VW introduces monthly subscription to increase car power

So apparently we will download a car.

Its a funny situation: they a put larger battery in the car, which makes the car heavier. Then they derate the battery to give you less mileage with the added “benefit” that you carry with you a deadweight that you can’t get rid of and contributes further to reduced mileage.

And someone at VW looked at this and said: amazing idea.

My single take from this is that batteries have become so cheap that you can put more in a car and still make a good profit.

It would have been nice if the savings would be passed on to the consumer.

And then all we'll need is a federal government that's friendly to free trade and all of the domestic auto manufacturers will go out of business because they can't compete.

It might not happen this year, it might not happen this decade, but it will eventually happen.

Organizing your business in such an anti-consumer way is a huge liability, but executives who will have extracted all the wealth anyways will probably be long gone by then.

> Instead every saving is definitely captured by the manufacturer and the consumer gets to buy a car that definitely does everything but "computer says no".

Or enabling full power puts more load on the vehicle's components and costs the manufacture more in warrant and reduced resale values.

Suspect it is a bit of both, but without access to the books.

It is actually a good thing for consumers buying the base model as their car is effectively subsidized by those who pay for the subscription.

Note that here, subscription is just an option, you can also buy the permanent upgrade.

Why would this saving in particular get captured by the manufacturer?

Unfortunately I'm pretty sure that's the type of person who eventually ends up running all large corporations.

“I bought this car before Adolf became problematic.”

We’ve long known what kind of people run VW. They’ve been involved in emissions scandals since the 1970s, illegal kickbacks in 2005, collaboration with Brazil’s dictator leading to the deaths of Brazilian citizens in the 60s-80s, use of Uyghur forced labor as recently as last year, and the list goes on. On top of all that, they’re awful cars. This is just yet another reason not to buy a VW.

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that a company founded by Adolf Hitler behaves in this way.

I don't buy this much at all (without making any kind of opinion statement on tariffs).

They're going to do the same thing in Europe (where the US tariffs don't apply).

Subscription-based features that are already built into the car and only activated by software have been talked about since at least 2020.

Car companies have been leaning on (BS, IMO) software revenue since the days of the $100+ GPS data update sticks, at the latest.

I don't think this is the future any consumer wants, but it's the one we're gonna get from every industry where money can be turned on with the flip of a Boolean.

Another possibility is that without the subscription, the car runs efficiently and meets all sorts of emission standards. But with the subscription, all that goes out the window, because it's got to deliver more power now. It might be a new loophole to get around emission standards.

This is called transfer pricing. VW can make cars in the US, but barely make any profit, thus minimizing taxes paid to the US. The subscription payments however can flow freely to the Switzerland directly, where royalty payments are taxed at the lowest possible rate.

This is how pharma works: pharma entities in the US dont make any profit, because they send royalty to the IP holder entity in Switzerland, where these royalty payments are taxes at the lowest rate possible and profits are sheltered that way from the US and EU taxation

https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/deadly-prices-pharma...

This is a reason also not to purchase a Tesla. Tesla's software subscriptions additionally have the problem that they don't work as advertised.

I guess I'm way more comfortable with a one-time purchase unlock (kind of SW "license" upgrade) rather than a subscription for hardware that I have 100% of the time.

Example: Acceleration Boost is a 2k one-time upgrade. Once you purchase it, you get it forever. EAP and FSD are the same: pay once, get for life. Those who purchased FSD before HW3 also got/get included driving computer upgrade. Of course this was done from Tesla to avoid backslash, but at the same time it was done without back-and-forth: they understood the situation and simply rolled it out.

FSD subscription makes sense because you purchase more "features", maybe for a limited time, for a much lower price.

If your daily driving is 20mi, you probably are fine with AP, and won't justify spending 4k on EAP, 8k on FSD or 100$/mo on the FSD subscription. But maybe if you trip for holidays for a few weeks, you can purchase the subscription for a couple months.

If you're daily driving 50+mi, or drive in very busy cities, I can see the 8k purchase offering some value if you want to keep the car more than 6 years (8k/100$ - 80 months, ~6.5y), and you can still try it out via subscription beforehand and decide to not pay the full price upfront.

Basically Tesla's model is mostly one-time license fee, except for FSD subscription to ease the access to software-powered features.

What VW is doing is selling you hardware, and then asking you to pay every month if you want to unlock its full potential. Honestly this should be illegal, a one-time fee should be the only way allowed. And I recognize they have the option of a one-time fee, but of course they're banking on people opting for the low-cost option and forget they have it active. EDIT: this is also the test bed for more subscription stuff, they want to see how people react to it. If there's no big backslash, expect more subscriptions to come.

The stranger thing here is it's... a whole 27 brake horsepower. I don't even think there's a different part at play at all here, they just decided to figure out how to play with their throttle mappings and stuff and wanted to scrape an extra couple bucks out of the bottom of the barrel.

At least Tesla was using some sense of the "ship one battery and restrict it in software" for an actual tangible hardware good versus some software shenanigans in the VW camp (again).

People do understand the economics: tomorrow the subscription costs 3x more, or they chose to stop supporting it when a new model comes out, or etc.

The analogy to software is great though; nobody paying for software owns it, or even has the option to own it. This is not fully the case for physical things, and people are rightly angry about “owning” things without owning them.

I loathe that model. I recognized it decades ago when, each year or so, Sony came out with a new phalanx of new televisions. They would have price points of high-end, less than high-end and moderate. What was frustrating was when the same panel (LCD) was used in a line up and the only features that differentiated the various price tiers were seemingly in the software. High-end might have picture-in-picture for example. Maybe that required a whole additional tuner? Maybe — but other features seemed like they were simply nerfed in the lower priced models.

It's as though, and now I know this sounds crazy, as though some bean-counter with a spreadsheet was actually the one determining price and features and not a team of engineers saying, "Here's what we can deliver competitively."

And while to a younger crowd, that might sound obvious, I would like to suggest that the older U.S. model (and now we're going back to the early days of the wireless, perhaps up to early Hewlett Packard times) was to beat your competition on price and features. You would never nerf a thing in your product line up.

Am I wildly off base here, naive, or have an ignorant reading of the history of U.S. Capitalism? I'm merely a layman so am happy to hear from someone who has studied this stuff.

A bit of a tangent, but I'm also reminded of the era when HeathKit was an option. My dad recalls at least that the HeathKit kits were not always inexpensive — but the completed consumer electronic project would be of very high quality. I know he but some of his early "hi-fi" equipment from HeathKit kits.

A recent headline decelared that China is run by engineers, the U.S. by lawyers. Perhaps it should have said the West is run by marketing.

But how are you going to brag about your car when it is the same with or without subscription?

I saw that current VW models feature very prominent (and IMO ugly, unibrow style) LED strips.

Does the car light up in a different color if you pay for the subscription?

This is quite common already, where they’ll offer a higher performance tier, but that power only comes from the engine control unit, no physical differences.

It makes even more sense in EVs where you don’t have to be concerned with the performance of supporting components to the engine.

The difference here, is that it’s a subscription, not a one time upgrade, and as a result, not an upgrade you can sell on.

a lot of medical devcies are basically a single SKU, but with various features turned on/off based on license (bill).

same with cars, same parts with one SKU, but various features turned on/off allows car OEMs to make different price offerings at different prices to capture larger part of the demand curve

> Car hacking will be normalized even more

We should be concerned of the increased possibility of malicious third-party hacking of other people's property.

And, I should not hack into my desk to open my drawers.

It's probably impossible to meet modern emissions, fuel economy, and safety standards without some computer control.

I haven't seen an analysis of whether regulations preclude those controls being open source and giving the car owner full access. Of course the owner could make the car noncompliant in that case, but the owner can do that on current and past cars using a wrench.

It's my understanding that said vehicle would be illegal to sell in most jurisdictions, so it probably wouldn't be a very lucrative endeavor.

Capitalism does not necessarily act in the interest of consumers, if that is what you were thinking.

> Now you are seeing the great electric car scam

Keep your anti-EV hatred in check for a second and note that nothing in here is EV only. They could just as well do this with a gasoline car, that engine is also electronically controlled.

> The best part is, many won't care (when they should).

This is generally valid for current societies, not just specifically.

Conformism has infiltrated economics, so now the supply-demand mechanism is broken: the demand agents are not "informed and rational", as classical theory wanted, so the supply is degraded - spawning "shrinkflation" and "viliflation".

BMW still sells a subscription to advanced headlight functions, live traffic info in their navigation and few other things. It's just now a packaged deal and they also opt you in by default into a three month trial. The car is also all but unusable without an online account, so there's that.

Regrettably, despite of all the brouhaha with the heated seats, all this b/s never really went away.

Who are you to tell other people what they should care about? Each person can decide for themselves what is important, and what is not.

Minding one's own business is an underrated virtue.