not sure what that would get you. So you don't click agree to it. Now what?
Lobbying.
The captalism, American politics bought and paid for.
I mean you are correct to some extent. But I'm curious, how does this not happen in a system where the state has full control? The only difference is the consumer has no other choices and the "politics" don't have to be paid for as they are already fully in control.
Unless you mean to say that by the good graces of the government they'd never do that in a state run economy because it's morally wrong. In which case... Lol
People who say things like that don't understand what regulations are or that better regulated capitalism is probably what they want
State-run authoritarian economies generally aren't so money-obsessed that they pull weird shit like this, but generally suffer from drastic inequality, distribution inefficiency, and a general lack of freedom and innovation. The most effective economic models from what I've seen are hybrid models, with a regulated market system with some nationalized industries. Morally though, I also believe that a nation's economic system should be democratic and that people should have a say in how their workplace is run and who their workplace leadership should be.
Unless you pay them more every month. Not everything needs to be a subscription and they'll keep doing it unless people stop buying.
Because you don't own the car, you're just leasing the use of it.
I've seen a bunch of lab equipment do this as well. For some, there are firmware hacks available to enable features only available on models twice the price.
It's a bit inevitable. There's a market for a range of features - i.e. some people don't want to pay extra for extra features. But it's simpler (i.e. cheaper) to produce all models with the same hardware. So, to fill the market, some features are simply disabled in software.
Imagine buying a house but you didn't want to pay extra so one room is padlocked, or several windows boarded up, or a pool walled off.
If it brought down the price of the house, people who didn't need those things would absolutely take the deal, and that's the point.
do you think it'd be right for people to break into the room
Were the terms of the purchase in the contract that the purchasers weren't allowed in the room? If so, then no. That would be breach of contract and wrong.
To be clear. I'm not a fan of paid upgrades for things that are already physically included but inaccessible without payment. But I get it because it still brings the price of the thing down to those who don't care about having the extra thing.
The point is being locked out of something you own is immoral. People being will to take the immoral deal doesn't make it okay.
So, when Tesla installed a rear seat heater module that's unusable by the car owner because they didn't pay for it, is the heater module actually legally owned by the car owner (even though it doesn't work), or is it still owned by Tesla? If the module is legally owned by the car owner, does Tesla in this case only sell ability to turn on the heater module?
Oftentimes it's done because it's cheaper, though oftentimes it's actually more expensive but they calculate that money from licenses post initial sale gets them more revenue and margin in the end anyway.
Still, even if it always was cheaper for the manufacturer this way, the point here is companies should not be able to control something you physically own once you have purchased it. It's a dangerous precedent to set and things like this will creep into more and more products if we let it.
Companies have owned your hardware for decades. Apart from a few open hardware systems like x86, everything comes software or mechanically locked to the price you pay.