The German car-maker says its "optional power upgrade" is designed to give customers more choice.
  • grue@lemmy.worldMEnglish
    7·
    16 minutes ago

    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.

  • wheezy@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    24 minutes ago

    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.

  • panda_abyss@lemmy.caEnglish
    9·
    1 hour ago

    I hope nobody buys these things.

    To think I used to respect VW and I even owned a 2002 Jetta.

    • wheezy@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      15 minutes ago

      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.