The German car-maker says its “optional power upgrade” is designed to give customers more choice.
1999: “Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization.”
lol. 1999 was the best time for humanity; ridiculous!
2025: Oh shit…
“We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.”
That’s why I live my life as if it were still the 90s…oh shit, am I in the matrix already?
You wish!
Seriously. Why didn’t I take the blue pill?
You guys were offered a blue pill???
You didn’t get the emails?
No. Just some weird guy in a trench coat behind a Giant Tiger offered me some white-ish looking pills. I woke up the next day with half my head shaved and my wallet was missing.
I forgot to check my spam folder
Yeah, but it was a weekly subscription fee, so I declined
This is despite a wider embrace of subscriptions in general…
I’m not sure this is the right conclusion. What seems like a “wider embrace of subscriptions” may be happening because subscriptions are becoming harder and harder to avoid. We don’t like them; they’re being forced on us. That’s an important difference.
I also think this is misusing the current statistics and drawing wrong conclusions.
Nobody is asking for these kind of subscription models.
Whag do you mean? Of course they are… everyone likes not reciving what they paid for to only have to pay a monthly charge for it… just look at what people pay monthly for… they will so enjoy this… /s
In France, people who have VW cars are not the best or brightest drivers. It could work.
In France, people who have VW cars are not the best or brightest drivers. It could work.FTFY
VW are garbage, have been since, well, forever.
70’s VW factory replacement parts were so bad you’d get water pumps with incompletely drilled mount holes.
Today, the electrics do dumb things like combine the AC control with the power window controls in a box in the drivers door. You know, an area that will deal with moisture.
Drive down the road and note how often a VW has an entire taillight that doesn’t work.
Their electrics are shit. (Other brands have their own issues, American brands are only a little better, or worse, depending on the brand and model).
UK too. The VW is the new Audi.
You do know that it’s all part of the same Volkwagen Group? Also known as VAG.
Thanks.
They mean “…by management”.
The intent is to provide
playersowners with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking differentheroeshorsepower.They came for the Gamers, but I did not speak out because I was not a Gamer.
Hey, we did speak out and most of us didn’t shut up since. Fuck EA, VW, BMW, whoever tries to push microtransactions.
I haven’t bought a AAA game for well over a decade because of this shit. I’ll bike and take a bus before I give in to it with a mode of transportation.
The future is a fucking farce.
Psych! You thought you were gonna get star trek style utopia, while we’ve been descending into fascist dystopia for several decades!?!
Woo! Techno-feudalism!
I’m still holding out hope for cyberpunk. At least it comes with skylines and cool back alley markets.
And cybernetics that won’t play adds in your brain until you have a seizure!. Seriously settings like cyberpunk and shadowrun are starting to look good by the standards of what we’re heading for. (Shadowrun is also old enough that you could actually just barely survive on a part time job without sharing an appartment even in the dystopia)
The difference is whether there’s any room outside the system to exist in, right? Can you jailbreak your implant? Can you live in a shitty illegal slum, or are they all carefully dispersed before they can begin?
It’s all about technologies of control. Ironically, the places seeing democratic backsliding are not the only or even the main ones developing and implementing them.
Our Startrek future is the Ferengi Empire.
Turns we’ve been in the mirror universe all along.
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Ah yes, selling me something that is already available but is just locked behind software. And then trying to frame that as somehow a good thing for customers. Just insulting.
Sadly, it’s been a good part of IBM’s business model for years. They call it Capacity on Demand.
Inactive processor cores and inactive memory units are resources that are included with your server, but are not available for use until you activate them.
I learned this when I moved into a corporate IT environment with Power servers. I couldn’t believe that some companies would pay a quarter of a million for a server that is intentionally stunted/limited unless you pay even more.
But cars are computers now. “Everything’s computer!”. So they will follow that subscription model.
Fuck that noise.
What happens if the car goes out of range from the internet? Does the car just lose power the same way I can’t play Gamepass games offline?
I already bought the car with the hardware in it. I will do what I want with it.
My next car will be a 1995 Honda. I’m so tired of being tracked all the time.
You can bump 10 years ahead, my car doesn’t have tracking 😄
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That’s an interesting insight, thanks!
You can play GamePass Ultimate games offline, though.
No, I’m serious. I’m not arguing with you, I promise.
Oh I wasn’t aware. Each time I try to open a game before my Xbox connects to the internet, I get an error.
Connect to the Internet, download the games you want and then go into settings and take your console offline.
The initial setup requires some settings tweaks but after that it’s smooth sailing.
Also, VW can suck a fat one.
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I will never buy a vw again, that is a fact.
Skip all of those brands. Škoda too.
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Yet people in my extended family keep buying them. They are people who are well off, too, so they could buy something nicer. They bought a trailer home for $30,000 to use for vacationing ffs, might as well invest in a nice car so they don’t have to buy a new one every 3–5 years because it rusts to shit.
This is partially my envy talking, but still, I don’t get it. I have a nicer car and my household makes less. Makes no sense.
When we start decent seeing vehicles at a decent price again
These exist, they’re just not in the USA. Look at what companies like BYD, MG, and Xiaomi are doing in practically every developed country except the USA. The entry-level BYD Dolphin EV is just under AU$30k (US$19k) in Australia, including taxes. Xiaomi have a sports car for around US$40k.
When we start decent seeing vehicles to a decent price again,
I don’t know about the Volkswagen ID.3, but in general, I think that car prices have tended to come down slightly over the years. I was in a conversation earlier about car prices earlier (talking about how truck prices had greatly increased).
If you go back 20 years, take a pretty plain-Jane standby, the Toyota Camry:
https://www.kbb.com/toyota/camry/2005/
2005 Toyota Camry pricing starts at $4,091 for the Camry LE Sedan 4D, which had a starting MSRP of $20,515 when new.
That’d be $33,934.10 in 2025 dollars.
A 2025 Camry has an MSRP of $28,700, about 15% lower.
Pickup trucks — which are considerably more expensive now in the US than they were a few decades back — are an exception to this, but there are other factors going on there.
EDIT: Though tariffs may wind up driving prices up.
I don’t think this factors in things that have gone up significantly, such as cost of repair and maintenance. I think another easy thing to point to would be the amount of 84 month car loans, and how many people struggle to pay those. I will also point out in 2005 that wage inflation was much closer to keeping pace with overall inflation. It’s easy to point to the one thing you did, but that misses the full picture imo.
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This is way beyond “mildly infuriating”. Shit should be illegal, it’s terrible for progress and an epitome of greedy capitalist bullshit.
Agreed. Although that is true for 80% of the threads posted in this category.
Okay, it’s high time for some serious regulatory intervention.
German car industry has one foot in the grave. The German car industry lobbyist have successfully weakened or delayed many EU climate and sustainability initiatives. I fucking hope the German car industry collapses sooner than later and weaken Germany’s political power in the EU.
German car industry has one foot in the grave.
I think that all or close to it auto manufacturers have some form of subscription service now with monthly fees. It’s not something specific to German manufacturers.
randomly picks from this list of auto manufacturers
Buick.
https://www.buick.com/ownercenter/onstar/learn
OnStar One Super Cruise
for vehicles with Super Cruise
$64.99/mo.
Save up to 16% by choosing this plan
OnStar Connect Plus
-
In-Vehicle Wi-Fi® Hotspot
-
Music
-
Podcasts
-
Audiobooks
-
News
-
Video Streaming (if properly equipped)
-
Games (if properly equipped)
-
Internet Browser (if properly equipped)
Safety & Security
-
Stolen Vehicle Assistance
-
Safety Services
-
OnStar Guardian App
-
Roadside Assistance
Super Cruise
-
Hands-Free Driver Assistance Technology
-
Turn Signal Activated Lane Change
-
Automatic Lane Change (if properly equipped)
-
Hands-Free Trailering (if properly equipped)
Is that subscription for OnStar or Super Cruise? One is a service with legitimate ongoing operating costs; the other is not.
I mean you picked an American car company. They’ve been garbage for decades, I’ve owned exactly one, a 90’s Taurus, probably the most reliable American car we’ve seen in decades, and it just barely approaches Japanese cars for reliability and maintenance.
I say this as someone who’s worked on every brand of car, from the 1940’s to today. You can’t give me an American car (or German, or just European). I refuse to own anything other than Honda or Toyota any more. I’ll sacrifice style and features for a vehicle that just works for 100-200k miles, or more.
Buick has been a style-over-substance brand in the GM lineup since the 80’s, at least. Not that any GM is particularly good, Buick just makes it worse with cheap gimmicks. Same with all Chrysler products.
But yea, all brands include some nonsense today.
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German car industry has one foot in the grave.
I wonder if that is true though. Sure, they lobby that way when they want government subsidies.
They might be late to the e-car game (but the above article applies to e-cars only anyhow).
But all that largely applies to most car industries across the globe, yet they do adapt, if slowly. Except those under totalitarian control, they adapt faster.
Car companies are parasites. America was built on trains and the investments into car infrastructure have paralleled US declines. Its just not an effecient use of public resources to build highways between cities.
When buying isn’t owning …
This company already has another scandal brewing, since 2005 they have been installing plastic engine parts, particularily the intake manifolds have been designed as a single use item to be replaced roughly every 3 years. Custom aluminum will run you $1000 for the part itself if you don’t want to keep swapping plastic, not to mention the ridiculous labour costs as well. Avoid!
For $1000 you could get a small furnace for cintering, a regular 3D printer and some of that special PLA that has metal powder in it that you can print and then cinter into a solid metal piece (The PLA bakes off) and just make the fucking thing yourself.
That’s horrible! If people do that how will companies gouge customers?
Basically every car manufacturer pulls shit like this these days; good luck avoiding all of them.
If it’s specific to a certain model, that would be good info.
That said VW obviously sucks for pulling the stunt mentioned in the article, which applies to (all?) its electric models.
You don’t really see this with Toyota and Honda, just avoid any of the models that are joint venture with other companies.
I got rid of my last VW after I got tired of plastic parts breaking. It happened every winter, after a cold snap.
I agree. They are using only plastic everywhere at this point.
It’s also a nano plastic nightmare at this point.
So… Volkswagen is the next target for hacking ?
How does this even work? It’s like they don’t realise they don’t own the car once it’s been sold. What’s to stop someone just hacking it and unlocking it?
It’s all proprietary code. But in theory you could unlock the full potential if not more. If you can recreate their software. Ideally then also open source it please.
What’s to stop someone just hacking it and unlocking it?
I assume that they try to make that fairly difficult.
I mean, modern cars are Internet-connected, have cell radios. If the vendor can maintain access to the car and can provide the initial trusted hardware, they can make it pretty unpleasant to modify the thing.
You also don’t need a 100% solution to make it financially work. Just need to make the level of inconvenience high enough that the bulk of people won’t do it.
It’s like they don’t realise they don’t own the car once it’s been sold.
They literally don’t. This is nothing less than a war on property rights.
What’s to stop someone just hacking it and unlocking it?
The DMCA Anti-Circumvention Clause makes it a felony.
Meet GPL. These fucking cars are running Linux.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization
I wish Linux was enough to protect us from this shit, but it’s not.
If you hack it warranty becomes void and you’re maybe in big insurance trouble if there’s an accident or your battery catches fire in an underground parking garage. Basically similar to how banking apps etc keep people from trying to use alternatives to Android on their phone. The boundary isn’t technical, it’s legal.
