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Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month

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Re: Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month

#271

Post by Salgat »

konschubert wrote: post #245
horsawlarway wrote: post #38

I want to see this legislated out of existence. To be clear, because every time this comes up some dickfucks come in here and start making excuses about how it's better to rent in some cases and that this is just amortizing the whole payment, and there are some people who want this: No. This is a fucking terrible deal even just using mercedes numbers. It takes a whopping 30 months (2.5 years) for the monthly payment…

I will get downvoted to oblivion for this and apparently this makes me a simp. But if I buy the car and don’t care for the acceleration, then I can NOT book this feature. And in a competitive market, which the auto market is, this will mean that the MRSP for the car is lower for me than it would otherwise have been. Unbundling is part of what made air travel affordable. In a competitive market, unbundling lowers base…

Someone has to cover the cost of hundreds of thousands of cars that have this unused feature. That's the rub.

Re: Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month

#272

Post by userbinator »

boston_clone wrote: post #164
fwungy wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original phrase was coined by the World Economic Forum. What the critics leave out is that the WEF was saying that people would be happier not owning anything. >You will own nothing and you will be happy. Alternatively it could have a darker interpretation: you will be a slave and you will be happy, because that's all you're going to get. I suppose it depends if you look at the WEF as a benevolent institution loo…

Easily fact-checked: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-wef-idUSKBN2AP2...

The link to the original article is now 404 from the WEF's site, but you can find it in archive.org. It's notable that the link has "agenda" in its URL.

Re: Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month

#273

Post by caconym_ »

horsawlarway wrote: post #38

I want to see this legislated out of existence. To be clear, because every time this comes up some dickfucks come in here and start making excuses about how it's better to rent in some cases and that this is just amortizing the whole payment, and there are some people who want this: No. This is a fucking terrible deal even just using mercedes numbers. It takes a whopping 30 months (2.5 years) for the monthly payment…

It's stupid, but so is anybody buying a luxury car in the first place unless they have millions and millions of dollars to burn on stupid shit to satisfy their own vanity and other frivolous tendencies.

I have much stronger feelings about general right-to-repair (which crap like this tends to obstruct, so I'm definitely against it in that sense) and speculative worlds down the slippery slope where actual safety is compromised if you don't pay an additional subscription (just $60/mo to enable your side curtain airbags!). But you won't see me crying over conspicuous wealth-signalers wasting their money on crap—they're going to do that anyway, with or without Mercedes' help. And faster cars are more deadly cars, so locking this functionality behind a paywall may actually save lives (though the real, sane solution would be to regulate excessively fast/massive/etc. personal vehicles off public roadways).

Re: Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month

#274

Post by alpaca128 »

ajross wrote: post #108
GiorgioG wrote: post #2

It won’t be my interest in saving the planet that stops me from buying cars, it’ll be bullshit like this. I want to own my car. I don’t want it to be connected (beyond acting as a hotspot) to the internet or to some central service. Have we not learned anything?

> I don’t want [my car] to be connected [...] to the internet Really? No remote access, security notifications, navigation facilities? No watching TV while charging? No OTA updates that obviate the need to take it to the dealership for routine fixes? No open source location analytic API? I mean, I'm sure there's some bad stuff that happens too. But this is very much throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I won't t…

> remote access, security notifications

Or just don't put so much software in it that you need security updates for remote access in the first place, how about that?

> navigation facilities? No watching TV while charging?

Why would I pay to have the same features as my phone/tablet/laptop but with the added disadvantage of not having access outside the car?

Re: Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month

#275

Post by fhood »

1827163 wrote: post #152

Does Mercedes understand this is destroying the reputation of the brand? This practice needs to be made illegal and an exception made to the DMCA specifically legalizing attempts to bypass it. Bypassing such measures absolutely should not be a felony.

Mercedes, Audi and BMW destroyed their reputation for anyone paying attention a long time ago by producing expensive, unreliable cars that aren't even remotely cost effective to keep running.

Plastic timing chain guides, FFS.

If purposefully building engines that grenade themselves at 80k miles wasn't enough, then it's hard to imagine what would be.

Re: Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month

#276

Post by deepspace »

jollyllama wrote: post #59

Why does anybody buy this crap?

Back in the day, I participated in Autocross, and occasionally joined a car club for a track day at the local raceway. Gas, club fees, entry fees and instructor fees typically came to $300-400 for a fun Sunday.

I drove a stock BMW 3-series, and did not need or want to pay for the added performance of an M-series for day to day driving. However, if I could upgrade to M-series performance for $60 for a track day, I would have jumped at the opportunity.

This is admittedly not a common use case, but there is definitely a niche market for this kind of thing.

Re: Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month

#277

Post by alexb_ »

konschubert wrote: post #245
horsawlarway wrote: post #38

I want to see this legislated out of existence. To be clear, because every time this comes up some dickfucks come in here and start making excuses about how it's better to rent in some cases and that this is just amortizing the whole payment, and there are some people who want this: No. This is a fucking terrible deal even just using mercedes numbers. It takes a whopping 30 months (2.5 years) for the monthly payment…

I will get downvoted to oblivion for this and apparently this makes me a simp. But if I buy the car and don’t care for the acceleration, then I can NOT book this feature. And in a competitive market, which the auto market is, this will mean that the MRSP for the car is lower for me than it would otherwise have been. Unbundling is part of what made air travel affordable. In a competitive market, unbundling lowers base…

Frictionless competition in an economic vacuum does not exist. It especially doesn't exist in the US, where foreign car manufacturers are banned from selling their superior, smaller, efficient, lower tech cars that have everything I actually want. Car makers now have a gigantic grapple on an industry that takes billions of dollars to get into. There is nothing approaching a free market for cars in the US.

Price discrimination makes this "affordable", until the base price is just raised back to where it was originally except now you have a gazillion fees you have to pay so that companies can extract more money from people less sensitive to price changes.

A company's dream is to enact price discrimination on every single transaction so that there is no such thing as a consumer surplus. The absolute dream of a company is to make it so everybody pays exactly the largest amount they can bear for everything.

This is why we have tipping everywhere. This is why we have features locked behind paywalls for no reason. This is why we have colleges that are uber-expensive, unless you are poor, in which case they aren't expensive because you actually care about the price.

Price Discrimination and Big Data, when combined, allow for companies to give prices in such a way that no consumer on earth gets a surplus. Legislation to ensure markets with consumer surplus continue to exist is badly needed.

Re: Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month

#278

Post by lopiar_zen »

konschubert wrote: post #245
horsawlarway wrote: post #38

I want to see this legislated out of existence. To be clear, because every time this comes up some dickfucks come in here and start making excuses about how it's better to rent in some cases and that this is just amortizing the whole payment, and there are some people who want this: No. This is a fucking terrible deal even just using mercedes numbers. It takes a whopping 30 months (2.5 years) for the monthly payment…

I will get downvoted to oblivion for this and apparently this makes me a simp. But if I buy the car and don’t care for the acceleration, then I can NOT book this feature. And in a competitive market, which the auto market is, this will mean that the MRSP for the car is lower for me than it would otherwise have been. Unbundling is part of what made air travel affordable. In a competitive market, unbundling lowers base…

That's absolutely false. You are painting the picture as if the car maker will sell you a high performance model (with all the necessary parts for performance) at a lower cost. No they will sell you that model with all their profit margin and then charge you extra monthly for the performance.

Re: Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month

#279

Post by mikeryan »

horsawlarway wrote: post #38

I want to see this legislated out of existence. To be clear, because every time this comes up some dickfucks come in here and start making excuses about how it's better to rent in some cases and that this is just amortizing the whole payment, and there are some people who want this: No. This is a fucking terrible deal even just using mercedes numbers. It takes a whopping 30 months (2.5 years) for the monthly payment…

Im ready for the after market EV control systems too…

Re: Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month

#280

Post by olyjohn »

abriosi wrote: post #264
konschubert wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will get downvoted to oblivion for this and apparently this makes me a simp. But if I buy the car and don’t care for the acceleration, then I can NOT book this feature. And in a competitive market, which the auto market is, this will mean that the MRSP for the car is lower for me than it would otherwise have been. Unbundling is part of what made air travel affordable. In a competitive market, unbundling lowers base…

I believe that the statement "the car will be cheaper because there is a subscription add-on enhancing the amount of horsepower available" is false This is a case of creative business modeling. I believe that companies should invest in creating good business models. They also shouldn't over complicate them Given that, I believe that the subscriptions to unlock seat heaters are a worse example of this and not great fo…

LOL. There's that saying... "We pass the savings on to the customer."

Nobody ever does this. The savings is never passed onto the customer. The only time that happens is when they're trying to get just in under the competition's price, but will never go lower than that. Nobody is trying to pass the savings onto the customer, ever.

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