Technology

59979 readers

2715 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

461

The New Audi A3 Is Amess With In-Car Subscriptions (www.motor1.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

166 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So far there's subscriptions for cruise control, adaptive beams, various navigation options, apple/google integration and my favorite, dual-zone climate.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] -2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

The logic behind the concept originally made sense, they manufacture just one car with all the features as that reduces manufacturing overhead by a ton, much more than what they would save by having one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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

The logic behind the concept originally made sense, they manufacture just one car with all the features as that reduces manufacturing overhead by a ton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!