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Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

arstechnica.com

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Re: Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

#261

Post by rlpb »

palata wrote: post #170
lotsofpulp wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4. Subscriptions drive our economy, I don't know the details but it seems like every company wants subscriptions over one time purchases. Every person I know wants a subscription, too. Who wouldn’t want a nest egg throwing off passive income?

> Every person I know wants a subscription, too. You mean consumer? I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy a car or a bed or a fridge that requires a subscription. That's beyond me. I do understand why companies want to screw consumers, obviously.

> I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy a car or a bed or a fridge that requires a subscription.

There's a huge car finance market where people do exactly that. How much they pay a finance company monthly vs. how much they pay the manufacturer monthly makes little difference to them. It's all about the monthly fee and what they get in return for it.

Re: Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

#262

Post by milkytron »

dylan604 wrote: post #78
throwawa14223 wrote: post #31

Just like all subscriptions this kills my interest in it. Tech is only interesting if it isn’t locked in a corporate data center.

you must be really bored with pretty much all the popular tech today then

I'm bored with most of the new flashy products, but that just leads to me tinkering more with things I already have or fun new open source projects. It's somewhat a hobby of mine to maximize the potential of old hardware with better software.

Re: Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

#263

Post by Marsymars »

palata wrote: post #170
lotsofpulp wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4. Subscriptions drive our economy, I don't know the details but it seems like every company wants subscriptions over one time purchases. Every person I know wants a subscription, too. Who wouldn’t want a nest egg throwing off passive income?

> Every person I know wants a subscription, too. You mean consumer? I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy a car or a bed or a fridge that requires a subscription. That's beyond me. I do understand why companies want to screw consumers, obviously.

> You mean consumer? I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy a car or a bed or a fridge that requires a subscription. That's beyond me.

If I'm buying something that has recurring costs to deliver services, I feel better if I'm covering those costs, so I'm buying something with a sustainable business model.

Subscription service for heated seats - outrageous.

Subscription service for premium, ad-free mapping - reasonable.

Re: Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

#264

Post by mancerayder »

baggachipz wrote: post #113

I'm glad I got rid of my Teslas, they are always doing their best to make the experience worse. Stage three of enshittification from them. I loved it back when it was stage 1.

What did you move to?

The speed is what I like, and the simplicity when I bought it. I hate 10,000 trim options with random prices like BMW and having to argue with a sales guy - just gimme the price!

Re: Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

#265

Post by lotsofpulp »

palata wrote: post #245
lotsofpulp wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant everyone wants to have a recurring income. After all, we have a recurring need to feed and house ourselves.

Sure, but when you buy a spoon, you expect to own the spoon. You don't pay 1$/month/spoon, do you?

That is neither here nor there. I was making a tongue in cheek comment that companies wanting recurring revenue is not notable, because everyone wants recurring revenue. The only thing limiting it before was lack of technical ability.

Re: Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

#266

Post by cmxch »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #149
burningChrome wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was watching OPLive last week. Every week they have a segment called "Triple Play" where they have law enforcement send them videos of crazy chases and other interesting experiences. This last week they had a guy who had completely passed out in his car and was fast asleep at the wheel. A state trooper pulled up alongside it and could see the guy slumped over his wheel. Apparently the car was essentially weaving back…

I've never actually tested what happens if you ignore the "steering input required" nags from LKAS. Does it truly keep driving at cruise control speed? I assumed it would eventually slow to a stop. As for the safety feature. I inherited (literally) a second car that's 10 years older than the primary one. You get used to LKAS. I was driving a long distance in the older one while somewhat overtired and had several rumb…

It will disengage after the alarms on Hondas.

Re: Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

#267

Post by AwGeezeRick »

BeetleB wrote: post #186
nxtfari wrote: post #18

My guess is Tesla is desperately in need of Q1 revenue and they want people to scarcity buy FSD lifetime @ $8K. Otherwise the strategy doesn’t make any sense. They’re saying FSD and basic Autopilot will go behind subscription and that subscription prices are expected to go up. Basically laying out that they’re planning to lock you into a subscription and then price gouge. It’s so transparent that I think the point is…

> Otherwise the strategy doesn’t make any sense. The price is high, but it's not unique to Tesla. Ford has Blue Cruise, which is about $500/year. People can, however, opt for openpilot/comma ( https://comma.ai/openpilot ), which random Youtubers tested and say it's about as good as Tesla's FSD, but has a simple one time fee of $1K But whether you want to trust open source is up to you.

Comma/OpenPilot is actually amazing. One of my cars is a Tesla Model 3 Performance 2025 and I love it, FSD on HW4 is great. Super fast.

I also have a Lexus ES 2025, I bought the Comma for it and it works better than Tesla’s AutoPilot (the thing they’re taking away new new Teslas). AutoPilot isn’t great to begin with, I kinda always hated it. But I do like cars that can drive themselves when I have long road trips and wanna be able to look at work. Comma makes that completely doable on the Lexus.

Re: Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

#268

Post by PhotonHunter »

tedggh wrote: post #214
buggy6257 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 5 year old Subaru has been able to lane keep and auto follow to the point that a 2h drive on the freeway is me tapping the wheel every ten seconds to keep it enabled while I watch for idiots. It has been able to do this since I bought it, and I haven’t paid a dime extra. Car cost 30k.

Fair enough, but is still a Subaru. So it doesn’t make sense to compare its value to a Tesla just because of auto steer. If it comes to that, there’s a lot of value in a Tesla for which you don’t pay a dime either, like constant and actually useful system upgrades, a reliable charging network and great customer service. It’s also a good looking car with a great user interface that gets better and better with free upd…

Great customer service?

Re: Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

#269

Post by Marsymars »

jmward01 wrote: post #171

I work hard to keep subscriptions out of my life. I will do everything in my power to not have a subscription as part of any car I own. The problem is it is likely out of my hands. I have a 21 yo car and a 12 yo car and will eventually have to get something 'modern' (worse) that forces spyware/subscriptions on me just to get from point at to point b. I will have to pay astronomical prices on a worse experience for th…

There are still current-model cars that are effectively subscription-free and/or where you can pull the fuse for the telematics/connectivity and everything else still functions as expected.

Re: Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

#270

Post by Marsymars »

wscott wrote: post #177

The funny part is that the Tesla doesn't have a basic dumb cruise control. It only has "traffic-aware" cruise control which uses the cameras and doesn't use the new FSD code so it has lots of glitches and phantom braking and decides for itself what speed to use. My wife just wants to set the speed and have the car go that speed.

Do any cars with assisted cruise control have the ability to step down to dumb cruise control? (I know my car doesn't - the lower trims have dumb cruise control, and you lose that in favour of assisted if you bump up to a higher trim.)
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