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This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 74%. (I'm a bot)

> Mercedes-Benz is to offer an online subscription service in the US to make its electric cars speed up quicker.

> "Mercedes is asking you to pay for hardware it has already installed in the car - and which it presumably already made a profit margin on when you bought the car."Trying to leverage even more profit out of subscription services is a worrying trend and I hope there is a consumer backlash against it.

> The Acceleration Increase subscription is listed as "coming soon" on the US Mercedes storefront, with no exact date given for its release.

Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: subscription^#1 car^#2 second^#3 pay^#4 Mercedes^#5

when i read cyber punk books as a kid 20 years ago i thought that they were over the top and comically delusional in their predictions of the future!

and here we are now ...

WRT BMW’s heated seats, honest question. What happens when you buy the subscription and the seats are broken? Does BMW pay to have the feature fixed since you bought the subscription, or are you on the hook for that too?

What do you think. When it's broken, they say you own it.

When you start fucking with critical drive systems on a pay-to-play basis there's going to be a mistake made and someone will die as a result.

If we had anything that looked like meaningful corporate regulation this would be illegal.

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When the revolution comes, MBAs will be the first one against the wall lol

Sort of like when the old school garage mechanic fucked up your carburetor and then said he could fix it... for a nominal price.

If you're going to introduce performance degrading software into your cars, expect people to do one of two things:

1. The will stop buying your cars
2. They will buy your cars and then figure out a way to undo your shitty software limits

Either way... your money-making scheme will bring down a world of shit PR. (What moronic executive thought this would be a good idea? The one with the most stock options?)

Not a great comparison, because Netflix didn't build the tv and then charge you a subscription to unlock the feature ( yet ) haha.

It's mind blowing how the public go along with the tighter and tighter control the corporatocracy have on them.

Sounds illegal. Probably is illegal. Definitely should be illegal.

Orwellian

First subscriptions for heated seats now this bullshit. Next they will introduce a subscription fee for the ability to turn on your engine. They are just price gouging the customers. Best thing to do is boycott their cars until the price gouging stops.

Spaceballs AI voice

"Your payment for 'Braking function subscription' was declined. Braking function disabled. Good luck!"

You’ve ran out of car starts. Purchase more to start car.

It may not be "performance degrading software" - you can maybe think of it like computer overclocking a PC. Though if you go back to mainframes, they've been doing that for decades - the physical hardware is often more CPUs/higher speed than what the company is licensed for and additional capacity can be enabled after the fact (sometimes even temporarily - need extra capacity for quarterly closing reports, you can do that with no downtime). Compute services have almost always been "pay for what you use" and you don't really think about how the vendor makes that happen, but when it becomes too obvious, people kinda freak out.

I don't know what the terms of warranty on Mercedes cars look like, but there would definitely be parts that wear faster when pushed to higher power output so having a "we give you the hardware with parameters tuned to last the lifetime of your warranty for $X and if you want to push past that, we'll let you do it but will charge based on expected additional costs to replace worn parts within warranty".

Some people really want the performance and would be willing to pay for a bigger engine up front, but the electric motors are probably cheaper to maintain one SKU and differentiate in software/pricing to account for the extra component wear - people who aren't pushing those limits don't pay for it.

Have they considered going back into car manufacturing? And make decent cars like they used to 30 years ago.

This trend sucks.

The supposed benefit of a subscription-based service is that the consumer receives some type of regular improvement, new content, or maintenance. You, the consumer, are paying somebody to work on a product regularly and, as a result, get to enjoy the fruits of that labor. I might pay for a newspaper subscription to get new content (or new printings), Netflix to get new shows, or a cell plan to ensure the network is maintained (and expanded).

Breaking a feature on an already-sold product and then charging continuously to "maintain" a one-time unlock seems like something closer to... extortion.

I thought this was satire the first time I saw this.

Dumb, but whatever. Much more reasonable as a one time purchase than a subscription

People can always choose not to buy it.

I see this as the eventual goal, using the mobile gaming model. You can start your vehicle once every, say, 8 hours. Or you can buy Ford Bucks and use them to start your vehicle whenever you want. They will run media campaigns around the idea that people who find themselves in trouble for not having a working vehicle due to the restrictions were "irresponsible" with their "free" start, or simply "foolish" for having a vehicle in the first place when they "obviously couldn't really afford one".

At what point do we start jailbreaking our cars and flashing in new open source plug-ins that unlock everything.

Yep. I seen it in games years ago and I’m seeing it creep into life. They can’t resist that delicious cash flow. Why pay once when you can get people to pay forever?

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Car companies will take the risk when they make more money than they have to pay out to the victims family. GM was guilty of this a few years ago

Holy shit.

I know this is BBC...but it's satire, right? No fucking way a company would screw with a critical system such as that?

this is not at all comparable to overclocking.

overclocking exists because chip manufacturing has always had a very high variance in product quality, due to extremely complex designs. instead of testing the limits of each individual chip, several sets of minimum standards, used for product segmentation due to performance differences, are put in place during the prototyping stages of chip design. chips are then tested against those minimum standards.

since the standards for each product segment are minimum standards, most chips will have additional performance headroom left over if the user chooses to tune that specific chip for its specific pecularities.

in contrast, electrical engines are very simple constructions, and the manufacturing tolerances are much much smaller, meaning that engineers know pretty much exactly what the performance limit is during the design phase, way before even prototyping.

Some dude in Eastern Europe is gonna make a fortune off hacking this shit.

checks calendar

Nope, not April 1st.

Wow.

Brakes fee coming soon

Cost of doing business, money is more important than human life.

The GM recall scandal of 2014. 13 people died as a result.

Just stop around. If you really want one of these cars there is most definitely, at least in the states, going to be aftermarket tools/software/or service stations/etc. Available to unlock any of these options.

Sure, but you can overbuild by 20-40% for not much more cost in lots of cases, but wear on things like bearings and other moving components can change in big ways if you push above some level. Imagine a car with a 5 year warranty but it will need an estimated extra $5k of parts and labor if you drive it hard (using the 5 second 0-60 instead of the base 6 second every time you get on the highway) vs keeping it to the lower limit.

And it's very much the same as overclocking (aside from the fact that you don't pay the original manufacturer to do the overclocking). They sell you a part for a price based on the performance they're guaranteeing. In this case they charge you a higher price to guarantee more from the part.

In a world where it's cheaper to manufacture one physical SKU and differentiate in software, you're going to start seeing more of this kind of thing. Not everybody needs the performance that sells for a higher price. I'd bet that at volume production the cost difference between a motor that can only do X and one that can handle more is pretty minimal and some is recouped by not needing to change over any manufacturing to manage the different production schedules. You would definitely lose some segment of the market if you didn't offer a vehicle at the lower price point, though.

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Holy shit.

This just affirms what I said.

Capitalism, am I right?

DLC in cars.

>And it's very much the same as overclocking (aside from the fact that you don't pay the original manufacturer to do the overclocking).

It's not though, this is essentially just unlocking features that are inherently there to begin with.

Overclocking is essentially exploiting the specific performance a chip may or may not have. That performance headroom isn't necessarily there to being with, and it's not necessarily something that offers any benefit to the consumer (stability issues, power consumption, compute errors etc).

Overclocking is still... Get a motherboard that lets you tweak voltage, current, and clock settings, and push the buttons until you get somewhere. Most enthusiast chips are good for a fair bit over what the box says. Electric motors are similar - push more electric power through them and you get more power out at the wheel.

The only difference is that they charge you to flip the bits that the overclocking motherboards use as an up front feature for selling the board.

>Get a motherboard that lets you tweak voltage, current, and clock settings, and push the buttons until you get somewhere. Most enthusiast chips are good for a fair bit over what the box says.

Lol that's been completely false for the last few years or so, so you're talking out of your ass.

There's basically no meaningful headroom available on CPUs unless you start cranking out chilled water or liquid nitrogen (how does the normal consumer benefit?).

GPUs essentially have to be modded on the circuitry side to get any additional performance (but highly unstable) due to the power limits they have.

Would you pay a monthly fee to "overclock" your CPU? I think not.

People do all the time. Look at cloud computing pricing, or old (even modern) mainframe stuff. Customers demand compute with burst capabilities that they only pay for when they use.

This is peak stupid capitalism.

>For an annual cost of $1,200 (£991) excluding tax, the company will enable some of its vehicles to accelerate from 0-60mph a second faster.

What an idiotic idea.

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Really.... It's about the "monthly fee" part. No car needs that. BMW took severe flack for a monthly fee for butt warmers. Sell the car... not a monthly fee schedule.

That might be, but would you be upset if you walked in and they were like "we have this car ... It's $80k, or we can install the performance software on it and sell it to you for $100k"? Or would you prefer "you can pay $80k and if you decide you want the performance upgrades you can have that for $100/month and take it for the months where you use it" or similar.

Or maybe you buy it and the fact that you never licensed that option helps maintain your resale value due to less overall wear, but the next person could have the option to turn it on if they wanted.

Imagine your subscription getting canceled mid drive

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this perfomance software will also allow them to tune down the car to make consumer spend money on repairs and/or new vehicle. No different old iphones getting slower.

monthly fees for product you paid for already that every other vehicle have is beyond dumb.

Iphone getting slower made some sense - there's lots of weird considerations in UX, but getting slower to ensure that the battery lasts through the day makes a ton of sense as a default.

You wouldn`t download a car!!

it doesnt when the version prior to that perfomed at peak capacity as long as user knew how to prevent updates. Problem is inability to go backwards in version made it impossible to go return to peak perfomance.

Sure... I could make the case either way - the fact that I think someone doing UX research on the experience of having a phone run out of battery before the end of the day could reasonably find that a majority of users would prefer a little slower but not running out and make a product case that the best way to ensure people are happy with their phones longer would be a software update that does that.

The fact that it's a reasonable outcome makes it hard for me to say they did something wrong. The fact that I can also see how someone might disagree doesn't change that.

The fact that apply was forced to pay a fine for this bad practice basically it is illegal.

Narrator:

A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

Just because the courts got it wrong doesn't mean the choice was bad. Also doesn't mean it was illegal, just means someone found a court that would listen and it was cheaper to just pay something than to fight it.

When a reasonable person could flip a coin and come up on either side of the outcome is an indication that it's not wrong. We'll have to disagree on this. Later updates, I believe, better tuned things and gave more options, right? The first version of the feature is rarely perfect.

That just means you were wrong in first place. If you can provide proof of non-deliberate tampering and take a fine, then yup, you purposely made mistake. If you cant fight it, then yup, you purposely made mistake.

This isnt a flip of a coin, this is deliberate. Unlike a flip of a coin, you can always roll back software. Apple doesnt allow that.

Think again, that’s not the same thing at all.

If it costs more to fight it than to pay the fine, you pay the fine and move forward. It's not worth wasting the resources on the fight, learn from it and improve the UX moving forward. They didn't break anything with the update, they just re-tuned some operating parameters.

Can you explain how people aren't constantly paying for features that they use only during the duration of their use?

that retuning is what users complained about and they ignored it. Imagine retuning something and u end up paying 113million, because you cant win it in court.

Why not just have a credit card reader in the dashboard, in case we want to turn on the wipers, heat, or air conditioning? Greedy fucking bellends.

This is a yearly subscription to unlock something in a car you bought. Cloud computing doesn’t involve equipment that you own. It’s rent.

You can rent a car for a limited time too.

A straight comparison would be to buy a throttled GPU and pay rent to unlock higher speeds.

Buy adding this feature, Mercedes isn’t improving their car in any way, they’re simply trying to get customers to accept a new pricing scheme.

You can win but it's going to take months and millions of dollars to litigate - it's a distraction and not worth fighting. Doesn't mean they did something wrong, just that they got to a number where it was cheaper to pay than to fight.

if it was cheaper, they could just avoided the whole court cases long before it got to court. if it was just a retune, you could just fix it long before it even getting to court.

Mainframes are often delivered with more CPUs in the box then you're licensed for. You can call ibm and have them enable more at any time and only pay for them while you use them. The machine is sitting in your data center with double the power that you can use.

This has been how IBM does things for decades.

I'm unfamiliar with this pricing model. But I'm quite sure a mainframe comes with yearly service fees, software licenses, etc, that makes it quite different from a one-off purchase in the first place.

I recently helped shut down an old Oracle database (physical + software) that cost our company $100k/year. Again, different pricing models, different expectation. If you buy a house, would you want to pay a subscription fee to have access to heated floors?

Eh... Users complain and file suit or whatever and even if you fix it they still pursue the case. They had fixed the issue with additional controls by 2018, the settlement happened in 2020 based on a case filed in december 2017.

The states were charging that apple was making changes to cause people to buy new phones, apple was contending that they were trying to prevent unexpected shutdowns due to old batteries losing capacity over time.

it happened between 2014 - 2016. apple admitted in 2017. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42508300

It wasnt just shutting down. It was straight up perfomance lowering.

I live in EE, on generic sales websites you can find dudes that can unlock any features on your BMW, Mercedes, VW, etc. All for 50-100 euros. Pay 100 euros one time and all the features are unlocked forever. Those guys are going to make a shit tone of money due to this stupid policy.

That's true. But also, you have hardware in your data center that can be turned on and off with a phone call to IBM (and assorted monthly or one time pricing). The maintenance contracts etc are tied to what you're licensed to use. Software licenses tend to cost way more than hardware, but in all of it you only pay for the things that you use. (Or ... You pay for the things you want to use, but they can be dynamically enabled or disabled.)

Other industries are trying to go a similar way. I've heard that some heavy equipment companies want to sell some sort of uptime/operating guarantees and not necessarily specific equipment. That might mean you need 5 trucks but they ship 6 to your site and some spare parts etc because that gives them the flexibility to have spares and deal with downtime/repairs while still hitting the contract requirements. If you put that 6th truck in service, those numbers might be missed or if you want to have 6 operating then the contract goes up.

The issue prior to that fix was that the phones shut down mid day due to running out of battery. Lowering performance on a phone with batteries degraded to the 80% level or worse in order to not have it shut down before the end of the day makes sense.

When the feedback you're getting is that people are complaining that their phones are shutting down and you then task some engineers to fix that, you get a fix. Apple said early on that it was a small number and it probably was, but lithium batteries have somewhere between 500 and 2000 charge cycles before they degrade to that level so over time more and more of the older phones would start falling into that mode.

But the accusations early on were "you're making my phone worse to force me to buy a new one" which wasn't the case. From an engineering perspective the change made the useful life of the phone longer (fixing the battery life issues).

Yes, but it's clear that your examples involve a negotiation in which the supplier is trying to more effectively match the buyer's needs.

This is all about building one car for everyone, but locking parts of it down with software. This reduces production costs. The value for the customer would be to upgrade/downgrade features at will. But so far, car makers haven't sold it very well, I think.

Cause and effect. Feedback forced statement. Statement forced lawsuit. Denial of the problem and hiding problem under the rug has consequences. that is full 3 years to admit fault. This is for things that are fully software controlled.

Imagine for cars. Normally perfomance u paid for now software controlled with pay 2 get getting perfomance. How easy it is to nerf perfomance to force a new purchase? even easier than an iphone.

There’s a disclaimer that basically says the subscription is only valid as long as the hardware can support the service, and at some point in the future they can unilaterally decide that the hardware is no longer supported.

M-B needs to get its head out of its corporate arse. This will turn a lot of potential customers away.

My question is about what happens when they buy the car and don't pay the sub? They just put extras in that bmw for no reason? No way, they definitely included the hardware in the cost of the vehicle. You're paying extra because they can charge extra.

When it's broken then it's hardware issue. Subsctiption is just for software.

I think the "car makers haven't sold it very well" is more of the issue than building one physical model and enabling/disabling bits with software to meet customer needs.

I don't need a <5 second 0-60, so the option to not pay for it makes sense. There's definitely some people who would pay for it. With gas motors you get the difference between the base model and the performance model, with electric - it's software and not a bigger motor. Seems fine to me. you need to have that base model spec available.

Fun times to be had when car people bypass the subscription hardware with a couple of jumper cables and a switch.

A hacked electric car would be quick as fuck. If you are fine with draining the battery quick they can takeoff like a rocketship.

You vill own nussing

I will take out a loan for the Benz, and finish paying once they give me the acceleration.

Unfinished product for unfinished payment.

Don't need to last long if you're going 5x escape velocity and arrive in 10 minutes.

I’ll get you a funnel for Christmas so guzzle Mercedes cum faster

“Please pay $49.99 subscription fee to use brakes”

Hot take but people who use the pedal break can not drive. Engine break is much better and more fuel efficient.

Brake pad salesmen hate him!

It’s just ecu flash or code injection to turn on disabled map. Not as complicated as you would wonder.

Unlocking blocked mapping should be way safer than a custom tune by a shop.

Have they ran out of ideas how to make stuff?

thats not anywhere near the same as overclocking. nor is it acceptable business practice.

if you want a suitable IT analogy, its like pre-installed ransomware, it locks down parts of your devices functionality until you give in to the blackmail and pay up.

Which car company do you work for ?

It causes more wear on your clutch and motor. I'd rather pay for new brakes than a new clutch or car. Sure it's necessary when going downhill, but the real mvp play is to keep enough distance and drive passively enough that you don't need pedals or motor brake. If you see a red light early, just go of the gas and let friction bring you to a stop.

Similarly I see a lot of impatient people overtaking one car at a time accelerating and braking all the time even on a motorway.

Modern clutches are made for motor breaking the motor breaking destroys you clutch is an old myth.

A major one.

The claim is that it is cheaper to make them the same than to have different manufacturing to the different specs, so they would be (and were) putting the hardware in there anyway but turned off to differentiate between trim levels. Dunno if it's true but seems lots of car companies have done it over the years so I assume so. To me the issue is the wastefulness of trying to create fake differences between trim lines in that case, if you are putting it in anyway then just include it in the lower trim.

I know why they don't, as people will pay to get some features and if seat heaters are on the "important" list then they definitely don't want to give it for free when it can be a hook to buying a whole bunch of crud you don't really want.

Back when I drove a manual, sure, engine braking was easy. But my current automatic takes a good 2-3 seconds to downshift in manual/tiptronic mode, a massive pain in the balls. So I think I'll stick to using the pedal dedicated to slowing my car down, thank you very much.

It is better for the environment to keep an old vehicle running, cash for clunkers in the U.S. and the push for evs are nothing more than a mask to drive profits for these large corporations.

Everything in the future will be a subscription, because it is more profitable. Do not buy smart appliances, because soon they will be subscription based. Want to flush your toilet, use your dishwasher, take a shower, use a coffee maker or water kettle, stove or microwave....Literally everything is going to be on a subscription.

This is not going to go well for Mercedes. Shall we start the clock at 7 days until this is no longer a thing?

The forced Ads on the car’s display will say something like: Did you know you could have saved your uncle if you had airbags super plus enabled? Begin your 2 days trial today!

Now Introducing *Tata Motors: A car that will outlive you"

But without the cool parts, just the depression corpo overlords controlling everything bit

Oh yea I never drove an automatic I only ever drive manuals but even so engine breaking is even more important in electric cars as they can generate a lot of electricity from engine breaking extending you millage massively but even more important is that you never fill up a electric car to the brim because if you do so engine breaking will no longer work if the battery is fully charged to avoid overcharging the battery.

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>They will buy your cars and then figure out a way to undo your shitty software limits

And there is already a black market that exists for this. It removes software limitation to reduce engine performance to reduce environmental emission. The thing is, you can do that and have more HP but if you have an accident and your insurance gets in, you are in hell of a trouble if they find out that your software is modified. Insurance INVALID

Let‘s hope a bunch of great devs group up to show Merc and the other fuckers how easy it is to overwrite their system by a custom OS. Fuck vendor locked systems… Customers should give a shit on all of those subscriptions…

What’s the fuzz about. What they actually do is the same thing a tuning company would do with a chip tuning. Now you can do that directly from the manufacturer, with a click.

Look into the Right To Repair movement. Farmers in the US are currently facing exactly this dilemma regarding their tractors and are fighting this through the courts for the right to fix their own stuff.

Toys for the wealthy. :-(

kinda like cable company?

I actually love that luxury brands like Benz and Mercedes are doing this. Continue to tax the people who have more money than sense.

Some will argue this will trickle down to the lower end brands if consumers don’t balk, but I don’t think so. Since the more mass market brands are fairly commoditized, they largely compete on price, so it’d be a bad strategy for say, Toyota or Chevy to do this. They might try, but they’ll see a lot more pushback from potential buyers than the luxury brands would.

Yeah, you'll be able to root it, depending on skill level. There will be a reliable percentage of rich fucks who never both to, though. It's like they figured out the math already on this.

That’s not overclocking, that’s renting a computer FFS.

idk.... but if someone demonstrates that they cannot be trusted with x acceleration or y speed... can be downgraded. think this could be an interesting "feature." or now lets add geolocation to this... automatic school zones... or upper limits on speed for locals/roads

Just wait until someone is in an accident and able to argue that it could have been avoided if they had been able to accelerate out of harms' way just a little faster.

> I actually love that luxury brands like Benz and Mercedes are doing this. Continue to tax the people who have more money than sense.

It's stupid, but it's hurting BMW and Mercedes Benz owners . . .

5 years ago I would have called the cautionary tale of Rush's Red Barchetta libertarian nonsense. But it's sounding more and more like reality.

I reread the Sprawl Trilogy a couple years ago. Hadn't read it in twenty years. It sure hit different! What's really meta is the presence Gibson has on Twitter and what we're witnessing now with THAT.

The whole product as a service model makes a car (brand) stone cold for me. That bmw and mercedes does this kind of crap is beyond me. We are no longer customers, we are money taps.

I sincerely hope that they loose a great chunk of their net profit and that brand trust takes decades to build again.

This is aimed squarely at company car drivers and/or finance buyers who will move on from the vehicle after 4 years. Personally, I like to buy and run a car for up to 10 years. I would not buy any car with any form of subscription. They are simply gouging the customer. Just say no.

you vill eat ze bugs

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Then they'll introduce a safety feature to detect that and completely lock the engine because bypassing existing safety features "has unexpected and unreliable results"

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