A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
The German car-maker says its "optional power upgrade" is designed to give customers more choice.
That's 100% a lie on VW's part. What they're doing is slapping a lock on hardware you already own (by virtue of having bought the car) and renting the functionality back to you. It's literally theft and VW's executives ought to go to prison for it.
Exactly. Customers had the choice already: "do I put my foot down harder on the pedal or not?"
Do you own the car or not?
You'll own nothing, and you'll like it.
I hope nobody buys these things.
To think I used to respect VW and I even owned a 2002 Jetta.
These types of things aren't put into products to test if people will buy them. They are put into products to test to see if it brings the company more profits. Less people can buy them but that won't matter if it can make them more money.
On top of that this company doesn't exist in a vacuum. There are other car manufacturers that will test the same subscription models as well. They follow each others leads and slowly normalize these new methods of profit extraction in collaboration with one another.
It's a lie that they are competing for your business. They are all working to make as much profit as possible and do absolutely follow the next method of doing so introduced by their "competitors".
The only thing they are testing is if it will negatively hurt next quarters earnings. So it needs to be introduced slowly by each manufacturer and promoted as a "feature" first. Then, as time goes on they can push it more and more as it's normalized in the market.
I had a Jetta in that era. Died after just 135,000 miles. Family was also into other German cars. They all had expensive issues. We switched to Japanese cars and stopped worrying about car repairs. Unfortunately, there is no real reason to buy a German car unless you’re hoping someone notices the car you drive. When I see people driving German cars, I mostly see people too rich to care about car repairs or a sucker.
It frustrates me that software is used to artificially limit the potential of technology in order to extract profits like this.
Somehow, instead of having so many quality of life improvements from an amazing technology, that eliminates so much prior scarcity that existed, we get shit like this that enforces artificial scarcity.
And the only thing we can do is laugh at it, until it's forced on us by every corporate overlord and we have no choice but to except it as the new normal.
Hackers will figure a way to make it free
everyone here seems to be mad.
i'm happy that there is some barrier of entry to adding more horsepower to an already lethal machine. sure, it doesn't affect rich assholes. but at least some won't buy it. ideally, nobody buys the feature.