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Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

autoexpress.co.uk

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Re: Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

#111

Post by fho »

benji-york wrote: post #15

This makes sense to me. (Not that I would personally ever buy a car with that mechanism baked in.) They could either make two models (incurring the costs associated with having two different SKUs) and let people pay more for the one with more power or make one with intrinsically more power and let the people that don't want it pay less with it nerfed. I would have thought that people (like me) that have spent our liv…

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?

Re: Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

#112

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

The really offensive part of this kind of thing is that you already paid for it. Like if you wanted to buy a regular car and you could get the engine with turbo then those are two different cars. The latter costing more because it has more/better stuff in it. This is all fine and good.

In this case, all the cars have turbo and you pay to have it turned on or not. The cost of the turbo is in the cost of the normal car because the company would not sell it at a loss. You already paid for it, but aren't allow to use it. So you are driving around with this perfectly good and usable turbo that you paid for and can't use unless you paid some extra extortion money. This is abusive, wasteful, and should be illegal in my opinion. You should only be charged extra if it is in fact extra. Not something that is already there and withheld.

Re: Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

#113

Post by octo888 »

_2d30 wrote: post #100
reorder9695 wrote: post #84

Seriously people selling a product at a fair price and that being that is a centuries old thing, why does everything need to be a subscription now just because it's possible?

There is a lifetime “subscription” option which is a lump sum payment and stays with the car even after being sold. Still something distasteful about it but not quite as vampiric

"lifetime"

Re: Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

#114

Post by hulitu »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #91
jqpabc123 wrote: post #28

Forget Netflix Better idea --- forget Volkswagen. This is just one example of anti-consumer antics bordering on extortion that have been building for a very long time. The overall idea is simple --- reduce the sticker price to a competitive level and try to increase profits with prepaid maintenance, insurance, data collection and other "subscription" services. In VW's case, this appears to be an act of desperation. C…

> down almost 40% over the past year. That has more to do with their legacy ICE business than with their EVs. Their EV business is apparently growing quite nicely. And they have issues with tariffs in the US of course. But so do all their competitors. > Consumers don't have to "subscribe" to this sort of gamesmanship. But some happily do. Modern cars have a lot of software that defines their behavior and characterist…

> Their EV business is apparently growing quite nicely

Their EV business is a disaster. Expensive cars plagued by ugly software bugs (reset of instrument cluster during driving). The whole VW holdind is competing with themselves (Skoda, VW, Audi, Porsche, Cupra)

Re: Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

#116

Post by mk89 »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #112

The really offensive part of this kind of thing is that you already paid for it. Like if you wanted to buy a regular car and you could get the engine with turbo then those are two different cars. The latter costing more because it has more/better stuff in it. This is all fine and good. In this case, all the cars have turbo and you pay to have it turned on or not. The cost of the turbo is in the cost of the normal car…

As I said in other comments, this is already happening since years (and I mentioned Ford, but literally everyone else does it).

Car manufacturers already give you the same powerful engine that you can't afford/don't want to buy and "shrink" it with SW. If you jailbreak it, you lose the warranty and bye bye insurance.

You should not think that you're paying more for getting less. You should think that finally you can now enable more in your engine if you want to. Until today, you couldn't.

You just had to know that your car is more powerful than the papers say and live with that.

Re: Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

#117

Post by plqbfbv »

jaffa2 wrote: post #18

Tesla already does this. Why no kickback there?

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.

Re: Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

#118

Post by simonh »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #109
jillesvangurp wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> down almost 40% over the past year. That has more to do with their legacy ICE business than with their EVs. Their EV business is apparently growing quite nicely. And they have issues with tariffs in the US of course. But so do all their competitors. > Consumers don't have to "subscribe" to this sort of gamesmanship. But some happily do. Modern cars have a lot of software that defines their behavior and characterist…

Of course the FOMO for pointless features Unfortunately, this sort of thing is not limited to "pointless features". The motor for the windshield wipers on some VW models cost $600 plus installation which is likely to be at least as much as the part itself. So just buy an aftermarket part and install it yourself? Sorry, no can do. The wiper motor is computer controlled using a proprietary protocol protected by DMCA. M…

We broke the charging port cover on our car a few weeks after we got it. Someone clipped it with their leg walking past while it was open. Small piece of plastic to replace. £60.

Re: Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

#119

Post by JSR_FDED »

stego-tech wrote: post #27

There’s already a growing market for companies that just sell you a quality good without ongoing service fees or data harvesting/surveillance; cars only recently really joined that list, which frustrates me. On the one hand, I appreciate the potential such data collection allows: proactive maintenance reminders, repair scheduling, TCO reductions, and even factory-line improvements by identifying flaws before they tur…

I was in Thailand recently and drove in an EV taxi. It was as plain as possible, just a simple sedan, analog speedometer, regular buttons, no screen of any kind. That’s the car I want - the simplicity of an EV without all the other BS that drives the price up and locks you into a manufacturer’s “value add” junk.
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