Technology

37573 readers

254 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Autoenshittification - How the computer killed capitalism. (doctorow.medium.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket.

The car manufacturers got so desperate for chips that they started buying up washing machines for the microchips in them, extracting the chips and discarding the washing machines like some absurdo-dystopian cyberpunk walnut-shelling machine:

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Cars have always been a subscription model, albeit in quotes.

You want to drive somewhere? You’ll need fuel.

Have driven a certain amount of miles? You’ll need to service your car.

Driven even more? Replace tires.

Brakes.

Fossil cars was a money printing machine.

That’s why the margin on sales are so low, the dealerships and manufacturers make it up over the lifetime of the car.

Electric cars threatens that model and we see manufacturers scrambling for more ways to make money so they have a leg to stand on when service costs drop.

In the meantime Audi e-tron owners seems to have little issue paying $5-600 for an “inspection” and another $4-500 (in total) for service items, including replacing a “leakage canister” (IIRC).

And best of all. When your car is old enough you come back for more.

It’s not like car manufacturers can twist our arm and make us go all in on subscriptions.

It’s happening because people are ok with putting their money down that way.

If we weren’t it would all be a failed experiment and everything would go back to normal.

The funny thing is how some manufacturers actually offer value added services as a subscription, while others - looking at you BMW and Toyota - are trying to de-content the car to put things on subscription instead.

I’m fine with value added services, less so with seat-heaters as a service.

That’s the kind of thing that - down the line - ends up with “oh sorry, we turned the server off so you can’t ever have heated seats again”, or in the meantime “server was down so heated seats didn’t work for two weeks in the middle of winter”.