460
The New Audi A3 Is Amess With In-Car Subscriptions (www.motor1.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
196 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

So far there's subscriptions for cruise control, adaptive beams, various navigation options, apple/google integration and my favorite, dual-zone climate.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 35 points 2 years ago (7 children)

"Or you can just purchase any of those features permanently"

This fact, hidden somewhere in the middle, makes the entire article pointless.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 7 child comments
    •
  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    It still sucks that features are physically present in the car, but you have to pay to unlock them.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
    •
  • [+] -9 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Just like a movie is already available for download on the Internet but you must still pay to download it. Unless yarrr not a fan of artificial scarcity.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
    •
  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    But the movie is not on the computer in your house.

    This would be closer to buying a house, and a washer/fridge are both installed, just turned off, until you pay extra to switch them on.

    The hardware and software are already in the car, and you would have already paid for both when buying it. Adding a subscription to enable them after is just skimming off the top.

    It might be a different story, if the price included them installing the relevant hardware onto the car separately, but not in this case.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    We already built the expensive Internet infrastructure that allows any digital media, including movies, to be delivered to your computer for virtually $0 extra cost. However, even though the infrastructure was built you are “not allowed” to access the digital media unless you pay some arbitrary price.

    In your example, having a washer/fridge installed in the house is not that different from having an Internet router installed in your house. In both cases the infrastructure is readily available and costs nothing to use but you cannot access the services for artificial reasons.

    I’m obviously not defending Audi as I think it’s a ridiculous concept but this is already happening at a large scale.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    However, the sole function of the internet infrastructure of your house is not exclusively for movie distribution. You can use it for other things, and do, so the example doesn't quite line up.

    Your example might be closer when it comes to rate limiting for ISP services. The network bandwidth that you could get from the actual hardware is often greater than what you paid for, and you only get extra if you pay the ISP more.

    But even then, that analogy falls apart a bit, since there is a scaling cost to the ISP associated with you using the internet more. It actually costs them more to do that, since it puts extra load on their servers/network, which would both put wear on hardware, and require them to purchase more powerful hardware to account for the capacity.

    Not so for Audi. The hardware and software are already in the car. They have no ongoing costs to pay associated with many of those systems, since they're local to the car itself. Smartphone integration, I could see a case for, if they do it by routing the connection through their own servers, but not a lot of the other things, like the adaptive cruise control, or Carplay/Auto.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent