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I'm torn. On one hand, I absolutely think that a capability available in the vehicle/device when you purchased it should be available for you to use, and not be

I'm torn. On one hand, I absolutely think that a capability available in the vehicle/device when you purchased it should be available for you to use, and not behind a software lock (heated seats, etc). On the other hand, an "upgrade" or 100% new software delivered via OTA (self driving, etc) seems a little more like it should be a separate thing.

Libcat99 3y ago
I'm somewhat torn too. IBM and I'm sure others have shipped enterprise hardware for years that was partially locked. You might get a machine with 16 cpus but you only paid for 8, for example, but you could license the rest as you grew. It seems a little similar and it was in no way underhanded, everyone knew what the deal was. However I'll echo what another poster said. I say Tesla should be free to sell whatever they want, but if the end user finds a way around it too bad.
- johnl1479 3y ago
  > However I'll echo what another poster said. I say Tesla should be free to sell whatever they want, but if the end user finds a way around it too bad. I think thats the stance I'm leaning towards as well. To quote another commenter[1]: > If a manufacturer wants to lock features behind a paywall, that is fine. However, they shouldn't be allowed to complain when consumers modify the thing they bought to get around that paywall. If Tesla really wants to make sure absolutely no one gets FSD or heated seats without paying, then they should make a point of only including the relevant hardware or software in the vehicle at the time of purchase. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36988514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36988514
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  I'm of the opinion that these two things aren't comparable. True, IBM and others have locked extra capability through software... but they were only ever selling/renting to the corporate world, which presumably had enough in-house legal expertise to not be completely dicked over. To take that business practice, and then try to foist it on consumers who don't have $500/hour lawyers on retainer looking out for them is more than just morally questionable, it crosses a line into some sort of fraud/extortion-adjacent realm. If Tesla was really upset about this, it's a problem completely within their capacity to solve. Only send bugfixes OTA, require a service visit for new features. I'm betting that their software's such a trainwreck they wouldn't be able to compartmentalize it properly like that to save their own lives.
  - prng2021 3y ago
    We’re not talking about enterprise software here. I think people can understand the concept of paying for a seat heater and the like without a team of lawyers.
  - gibolt 3y ago
    What are you talking about... Tesla is one of only a handful of OEMs that can even issue OTA updates. Their cars from 2013 can still get modern features OTA. Please explain how you classify that as a train wreck compared to software cobbled together from 100 vendors (none of whom specialize in software)
    - martin8412 3y ago
      Have you perhaps considered that OTAs aren't a desirable feature in a safety critical system?
    - FireBeyond 3y ago
      > Please explain how you classify that as a train wreck compared to software cobbled together from 100 vendors Tesla gets plenty of software from other vendors. And doesn't always test it particularly well - there was a story here of a firmware vendor who had a test harness that took ~36h to verify. They shipped a bug fix to Tesla, told them it was available... ... four hours later, "Great, this is awesome, looks like we fixed the issue." ??? "We just flashed one of the cars here and took it for a drive."
- huhtenberg 3y ago
  > I say Tesla should be free to sell whatever they want, but if the end user finds a way around it too bad. The same should go for DVDs, BluRays and streaming media and yet here we are looking at jail time for bypassing the DRM.
  - martin8412 3y ago
    That certainly depends on the country. Breaking DRM to access something you've paid for is perfectly legal here.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      "perfectly legal" largely hasn't stopped IP owners from finding ways to hassle people involved.
    - huhtenberg 3y ago
      Yeah, I am in a country like that. I was referring to the state of affairs States-side.
  - semiquaver 3y ago
    Would you mind providing a citation stating that someone has gone to jail in any country as a result of bypassing DRM for personal use on things they purchased? I am skeptical that this has ever occurred. Even in the US, which has quite draconian anti-circumvention law under the DMCA, the criminal penalties associated with this behavior only apply to those that violate the statute “willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain”. A person who bought a DVD or blu ray and decrypted it for their own use would not be criminally liable. https://law.justia.com/codes/us/2021/title-17/chapter-12/sec-1204/ https://law.justia.com/codes/us/2021/title-17/chapter-12/sec... I’m not defending the law, which I disagree with, merely pointing out that “looking at jail time” for non commercial bypassing of purchased BluRay DRM is a stretch.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- theluketaylor 3y ago
  I don’t mind hardware shipping locked and being an optional fee to unlock. I have paid for the rear heated seats in my model 3. What I’m vehemently opposed to is ongoing fees for things that don’t have ongoing costs. BMW wants to charge monthly for seat heaters or carplay, but those things are not a service and don’t have ongoing costs for BMW to provide. If anything creating an ongoing software lock creates an availability risk. If BMW’s authorization service is unavailable do you lose heated seats? Several manufacturers are offering either monthly or one time costs for certain features. I’m less clear how I feel about that. Maybe quite valuable for someone who lives somewhere warm and only needs seat heat one month a year. It would take many years of paying for a single month to justify paying for the fully unlocked feature. I think I can live with optional monthly fees for things as long as you can always pay once and just have something that stays for her life of the car.
  - foobiekr 3y ago
    I've always been curious if the ongoing fees for BMW end up covering repairs if the hardware covering the function breaks. It would seem absolutely insane if not, yet I am pretty sure the answer is not.
  - asynchronous 3y ago
    100% agree about the ongoing features. Let me pay one time to own the software unlocks please.
  - cameronh90 3y ago
    I would also add that those sorts of subscriptions shouldn't have a lock-in period, at least not more than a month. And auto-renew should require explicit opt-in. For most subscriptions I have, automatic renewal is desirable, but invariably I forget to cancel trials or one month subs of things I just wanted to test.
  - nordsieck 3y ago
    > What I’m vehemently opposed to is ongoing fees for things that don’t have ongoing costs. IMO, the real issue is the price. There is pretty broad and well established equivalency between OPex and CAPex. The problem is that car companies are trying to charge OPex as if there was a 1 year depreciation schedule, when cars typically last for decades. I think that if BMW charged 1/240th[1] the cost to buy the option in order to rent it per month, very few people would complain. Especially if that price were locked in for the life of the car. --- 1. 20 * 12 = 240
- martin8412 3y ago
  AMD shipped CPUs for quite some time where if you were lucky you could unlock additional cores that had been disabled for various reasons
  - adra 3y ago
    These were likely sold down due to demand imbalance or more likely due to QA failures in the disabled cores. It's a lot cheaper to get some value from a defective chip than no money. So... by all means try to unlock more cores but don't start whining when your computer acts like Windows ME on a good day (only crashing a few dozen times a day! So stable!)
  - slenk 3y ago
    I tried that on my 3-core something back in the day. I was not one of the lucky ones.
- y7 3y ago
  I think the concept of "licensing" should not apply to something you own. If they want to rent you a CPU, fine, but then they should also bear the costs for when it breaks.
- bartchamdo 3y ago
  Sun Microsystems did this in the early 2000’s
- kelnos 3y ago
  I think the problem becomes when you figure out a way to unlock those extra CPUs without paying IBM, and then IBM sues you or terminates your contract with them entirely. People should not be constrained in doing whatever they want with the hardware they have bought.
wahnfrieden 3y ago
Does that mean all feature-gating iOS App Store IAP should be unlocked for iPhone owners?
- johnl1479 3y ago
  Not interested in having a whataboutism discussion. There is a clear distinction here of software vs hardware
  - lockhouse 3y ago
    Is there though? Even on game consoles, the “DLC” is often a couple meg download because the actual content is already built into the game. You could turn Windows NT 3.51 Workstation into Server by just changing a registry key! https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/differences_nt.html https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/differences_nt.htm...
    - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      I'm not sure 'MS charged $800 more for NT server when it was basically the same as NT', given how much they're known for unfair and fraudulent business practices, is the greatest argument. Expecting capitalism to be fair is probably where we're all going wrong here.
      - lockhouse 3y ago
        I’m not arguing whether or not it’s fair, just that at this point this is a long standing industry practice going back decades.
    - LocalH 3y ago
      This is less true nowadays than it used to be, some games have quite a substantial amount of DLC of which no part is shipped with the base game. The Rock Band series comes to mind there, for one.
      - 3y ago
mensetmanusman 3y ago
This analogy/mental model of what things are when you purchase them breaks down for software. It’s less environmentally wasteful to build a single sku and unlock paid software features requiring teams of devs.
- RajT88 3y ago
  > paid software features requiring teams of devs. This makes it easy for me to make up my mind about. FSD is about far more than just the hardware - there's many teams of devs working on it. > heated seats There's little (no?) justification for software locking heated seats. Press the button, make the seats hot. This is just capitalist bullshit and we shouldn't put up with it.
rootusrootus 3y ago
From the perspective of a customer, what is the difference between a heated seat that doesn't work because it doesn't exist, and one that is locked out by software? Assuming the customer isn't paying up front for that feature. Some people don't want to pay for heated seats. Turns out the manufacturer found it cheaper to just include the hardware anyway rather than differentiate on the production line. What's the big deal? The ability to change your mind and pay for the feature after purchase without getting an aftermarket seat heater seems like a nice bonus. Everyone wins.
- _factor 3y ago
  The wasted economy on lugging around the extra weight for a useless seat heater.
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    That's true. It happens, though, and has for years. My last car had a seat ventilation fan that was inoperable because the switch and corresponding electronics (some kind of PWM controller) to turn it on weren't installed. Seat ventilation wasn't offered on that model at all, but the seats were built with the fan. They didn't yank the fan out on principle, they just installed the seats as built.
- overnight5349 3y ago
  In reality, you're still paying for the hardware. Don't think for a second that these 'optional' features don't figure into the price. Sure, maybe they have a lower markup if you don't buy the license up front, but you still paid for it. These types of gimmicks are free money for the company pulling them.
  - matwood 3y ago
    Because of the way production lines work it can actually be cheaper to include it on every seat and unlock it with software.
paxys 3y ago
I'm not torn at all. It's my car. I should be able to "hack" it as long as it doesn't involve illegal access to anyone's servers.
- rvnx 3y ago
  The exact same way you should be able to install your own software on your iPhone
  - zht 3y ago
    your phone isn't a 3500 lb metal box of death on public roads with other cars, cyclists, and pedestrians
    - omginternets 3y ago
      We already have a system in place for this: civil liability and criminal culpability. If you hack your car negligently, you can be sued for negligence or charged with manslaughter.
      - jabradoodle 3y ago
        Same thing if you sell unsafe food, yet we have regulations, because it's preferable to not be killed in the first place.
        omginternets 3y ago
        And because the impact is exponentially larger. Arguments for regulation prohibiting individuals from tinkering with their cars does no such thing, because those laws are not currently in place, and there is not an epidemic of runaway user-modified vehicles. On the other hand, such regulation would serve to prevent users from enjoying the property they purchased and to facilitate exploitative practices by manufacturers and retailers. It is all the more absurd given that existing law already provides mechanisms for deterrence and punishment, namely: the notion of negligence. I cannot stress how terrible this idea is. This would severely degrade consumer rights and do virtually nothing to protect people.
Denvercoder9 3y ago
> I absolutely think that a capability available in the vehicle/device when you purchased it should be available for you to use, and not behind a software lock (heated seats, etc). While I intuitively agree with you, I'm having a hard time arguing against the economic argument in favor it. Producing a single version of a product is generally cheaper than producing two different versions. Also offering a lower-margin, software-locked variant can (in certain conditions) make things cheaper for everyone, and it gives the consumer more choice: if you don't need or want the features of the premium model, you don't have to pay for it. For example, imagine a manufacturer that sells two versions of its product, a basic model that makes up 20% of sales which costs $1000 to manufacture, and a premium model that makes up 80% of sales and costs $1250 to manufacture; this gives an average cost of $1200/unit. If they can save $100 per unit by only manufacturing the premium version and software-locking it, that reduces the average cost of goods sold to $1150/unit. They can pass on half of the savings to the customer, and still come out $50/unit ahead.
- beiller 3y ago
  Producing the extra weight of the seat heater requires extra fuel to burn. Now multiply that by the number of cars on the road. Will cost the customer a (small) amount extra in fuel costs for a part that is not being used. So there is an economic argument that ya, we can subsidize manufactures by taxing people more. Seems like a bad deal to me. Now lets talk about CO2 output of driving around extra dead weight. Makes it worse.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    I think the usual "heated seats" example is a poor one, since it's so obviously an optional feature that not everyone would want to hack around. Let's say instead that BMW decided all their car models would be physically 4 seaters, but in order to be allowed to use the back two seats, you had to pay a large monthly "sedan fee". And if they caught you using the back seats without paying, they'd sue you. Would anyone accept this? Likely no. And the reason you shouldn't accept this is the same reason you shouldn't accept the "seat heat" fee.
_ea1k 3y ago
It gets a lot more ambiguous when the features being offered also come with increased risk of warrantly liability. I'm thinking of things like acceleration boost here rather than FSD and other driver assistance features. For FSD, part of the payment is for ongoing maintenance. It is likely that the countermeasure would be subscriptions, and they already seem to be progressing in that direction.
- yardie 3y ago
  FSD is a little trickier. FSD hardware is installed in your car and is used for ADAS. FSD is completely different firmware and has to be downloaded from Tesla servers which will check to see if you paid for that service. It might be possible to subscribe to FSD, wait for it to download, then unsubscribe, and hack it to re-enable the firmware. But FSD is still beta and you'd be risking being exposed to get future updates.
m463 3y ago
I can see two different ways of looking at this If you enabled a seat heater, enabling hardware that the car already has installed, or hot-rodding the engine, I don't think it is that big a deal. But if you downloaded and installed software from tesla that didn't come with the car, or did something like enabling free supercharging, that would be more like theft of services. I expect if this becomes a thing, features will have to be downloaded after purchase.
- eschneider 3y ago
  The flip side of that is when they disable features that were purchased when a car is purchased used.
  - m463 3y ago
    I think the disabling features of a used car has some nuances. 1) If tesla took possession of the used car and then sold it to you, I think they can disable features. 2) If you sold your car to someone, and THEN tesla disabled features I am not ok with that. With case #1, I think it is like any used car. People flip cars. They can take a car, remove expensive rims or other options and sell the car without them. People also buy cars and part them out, selling each piece individually. This is ok because the flipper owns the car before selling it and they can do what they want.
    - eschneider 3y ago
      Case 2 definitely has happened.
      - edude03 3y ago
        Here's a solid example - in 2016 all teslas came with free supercharging for life. In 2017 they changed it to be non transferable. If you buy the car directly from someone tesla won't know but there has been cases where they've found out (warranty repairs for example) where tesla then removed it. If the seller didn't tell the buyer, or the seller themselves didn't know - who's fault is that?
asdff 3y ago
That's kind of just how cars work in general even outside of software. I put in the oem fog lights in my old car. All I had to do was basically screw through a plastic bracket in the grill that was installed at the factory specifically for the lights, plug in the lights into one end of the harness that was already in the car, pop out the preinstalled plastic cap in the dash and pop back in the fog light switch after connecting it with the other end of this harness that's already there near the button, routed through the firewall for me. The fuse was even already there in the fuse box for the fogs. Basically everyone with this car is paying for 95% the actual hard work of what you need for the fog lights already. Very few owners end up going for the fog lights but everyone subsidizes their installation.
- kevincox 3y ago
  You can also look at this the other way. Most people don't value the fog lights, so the very few owners pay the cost to install fog lights in every car because it is cheaper than creating a separate production line. So you are "cheating" the system by taking advantage of that hardware without sharing the cost of it.
chrisstanchak 3y ago
You can make the same argument that pirating software is ok
- eimrine 3y ago
  In the world which disrespects FOSS for so much it is OK. Pirating books is 100% OK.
alerighi 3y ago
In a sense it's something car manufacturers have made for years. Most of the time the difference from one model of a car and another with more power is the mapping on the engine control computer. Till this day it wasn't a problem since this was not really locked down, and despite the fact that is illegal, people did modify the car software to unlock more power quite easily. But... that "locking" of feature kind of made sense, since a car with less kW pays less taxes (at least in my country you pay more if the car is more powerful) so selling a locked down model was also an advantage for the user that wasn't interested in having more. Locking down heated seats... it's just a move against the user. Buying a car you payed for that seats, since they are there, why the manufacturer should ask you another fee to use for something you already payed? To me this shouldn't be possible.
- eschneider 3y ago
  I've done a fair bit of work with engine ECUs and remapping for more power is almost never "free". It's not like manufactures are offering different power outputs strictly via software, though sometimes they'll make different _tradeoffs_ between power/drivability/reliability. I mean, it's easy to get 20% more power out of an engine if you don't care if it idles like a washing machine. And for some applications, that's just fine.
  - sawjet 3y ago
    >I mean, it's easy to get 20% more power out of an engine if you don't care if it idles like a washing machine Can you explain this? How does remapping an ecu make the idle different?
    - eschneider 3y ago
      Sure, you're basically running the engine with a different tuning and you can't optimize for everything. Getting more peak power, or a broader power band out of an engine often means sacrificing smoothness in other parts of the power band.
alistairSH 3y ago
It's relatively clear to me... Features cost money, so I should pay for them. Wether that's via an option package (traditional) at order time OR via a software update (Tesla) after purchase doesn't matter. BUT! As long as that feature doesn't have recurring costs to the manufacturer (heated seats), it should be a one-time fee, and transfer with ownership. Something like self-driving, where there might be an active internet connection and server costs - I'm ok with a recurring subscription. Examples... BMW tried to charge a subscription to use Apple CarPlay. This should be a one-time fee (baked into model price, or a one-time software switch). Same for Toyota (I think) who tried to make remote-unlock a subscription (this was basic key fob unlock - no internet hosting/app maintenance involved). Also crappy move from them. Hacking otherwise reasonable software-locked features feels like theft to me. If you want the feature, pay for it. At minimum, I'd expect Tesla (or whoever) to void warranties on cars with these hacks applied (within the bounds of Magnuson-Moss Act in the US).
- Cagrosso 3y ago
  If the feature is built in to the car from the factory and disabled via software so they can charge more then you are already paying for the parts and lugging around the added weight in the vehicle thus costing you more in fuel. Software locking a hardware feature that is integrated is an awful practice. Telsa chose to do this presumably to only have to buy a single seat configuration and streamline installs so they could hit production quotas.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Right. Instead of manufacturing a 50, 80, and 100 kWh battery pack, and having to go through the whole process of getting certifications and everything for each size, they just make 100 kWh packs all day long, and then software limit them to 50. Which means, in the case of an emergency, the company can bestow extra range on lower-end vehicles, which they did for Hurricane Irma. https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/10/16283330/tesla-hurricane-irma-update-florida-extend-range-model-s-x-60-60d https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/10/16283330/tesla-hurricane-...
    - 3y ago
masterofmisc 3y ago
Cory Doctrow recently wrote a good piece about it here. Cars are going down the renting model, not the ownership model and it sucks. https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/ https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/
kelnos 3y ago
I don't think there's any need to be "torn" on that; you can certainly hold different opinions for different nuances without conflict. Hardware features that are actually present in the product when purchased should be available for use. If manufacturers want to put those features behind a software lockout, I guess that's their prerogative, but they shouldn't be allowed to complain or punish the customer if they find a way to circumvent it. Charging for ongoing services that require the manufacturer to spend money to maintain infrastructure (like a remote engine start or remote lock/unlock) seems entirely fair, though. But as a big fat asterisk to that last statement, it pisses me off that I can't run my own server infra for that myself. I bought a Mercedes E-class a little over a year ago, and it included a free year of their online services. Fortunately continuing the subscription is pretty cheap (something like $150/year). But it's an all-or-nothing deal. I want to be able to do remote lock/unlock and engine start, but I don't want Mercedes tracking my location wherever I go, and I don't care about map updates (since I use Google Maps via Android Auto for navigation). I would much rather be able to spin up my own server to handle some of the remote capabilities, and not have the car talk to Mercedes' infra at all (except perhaps for software updates, which I would manually approve/accept). I get why car makers won't do this. Even if they didn't want a stranglehold over providing services, I'm sure they still wouldn't do it: it would require extra "advanced" settings in the car and in the app to allow the customer to set an alternate server backend. And customers will inevitably make security mistakes with their own server backend, which could create liability for the carmaker, or at least cause bad press, even if it shouldn't.

Libcat99 3y ago

I'm somewhat torn too. IBM and I'm sure others have shipped enterprise hardware for years that was partially locked. You might get a machine with 16 cpus but you only paid for 8, for example, but you could license the rest as you grew. It seems a little similar and it was in no way underhanded, everyone knew what the deal was. However I'll echo what another poster said. I say Tesla should be free to sell whatever they want, but if the end user finds a way around it too bad.

johnl1479 3y ago
> However I'll echo what another poster said. I say Tesla should be free to sell whatever they want, but if the end user finds a way around it too bad. I think thats the stance I'm leaning towards as well. To quote another commenter[1]: > If a manufacturer wants to lock features behind a paywall, that is fine. However, they shouldn't be allowed to complain when consumers modify the thing they bought to get around that paywall. If Tesla really wants to make sure absolutely no one gets FSD or heated seats without paying, then they should make a point of only including the relevant hardware or software in the vehicle at the time of purchase. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36988514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36988514
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
I'm of the opinion that these two things aren't comparable. True, IBM and others have locked extra capability through software... but they were only ever selling/renting to the corporate world, which presumably had enough in-house legal expertise to not be completely dicked over. To take that business practice, and then try to foist it on consumers who don't have $500/hour lawyers on retainer looking out for them is more than just morally questionable, it crosses a line into some sort of fraud/extortion-adjacent realm. If Tesla was really upset about this, it's a problem completely within their capacity to solve. Only send bugfixes OTA, require a service visit for new features. I'm betting that their software's such a trainwreck they wouldn't be able to compartmentalize it properly like that to save their own lives.
- prng2021 3y ago
  We’re not talking about enterprise software here. I think people can understand the concept of paying for a seat heater and the like without a team of lawyers.
- gibolt 3y ago
  What are you talking about... Tesla is one of only a handful of OEMs that can even issue OTA updates. Their cars from 2013 can still get modern features OTA. Please explain how you classify that as a train wreck compared to software cobbled together from 100 vendors (none of whom specialize in software)
  - martin8412 3y ago
    Have you perhaps considered that OTAs aren't a desirable feature in a safety critical system?
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    > Please explain how you classify that as a train wreck compared to software cobbled together from 100 vendors Tesla gets plenty of software from other vendors. And doesn't always test it particularly well - there was a story here of a firmware vendor who had a test harness that took ~36h to verify. They shipped a bug fix to Tesla, told them it was available... ... four hours later, "Great, this is awesome, looks like we fixed the issue." ??? "We just flashed one of the cars here and took it for a drive."
huhtenberg 3y ago
> I say Tesla should be free to sell whatever they want, but if the end user finds a way around it too bad. The same should go for DVDs, BluRays and streaming media and yet here we are looking at jail time for bypassing the DRM.
- martin8412 3y ago
  That certainly depends on the country. Breaking DRM to access something you've paid for is perfectly legal here.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    "perfectly legal" largely hasn't stopped IP owners from finding ways to hassle people involved.
  - huhtenberg 3y ago
    Yeah, I am in a country like that. I was referring to the state of affairs States-side.
- semiquaver 3y ago
  Would you mind providing a citation stating that someone has gone to jail in any country as a result of bypassing DRM for personal use on things they purchased? I am skeptical that this has ever occurred. Even in the US, which has quite draconian anti-circumvention law under the DMCA, the criminal penalties associated with this behavior only apply to those that violate the statute “willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain”. A person who bought a DVD or blu ray and decrypted it for their own use would not be criminally liable. https://law.justia.com/codes/us/2021/title-17/chapter-12/sec-1204/ https://law.justia.com/codes/us/2021/title-17/chapter-12/sec... I’m not defending the law, which I disagree with, merely pointing out that “looking at jail time” for non commercial bypassing of purchased BluRay DRM is a stretch.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
theluketaylor 3y ago
I don’t mind hardware shipping locked and being an optional fee to unlock. I have paid for the rear heated seats in my model 3. What I’m vehemently opposed to is ongoing fees for things that don’t have ongoing costs. BMW wants to charge monthly for seat heaters or carplay, but those things are not a service and don’t have ongoing costs for BMW to provide. If anything creating an ongoing software lock creates an availability risk. If BMW’s authorization service is unavailable do you lose heated seats? Several manufacturers are offering either monthly or one time costs for certain features. I’m less clear how I feel about that. Maybe quite valuable for someone who lives somewhere warm and only needs seat heat one month a year. It would take many years of paying for a single month to justify paying for the fully unlocked feature. I think I can live with optional monthly fees for things as long as you can always pay once and just have something that stays for her life of the car.
- foobiekr 3y ago
  I've always been curious if the ongoing fees for BMW end up covering repairs if the hardware covering the function breaks. It would seem absolutely insane if not, yet I am pretty sure the answer is not.
- asynchronous 3y ago
  100% agree about the ongoing features. Let me pay one time to own the software unlocks please.
- cameronh90 3y ago
  I would also add that those sorts of subscriptions shouldn't have a lock-in period, at least not more than a month. And auto-renew should require explicit opt-in. For most subscriptions I have, automatic renewal is desirable, but invariably I forget to cancel trials or one month subs of things I just wanted to test.
- nordsieck 3y ago
  > What I’m vehemently opposed to is ongoing fees for things that don’t have ongoing costs. IMO, the real issue is the price. There is pretty broad and well established equivalency between OPex and CAPex. The problem is that car companies are trying to charge OPex as if there was a 1 year depreciation schedule, when cars typically last for decades. I think that if BMW charged 1/240th[1] the cost to buy the option in order to rent it per month, very few people would complain. Especially if that price were locked in for the life of the car. --- 1. 20 * 12 = 240
martin8412 3y ago
AMD shipped CPUs for quite some time where if you were lucky you could unlock additional cores that had been disabled for various reasons
- adra 3y ago
  These were likely sold down due to demand imbalance or more likely due to QA failures in the disabled cores. It's a lot cheaper to get some value from a defective chip than no money. So... by all means try to unlock more cores but don't start whining when your computer acts like Windows ME on a good day (only crashing a few dozen times a day! So stable!)
- slenk 3y ago
  I tried that on my 3-core something back in the day. I was not one of the lucky ones.
y7 3y ago
I think the concept of "licensing" should not apply to something you own. If they want to rent you a CPU, fine, but then they should also bear the costs for when it breaks.
bartchamdo 3y ago
Sun Microsystems did this in the early 2000’s
kelnos 3y ago
I think the problem becomes when you figure out a way to unlock those extra CPUs without paying IBM, and then IBM sues you or terminates your contract with them entirely. People should not be constrained in doing whatever they want with the hardware they have bought.

wahnfrieden 3y ago

Does that mean all feature-gating iOS App Store IAP should be unlocked for iPhone owners?

johnl1479 3y ago
Not interested in having a whataboutism discussion. There is a clear distinction here of software vs hardware
- lockhouse 3y ago
  Is there though? Even on game consoles, the “DLC” is often a couple meg download because the actual content is already built into the game. You could turn Windows NT 3.51 Workstation into Server by just changing a registry key! https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/differences_nt.html https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/differences_nt.htm...
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    I'm not sure 'MS charged $800 more for NT server when it was basically the same as NT', given how much they're known for unfair and fraudulent business practices, is the greatest argument. Expecting capitalism to be fair is probably where we're all going wrong here.
    - lockhouse 3y ago
      I’m not arguing whether or not it’s fair, just that at this point this is a long standing industry practice going back decades.
  - LocalH 3y ago
    This is less true nowadays than it used to be, some games have quite a substantial amount of DLC of which no part is shipped with the base game. The Rock Band series comes to mind there, for one.
    - 3y ago

mensetmanusman 3y ago

This analogy/mental model of what things are when you purchase them breaks down for software. It’s less environmentally wasteful to build a single sku and unlock paid software features requiring teams of devs.

RajT88 3y ago
> paid software features requiring teams of devs. This makes it easy for me to make up my mind about. FSD is about far more than just the hardware - there's many teams of devs working on it. > heated seats There's little (no?) justification for software locking heated seats. Press the button, make the seats hot. This is just capitalist bullshit and we shouldn't put up with it.

rootusrootus 3y ago

From the perspective of a customer, what is the difference between a heated seat that doesn't work because it doesn't exist, and one that is locked out by software? Assuming the customer isn't paying up front for that feature. Some people don't want to pay for heated seats. Turns out the manufacturer found it cheaper to just include the hardware anyway rather than differentiate on the production line. What's the big deal? The ability to change your mind and pay for the feature after purchase without getting an aftermarket seat heater seems like a nice bonus. Everyone wins.

_factor 3y ago
The wasted economy on lugging around the extra weight for a useless seat heater.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  That's true. It happens, though, and has for years. My last car had a seat ventilation fan that was inoperable because the switch and corresponding electronics (some kind of PWM controller) to turn it on weren't installed. Seat ventilation wasn't offered on that model at all, but the seats were built with the fan. They didn't yank the fan out on principle, they just installed the seats as built.
overnight5349 3y ago
In reality, you're still paying for the hardware. Don't think for a second that these 'optional' features don't figure into the price. Sure, maybe they have a lower markup if you don't buy the license up front, but you still paid for it. These types of gimmicks are free money for the company pulling them.
- matwood 3y ago
  Because of the way production lines work it can actually be cheaper to include it on every seat and unlock it with software.

paxys 3y ago

I'm not torn at all. It's my car. I should be able to "hack" it as long as it doesn't involve illegal access to anyone's servers.

rvnx 3y ago
The exact same way you should be able to install your own software on your iPhone
- zht 3y ago
  your phone isn't a 3500 lb metal box of death on public roads with other cars, cyclists, and pedestrians
  - omginternets 3y ago
    We already have a system in place for this: civil liability and criminal culpability. If you hack your car negligently, you can be sued for negligence or charged with manslaughter.
    - jabradoodle 3y ago
      Same thing if you sell unsafe food, yet we have regulations, because it's preferable to not be killed in the first place.
      - omginternets 3y ago
        And because the impact is exponentially larger. Arguments for regulation prohibiting individuals from tinkering with their cars does no such thing, because those laws are not currently in place, and there is not an epidemic of runaway user-modified vehicles. On the other hand, such regulation would serve to prevent users from enjoying the property they purchased and to facilitate exploitative practices by manufacturers and retailers. It is all the more absurd given that existing law already provides mechanisms for deterrence and punishment, namely: the notion of negligence. I cannot stress how terrible this idea is. This would severely degrade consumer rights and do virtually nothing to protect people.

Denvercoder9 3y ago

> I absolutely think that a capability available in the vehicle/device when you purchased it should be available for you to use, and not behind a software lock (heated seats, etc). While I intuitively agree with you, I'm having a hard time arguing against the economic argument in favor it. Producing a single version of a product is generally cheaper than producing two different versions. Also offering a lower-margin, software-locked variant can (in certain conditions) make things cheaper for everyone, and it gives the consumer more choice: if you don't need or want the features of the premium model, you don't have to pay for it. For example, imagine a manufacturer that sells two versions of its product, a basic model that makes up 20% of sales which costs $1000 to manufacture, and a premium model that makes up 80% of sales and costs $1250 to manufacture; this gives an average cost of $1200/unit. If they can save $100 per unit by only manufacturing the premium version and software-locking it, that reduces the average cost of goods sold to $1150/unit. They can pass on half of the savings to the customer, and still come out $50/unit ahead.

beiller 3y ago
Producing the extra weight of the seat heater requires extra fuel to burn. Now multiply that by the number of cars on the road. Will cost the customer a (small) amount extra in fuel costs for a part that is not being used. So there is an economic argument that ya, we can subsidize manufactures by taxing people more. Seems like a bad deal to me. Now lets talk about CO2 output of driving around extra dead weight. Makes it worse.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  I think the usual "heated seats" example is a poor one, since it's so obviously an optional feature that not everyone would want to hack around. Let's say instead that BMW decided all their car models would be physically 4 seaters, but in order to be allowed to use the back two seats, you had to pay a large monthly "sedan fee". And if they caught you using the back seats without paying, they'd sue you. Would anyone accept this? Likely no. And the reason you shouldn't accept this is the same reason you shouldn't accept the "seat heat" fee.

_ea1k 3y ago

It gets a lot more ambiguous when the features being offered also come with increased risk of warrantly liability. I'm thinking of things like acceleration boost here rather than FSD and other driver assistance features. For FSD, part of the payment is for ongoing maintenance. It is likely that the countermeasure would be subscriptions, and they already seem to be progressing in that direction.

yardie 3y ago
FSD is a little trickier. FSD hardware is installed in your car and is used for ADAS. FSD is completely different firmware and has to be downloaded from Tesla servers which will check to see if you paid for that service. It might be possible to subscribe to FSD, wait for it to download, then unsubscribe, and hack it to re-enable the firmware. But FSD is still beta and you'd be risking being exposed to get future updates.

m463 3y ago

I can see two different ways of looking at this If you enabled a seat heater, enabling hardware that the car already has installed, or hot-rodding the engine, I don't think it is that big a deal. But if you downloaded and installed software from tesla that didn't come with the car, or did something like enabling free supercharging, that would be more like theft of services. I expect if this becomes a thing, features will have to be downloaded after purchase.

eschneider 3y ago
The flip side of that is when they disable features that were purchased when a car is purchased used.
- m463 3y ago
  I think the disabling features of a used car has some nuances. 1) If tesla took possession of the used car and then sold it to you, I think they can disable features. 2) If you sold your car to someone, and THEN tesla disabled features I am not ok with that. With case #1, I think it is like any used car. People flip cars. They can take a car, remove expensive rims or other options and sell the car without them. People also buy cars and part them out, selling each piece individually. This is ok because the flipper owns the car before selling it and they can do what they want.
  - eschneider 3y ago
    Case 2 definitely has happened.
    - edude03 3y ago
      Here's a solid example - in 2016 all teslas came with free supercharging for life. In 2017 they changed it to be non transferable. If you buy the car directly from someone tesla won't know but there has been cases where they've found out (warranty repairs for example) where tesla then removed it. If the seller didn't tell the buyer, or the seller themselves didn't know - who's fault is that?

asdff 3y ago

That's kind of just how cars work in general even outside of software. I put in the oem fog lights in my old car. All I had to do was basically screw through a plastic bracket in the grill that was installed at the factory specifically for the lights, plug in the lights into one end of the harness that was already in the car, pop out the preinstalled plastic cap in the dash and pop back in the fog light switch after connecting it with the other end of this harness that's already there near the button, routed through the firewall for me. The fuse was even already there in the fuse box for the fogs. Basically everyone with this car is paying for 95% the actual hard work of what you need for the fog lights already. Very few owners end up going for the fog lights but everyone subsidizes their installation.

kevincox 3y ago
You can also look at this the other way. Most people don't value the fog lights, so the very few owners pay the cost to install fog lights in every car because it is cheaper than creating a separate production line. So you are "cheating" the system by taking advantage of that hardware without sharing the cost of it.

chrisstanchak 3y ago

You can make the same argument that pirating software is ok

eimrine 3y ago
In the world which disrespects FOSS for so much it is OK. Pirating books is 100% OK.

alerighi 3y ago

In a sense it's something car manufacturers have made for years. Most of the time the difference from one model of a car and another with more power is the mapping on the engine control computer. Till this day it wasn't a problem since this was not really locked down, and despite the fact that is illegal, people did modify the car software to unlock more power quite easily. But... that "locking" of feature kind of made sense, since a car with less kW pays less taxes (at least in my country you pay more if the car is more powerful) so selling a locked down model was also an advantage for the user that wasn't interested in having more. Locking down heated seats... it's just a move against the user. Buying a car you payed for that seats, since they are there, why the manufacturer should ask you another fee to use for something you already payed? To me this shouldn't be possible.

eschneider 3y ago
I've done a fair bit of work with engine ECUs and remapping for more power is almost never "free". It's not like manufactures are offering different power outputs strictly via software, though sometimes they'll make different _tradeoffs_ between power/drivability/reliability. I mean, it's easy to get 20% more power out of an engine if you don't care if it idles like a washing machine. And for some applications, that's just fine.
- sawjet 3y ago
  >I mean, it's easy to get 20% more power out of an engine if you don't care if it idles like a washing machine Can you explain this? How does remapping an ecu make the idle different?
  - eschneider 3y ago
    Sure, you're basically running the engine with a different tuning and you can't optimize for everything. Getting more peak power, or a broader power band out of an engine often means sacrificing smoothness in other parts of the power band.

alistairSH 3y ago

It's relatively clear to me... Features cost money, so I should pay for them. Wether that's via an option package (traditional) at order time OR via a software update (Tesla) after purchase doesn't matter. BUT! As long as that feature doesn't have recurring costs to the manufacturer (heated seats), it should be a one-time fee, and transfer with ownership. Something like self-driving, where there might be an active internet connection and server costs - I'm ok with a recurring subscription. Examples... BMW tried to charge a subscription to use Apple CarPlay. This should be a one-time fee (baked into model price, or a one-time software switch). Same for Toyota (I think) who tried to make remote-unlock a subscription (this was basic key fob unlock - no internet hosting/app maintenance involved). Also crappy move from them. Hacking otherwise reasonable software-locked features feels like theft to me. If you want the feature, pay for it. At minimum, I'd expect Tesla (or whoever) to void warranties on cars with these hacks applied (within the bounds of Magnuson-Moss Act in the US).

Cagrosso 3y ago
If the feature is built in to the car from the factory and disabled via software so they can charge more then you are already paying for the parts and lugging around the added weight in the vehicle thus costing you more in fuel. Software locking a hardware feature that is integrated is an awful practice. Telsa chose to do this presumably to only have to buy a single seat configuration and streamline installs so they could hit production quotas.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Right. Instead of manufacturing a 50, 80, and 100 kWh battery pack, and having to go through the whole process of getting certifications and everything for each size, they just make 100 kWh packs all day long, and then software limit them to 50. Which means, in the case of an emergency, the company can bestow extra range on lower-end vehicles, which they did for Hurricane Irma. https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/10/16283330/tesla-hurricane-irma-update-florida-extend-range-model-s-x-60-60d https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/10/16283330/tesla-hurricane-...
  - 3y ago

masterofmisc 3y ago

Cory Doctrow recently wrote a good piece about it here. Cars are going down the renting model, not the ownership model and it sucks. https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/ https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/

kelnos 3y ago

I don't think there's any need to be "torn" on that; you can certainly hold different opinions for different nuances without conflict. Hardware features that are actually present in the product when purchased should be available for use. If manufacturers want to put those features behind a software lockout, I guess that's their prerogative, but they shouldn't be allowed to complain or punish the customer if they find a way to circumvent it. Charging for ongoing services that require the manufacturer to spend money to maintain infrastructure (like a remote engine start or remote lock/unlock) seems entirely fair, though. But as a big fat asterisk to that last statement, it pisses me off that I can't run my own server infra for that myself. I bought a Mercedes E-class a little over a year ago, and it included a free year of their online services. Fortunately continuing the subscription is pretty cheap (something like $150/year). But it's an all-or-nothing deal. I want to be able to do remote lock/unlock and engine start, but I don't want Mercedes tracking my location wherever I go, and I don't care about map updates (since I use Google Maps via Android Auto for navigation). I would much rather be able to spin up my own server to handle some of the remote capabilities, and not have the car talk to Mercedes' infra at all (except perhaps for software updates, which I would manually approve/accept). I get why car makers won't do this. Even if they didn't want a stranglehold over providing services, I'm sure they still wouldn't do it: it would require extra "advanced" settings in the car and in the app to allow the customer to set an alternate server backend. And customers will inevitably make security mistakes with their own server backend, which could create liability for the carmaker, or at least cause bad press, even if it shouldn't.