Volkswagen gates a new vehicle's full horsepower behind monthly subscription

Everyone in the comments rightly complaining about this being am extortion, which it is! But tge more interesting part is the source of this behaviour: stock markets.

Tesla market cap was so high that any other normal producer felt the pressure. Simply designing and delivering good cars won't do it, because then you aren't a service company. Investors want you to exploit the customers to the last drop financially. You should try to make the product a service, because products are so 20th century! You shouldn't stop there though, you should also exploit their data. Because that's where the money is, because how else would you get ad revenue.

This is not meant to be satirical btw. It's really what's going on. VW tried to build a tech company as Cariad, which imploded because it's an old school industrial production company. They keep trying to throw tech at it but they can't do it like Tesla. They can build good EVs if they wanted, but they can't focus because imvesters are pulling them to ten different directions. One day it's software stack, the other day it's zonal architecture. It's sad to see them die a painful death like this.

The time to fight against this was when they pushed the first kind of this extortion services.

But do not accept it as a given now. The next best time to fight agains this is always now! Do not buys cars that are sold that way. If you have to buy a 'new' car, buy a used one that you can repair. Try to see this pattern in other products and avoid those too.

Talk about it with others while mentioning simple analogies like basfo did here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44944155

And please, do not think that 'the market' could solve this. Once 'the market' sees adoption, it will follow suit. Only regulation can help with these issues.

Nothing is lost until we give up and accept that.

VW and all the group cars problem is that their electric cars are bad. Remember those Audi that at 10k told customers to change the engine oil?

ID3 and others are curious cars. People have so many problems and software issues that it is funny how they still sell some cars. Those cars are regular cars that they stripped the engine and put an electric motor. Then sell it. After sell loads of cars, they started thinking about software and how an electric car might be diferent.

Who remembers their CEO for many times to say that they were about to pass Tesla in sales? When they almost had no cars or sales. Poor man, without medication, it is very hard to say something with meaning or have a clue about reality.

But the summary of this is simple: extortion.

This is the same company that created illegal cars and sold them. Then they got caught. Then they were to become the best electric cars. Then we got to see the crap of ID3 up to ID7! Remember it got rain and broke?

Let's hope they close that thing. Not the sausages, those are good and they sell them more than cars.

Still, Audi could get their engines from Honda. Fixed!

It might make sense if they unlocked a hundred or more horsepower and they want to cover the warranty costs all that extra torque might cause, but its only 27hp so I'm baffled.

Tesla's "Acceleration Boost" is $2000...

The problem is that feels unfair, because you pay the HW which is capable of doing 220hp and they limit it to 201hp. I do not understand the logic behind it. For 700 dollars that could be added to the price so easily… i do not get the reasoning of the marketing department.

VW saw what Adobe did with the transition to a subscription model and they’re testing it…simple as that.

Can they capture more value by selling their big, expensive thing as a service rather than in one big sale?

In 2010, everyone complained that Adobe was ripping their users off charging them every month for software which basically doesn’t change (which was and is correct). But since that move, their valuation is up 10x.

I’d much prefer to drive a car that doesn’t know much about me…but then again, I still use Adobe products every day.

So, if you don't subscribe, do they pay you to offset the worse gas mileage your car has to carry around but never have access to?

I'm not a lawyer, but is this not a class action suit waiting to happen?

The difference between this and option packages you purchase to get a more luxurious car is not that big imo. The real scandal is the monthly subscription, not the software unlock.

My last car rental had half the vehicle's HP locked out. To be fair it was a Charger, and a $15 upgrade cost, so I wasn't all that surprised.

It's nice when a company tells you when to short its stock

I wonder how long it'll be before the tuning shops crack this, and provide the service for a lower one-time fee; or the tools and instructions to do it are posted freely online.

VW seems to have the habit of shooting themselves in the foot. Gonna be hard to compete with China that way.

Even if you go straight to the website and read the fine print, this is pretty transparently a rip-off. They don't really bother to justify it. https://www.volkswagen.co.uk/en/connected-services/upgrades-...

And honestly, locking horsepower behind a paywall is more justifiable than some of the other features you have to unlock - like activating your own headlight features or climate control. They are literally installing the physical components into your car and charging you to activate them.

I used to be an Audi and BMW driver, but this stingy nickel and diming mindset, common to German manufacturers, and the silly maintenance tax (I always drove RS or M models), made me swear off German cars forever. They deserve the reckoning coming for them with this cynical bullshit. Pity, as they really do make cars that are enjoyable to drive.

I will absolutely be avoiding any car companies that do this lol. Completely slimy behavior. I was going to keep buying VW GTI or R models my entire life but this and the no manual transmission bs means I have to look at elsewhere. Probably gonna end up like those people who only drive ridiculously old cars.

I think this is a great move from Volkswagen. I'm sure this has happened to all of us at some point: you buy something, and then a few days later you think "if only I had paid a little bit extra and gotten the big version", but by that time you are already stuck with the small version.

Well, no more. Now Volkswagen is willing to sell you the big machine for the price of the small machine. And they are willing to gamble on taking a financial loss if you do not change your mind after all and don't make up for the difference. What a great company! Either that, or they are selling you the big version whether you want it or not, and then trying to double-dip. But they would never do that, that's just a crazy conspiracy theory. R-right?

I have to wonder at $760/forever if this feature even pays for itself. The pure dystopian version of this is that VW loses money on this directly (never mind lost sales) because the hardware and service side costs more for all of the cars than what they get from the small percentage of owners who do pay.

The idea of a service is that you pay a monthly fee and can use it during that period. It implies that the vendor has some kind of ongoing or recurring cost, or that they need to continuously provide or produce the service in some way. For example, in software they need to keep the servers running, push updates, and so on. If the service is related to goods, they deliver you a set of products that you’ve subscribed to on a recurring basis.

This new approach, however, often means you need to pay to use something that has already been produced, with its functionality fully available, but locked unless you subscribe. In that case, they are not really providing a service, they’re just holding a feature hostage until you pay. That isn’t a service; it’s basically extortion. If the car were free, I could understand having to pay to unlock it. But needing a subscription just to use my own car at full capacity? That’s dystopian.

I can totally see a TV that refuses to turn on until you’ve paid Samsung, a fridge that stays locked until you cough up more money, or a toilet that only lets you flush twice a day.Unless, of course, you upgrade to premium.

Related:

Hyundai wants loniq 5 customers to pay for cybersecurity patch in baffling move

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44928497

VW has done this in a sense forever. My Mk7 GTI came with the "performance package" which in some years included different brakes and a limited slip diff, but in other years was literally just an ECU flash that gave it an extra 10hp for hundreds to a couple thousand extra dollars.

It was the general case in VAG cars going back as far as 2000 that the same engine hardware was sold with different software packages for different markets and trims essentially. The same trim made different performance figures in different emissions regimes too. Typically, you could take a car without the paid software boost into an official shop, pay a one time fee, and get that boosted software package.

The fix is to go to any "Performance Automotive" shop, or buy a dongle on the internet for $200 that lets you just flash whatever you want to the ECU, because VW ECUs are surprisingly "open" (compare the ECU situation that Toyota has, where ECU reflashes basically weren't a thing) and then you can run +40ish hp and kill your undersized turbo at 80k miles, or turn off the soundaktor, or add some weird regulatory quirk of rear lighting, to enable extra features that you didn't pay for like radar cruise control.

Sure, you can now pay $20 and only get that for a month, but how stupid do you have to be to do so compared to a one time $760 cost?

Automotive SaaS is the lowest form of enshittification.