The problem is that once one manufacturer starts doing this, they'll all do it, so you won't even have the option of buying a new car without a subscription.
Bought a car recently and got stuck with subscriptions. Friggen sucks. Only have Apple car play for 3 years before they charge for it, heated seats I’ve got until 2027, same for heated steering wheel. Hope there’s some OBD2 hack I can apply by the time that rolls around.
Edit: it’s Ford. SYNC 4 requires paid subscription for a chunk of features on the infotainment unit (which seats and wheel are located in). Vehicles features all have a little star on them and the small text at the bottom says “complimentary for 36 months”
CarPlay I can see if there's an ongoing cost of making sure future Apple updates don't break compatibility, but it's very highly unlikely that will ever be an issue.
My job now requires my physical presence at one of their offices for compliance so in a very short time I had to buy a second car that could fit our budget. This was one of the few that could. Figured as a second car it wouldn’t be so bad.
Also the dealers swore up and down there would be no subscriptions but only after reading the fine print where these features are mentioned as “Complimentary for 36 months”
Or just drive through the dealership's front window and then declare "I'd like a refund, please". A few of these occurring nationwide and they'd halt their bullshit.
And what exactly happens after I’ve signed all the papers?
“Hi yes I am mad that this car has hidden subscriptions for features I thought came standard but didn’t do enough due diligence to specifically verify each feature”
“Cool lol u signed up for payments so r u gonna continue making them or do we repossess it and tank ur credit rating?”
All I can do is not make the same mistake in the future.
I’m glad my current car is a 2015 Mazda. It’s recent enough to have a touch screen and Bluetooth, but not so recent that it’s got an LTE/5G radio that can phone home and let them sell my driving data to insurance companies or force subscription payments on me. When I get my next car in a decade or so, hopefully I can import a cheap Chinese EV that’s either easy to jailbreak, or doesn’t have any of that bullshit included.
I was a BMW mechanic from 2009-2012. I can't believe anyone buys them after what I've seen. The engines are all made of plastic and start to literally crumble to pieces and leak oil from absolutely everywhere after ~70k miles. We had to have customers sign diaclosures on these cars because inevitably they would just crumble to pieces when we went in to replace one part and we'd end up having to replace others to reassemble it.
On their V8s there's a plastic cooling tube that runs from front to back on the engine. The tube itself is like $10 but you had to disassemble the entire engine to access it so it would cost several thousand $ in labor.
We eventually started selling an aftermarket CNC aluminum one that was threaded and expanded into the hole. We would just beat the old one out with a hammer and thread the new one in in a couple hours and they'd never have that problem again. Why BMW couldn't think of that is beyond me. The people who did made buckets of money selling aluminum tubes for hundreds of dollars just because they could.
You might expect cost cutting like that from a Kia or something but not from a car that's advertised as a premium brand and sold at premium prices.
The Buick 3800 had a tube like that on top, it would crack from thermal stresses and piss out hot coolant. There was an aluminum aftermarket replacement like you describe but it was Dorman and a cheap fix. Buick also addressed the problem in later versions. I miss that engine.
I used to own a W124 series Benz (bought used for 5% of sticker price, I ain't no fauntelroy). Nearly everything on it was redundant or excessively skookum.
When systems that weren't as rugged started going down, like the vacuum controllers for doors or the 4matic computer etc, the car still worked safely with reduced convenience. A few minor design flaws like the wiring harness but that's it. Room to work under the hood, too.
It was built in '93 when the engineers still ran the company.
Current main driver is the super reliable '03 CRV.
The problem is a huge number of cars were removed and destroyed which would otherwise have been in the used market. It's a big reason why even used cars are priced so high. Buying used isn't what it used to be.
Agree with that yep, its also already been shown years ago that modding used cars into electric cars is totally doable, economic and saves fuckloads of resources. Same thing happening with tractors too btw. Lots of farmers are buying up old tractors because they can actually repair them on site when they break down. With modern ones they have to wait for some asshole from john deer to come in with a debugging laptop to do the exact same thing for lots of money and downtime.
While this is completely true, it's a bit tone-deaf. Fuck cars, but many people barely have a choice because their public transport consists of a handful of busses that come once an hour and nothing is close by.
As an aside, I spend a whopping total of about $1/day (edit Australian $, so less USD) on maintenance and electricity for my electric cargo bike. I go about 17 km each way to work and the funny thing is it's only about 10 mins longer than driving, lol
Yeah i know many people dont really have much of a choice, see the thread nex to your comment. I was more intending to talk shit about modern cars that all seem to have this shit.