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Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

autoexpress.co.uk

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Re: Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

#261

Post by reactordev »

netsharc wrote: post #257
reactordev wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish the smartcar didn’t suck so bad. We need alternatives to this “turn them upside down and shake the coins from them” approach to cars. We kind of screwed ourselves here in US because you have to drive places, you can’t walk. Even big cities aren’t that walkable (with the exception of a dozen neighborhoods sprinkled about a half dozen cities).

Digital payments ruined everything... video games are ruined, apps are ruined, now cars are ruined. What next, fridges? "I see you bought ice cream. The optimal storage temperature is -18C, the cost to enable this mode is $5/week. Enable now?"

No, digital payments didn’t do it, lack of laws did. Courts can’t keep up with the pace of innovation to protect us from greed.

I’m ok with an app charging an install fee if it’s worth it. I’m ok with games selling micro transaction cosmetics. I’m not ok with features being behind yet another paywall or subscription.

It’s plain old false advertising. If I buy a car and it has a turbo, I expect it to go turbo. If I buy an app and it’s supposed to make things pretty, it better make things pretty. If I buy a cheeseburger, I don’t want to be charged extra for the condiments put on it or the onions, pickles, lettuce. I expected that comes included as part of Cogs.

Re: Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

#262

Post by anal_reactor »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #40
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…

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 exampl…

I remember the exact moment when phone manufacturers removed the SD card slot so that they could sell integrated memory at huge markup while still technically advertising their phones as cheap. The excuse was that integrated memory is faster than SD card, except support of SD cards is on purpose shitty on Android just to enable this whole shitshow.

Re: Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

#264

Post by ryandrake »

reactordev wrote: post #261
netsharc wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital payments ruined everything... video games are ruined, apps are ruined, now cars are ruined. What next, fridges? "I see you bought ice cream. The optimal storage temperature is -18C, the cost to enable this mode is $5/week. Enable now?"

No, digital payments didn’t do it, lack of laws did. Courts can’t keep up with the pace of innovation to protect us from greed. I’m ok with an app charging an install fee if it’s worth it. I’m ok with games selling micro transaction cosmetics. I’m not ok with features being behind yet another paywall or subscription. It’s plain old false advertising. If I buy a car and it has a turbo, I expect it to go turbo. If I bu…

> Courts can’t keep up with the pace of innovation to protect us from greed.

I wish we would start getting product innovation and not just Greed Innovation.

Re: Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

#265

Post by potato3732842 »

altairprime wrote: post #217
mk89 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Insurance does not necessarily stop insuring modified cars. They do, however, require you to detail in depth your modifications and request a revised estimate of them. If your modification is “downloaded an Internet program and ran it to break the ECU lock”, they may be uncomfortable and either raise your premium or ask you to find another insurer. If instead it is “applied the attached two-byte change to the manufac…

Insurance in the US DGAF, you just can't come to them later when a tree falls on it saying it ought to be worth more because of your sick modz.

I assume Europe is way worse and that you can't even change tire/rim size without permission.

Re: Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

#266

Post by potato3732842 »

tux1968 wrote: post #229
dare944 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manufacturers have been shipping cars with detuned engines forever, and tuners have been tweaking them to unlock the hidden power for just as long. Back in the beginning of the century I owned a 2000 Audi S4 twin-turbo. The torque curve on it looked like a perfect plateau between 2,500 and 5,300 rpm. I replaced the entire ECU with a chipped duplicate (a five minute swap) and instantly gained 50 horsepower. Of course,…

This is an honest question, because I have no knowledge about cars at all. Could the "detuning" rather be interpreted as akin to the "binning" that CPU manufacturers do? So, if you buy a higher model car, you get qualified and tested parts for that performance rating. And if you buy a lower model, and "overclock" it, you're on your own?

The short answer is no. OEMs don't really do quality control tiers. They'll do new vs service tolerances and that's about it.

Re: Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

#267

Post by mr90210 »

linotype wrote: post #263

I wonder if the German government will let them go out of business. The only way they could do something this stupid and petty is if they think they have an incredible backstop.

They shouldn’t, but each bailout should be accompanied by consequences for the execs and partial nationalisation of the company. Companies that big should see the German government as the devil they never want rely on.

That’s my view - which I stole from N. N. Taleb - on how to deal with too-big-to-fail companies.

Re: Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

#268

Post by potato3732842 »

barrkel wrote: post #227
lurk2 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I’m understanding you correctly, the play here is: 1) Build engine with $market_leading_horsepower. 2) Throttle engine so that base models of a car have $market_leading_horsepower - $throttle_amount. 3) Price discrimination for enthusiasts removes the throttling back to the original $market_leading_horsepower while also saving the effort of having to design a faster engine. Is there no extra cost associated wit…

Done right, a more powerful engine needs uprating of a bunch of other components - clutch, brakes, suspension, tyre profile, cooling, exhaust, air intake and so on. Almost certainly not a big deal with a 10% bump, but if it was a big bump, costs could be saved elsewhere in a less powerful vehicle.

In a laboratory run by Redditors in a universe where cows are spherical then sure.

In reality cramming a little more air through the thing is no big deal because it'll be within the fudge factor of all the other parts.

Nobody is engineering a clutch to within an inch of it's life on a 200hp shitbox, they'll use the same clutch as the 300hp version of the same engine. Yeah the trans shifting tune will be different but that doesn't necessarily mean that the components in it are different.

Re: Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

#269

Post by potato3732842 »

mk89 wrote: post #96
JFingleton wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never trusted VW after the emissions scandal : https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn5r9rgg6yno Now I trust them even less, if that's even possible .

The emission scandal is something that VW paid while literally everyone else didn't - they got caught because they installed cheating software and deinstalled it after the test lab, while the others did pretty much the same in the same software which was more sophisticated, as it could somehow recognize the car wasn't being driven in real use cases, which reduced the emissions, to drastically increase once it was dri…

So basically VW got shit all over not for cheating but for being the lowest dollar, lowest effort, trashiest implementation of cheating that makes a fool out of the regulating agency. That's actually makes perfect sense if you're jaded enough

Re: Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

#270

Post by ryandrake »

dylan604 wrote: post #205
gizmo wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the manufacturer doesn't want to go through the trouble of creating a less powerful engine because it's not economically advantageous then the consumer should just get the better engine by default. It's ridiculous and insulting to buy a new car (a big purchase for many) to be presented with options where the manufacturer went through considerable effort to _make the car worse_. Manufacturers should be in fierce co…

They are getting the better engine. It’s right there in the car. The thing that is confusing people is it was introduced backwards, I’d imagine intentionally. As stated, it reads as if the engine is being crippled. If you fired up the engine, it would not have the max performance without tweaking the timings, but it would still work. So paying more for the higher model is paying for the software tweaks. It’s not much…

This is more like the manufacturer selling a four set car sold as a two-seater with razor blades in the back seat so you can’t sit there. Then those blades get disabled if you purchase a monthly “sedan subscription”.
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